神父马克西姆：认信者圣马克西姆的生平与教导

Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Fr. Maximus Simonopetridis. St. Maximus the Confessor, who served God from 580 to 662, is one of the great theologians of the Orthodox Catholic Church. This devout monk was a leading Constantinopolitan intellectual, a prolific author on doctrinal, ascetical, exegetical, and liturgical subjects, and a confessor of Holy Orthodoxy, who lost his right hand and tongue for his stentorian opposition to heresy. In eight lectures, Fr. Maximus Simonopetridis, a highly esteemed patrologist and the world’s leading authority on the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, presents an edifying overview of the life and works of this magnificent man of God and teacher of the church. The lectures are entitled, Lecture 1. What is a Church Father? Lecture 2. An Overview of the Life of St. Maximus. Lecture 3. An Introduction to the Works of St. Maximus, Part 1. Lecture 4. An Introduction to the Works of St. Maximus, Part 2. Lecture 5. The Theology of St. Maximus, Part 1. The Ambigua. Lecture 6. The Theology of St. Maximus, Part 2. The Ambigua. Lecture 7. The Theology of St. Maximus, Questions of Thalassios, Part 1. Lecture 8. The Theology of St. Maximus, Part 2. The Ambigua. Questions of Thalassios, Part 2. For this and other available titles, please visit our website at www.patristicnectar.org. And now, Fr. Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 1. What is a Church Father? Good evening, everyone. Am I audible? Can you hear me? Yeah? I’m not too up-to-date with modern technology. I have a little joke that I tell at the start of these things, when we’re usually fiddling around with microphones and so forth. And I say that I’m so low-tech that I just figured out that my AM radio works in the afternoon. It’s customary to thank people for coming from far away to attend these things, but I guess I’ve come further than perhaps anyone else in the room. Just to satisfy my own personal curiosity, how many people are from the state of Alaska? And those who have come from out of state? I know Father. And also, this is a good number, so okay. I was actually very pleased and honored for the invitation here, and I think it did have something to do with a small kindness that I performed for Christopher, and as they say, no good deed will go unpunished. So the next thing I knew, I found myself on what was an 18-hour journey altogether, and here I am. But it’s great to be here. Like many people who live in the rest of the United States, I always thought about coming to Alaska, wanted to come to Alaska, but never actually had cause enough to do so, so here I am. And it seems to me that Alaska, I’ve only been here for a couple of days, but I can say with some confidence that it’s not the scenery that makes Alaska great, it’s not Mount McKinley that makes Alaska great, it’s not the five or whatever it is different species of fresh salmon that make Alaska great. So far in my limited experience here, I would say that the greatest thing that Alaska has is silence. I live in a pretty quiet place normally, but there’s noise everywhere. But I’ve been impressed by the quality of silence that I find myself in while I’m here, whether it’s in the evening or during the day or out on the walk. I suppose with all of the technology and all the gadgets that they want to hook up to us and all that sort of thing, that finding silence, creating an environment of silence, a physical environment of silence around ourselves in which to be silent and in which to maybe discover a silence within silence is becoming harder and harder for people to find. So you should consider yourselves thrice blessed for living in a part of the world that God has blessed with the kind of quality of silence that I perceive here. It’s really a remarkable thing to be in that silence. It can often be just overwhelming by itself because it’s infrequently that we are separated from noise, separated from just the events that are going on. And as I was just enjoying the silence last night, I thought of, because we can also say too that silence is also an internal state, right? That a person who has acquired a degree of internal silence can be in a noisy environment and not be unsettled by that. But that’s the mark of a fairly advanced degree of inner cultivation, inner sanctity. Most of us need good external conditions to do the work that we want to do, and that applies for the spiritual life too. But I thought of a story from the life of St. Silouan of Mount Athos, a modern saint who I’m sure is known to all of you. And a couple of years ago, a new photograph was discovered of St. Silouan. I think up until then we had only two, and one of the two is the one that you see on lots of the backs of books. There was another one, not quite so nice, people didn’t use that, but there was a third one, and they also found some, I think they were letters or some other kinds of written documents that contained some more details about his life and some anecdotes from his life, and they’re all very interesting, and there’s one in there about silence, and I don’t think it’s been published yet, so I’ll share it with you because it fits into the topic of silence. And though he lived, though Saint Silouan lived in a very large, busy sort of community-style monastery. He was very much a hesychast. He was very much,

He lived a very hesychastic life within a busy community. And one day a visitor came and met him and they said, hey, what are you doing here? You shouldn’t, you’re in this busy monastery and there’s pilgrims coming and going all the time and there’s work and there’s noise and there’s construction and you should be living in a cave somewhere. And of course Mount Athos is one of the few places in the world where telling somebody they should be living in a cave is a compliment, right? So he said, you should be living in a cave or somewhere remote from the activities of the monastery. Oh, he says, I do live in a cave, he said. I do live in a cave. And he said, my body is a cave for my soul, and my soul is a cave for the Holy Spirit. So there is the beauty of the real beauty, which is a divine gift of external silence, physical silence, but then there’s a silence within that silence, which is the life of the Holy Spirit within us. So, just a couple of thoughts about my experience of your beautiful state so far. When I was put into contact with Father Mark, and we were talking about possible ideas or subjects for talks, he said, well, we’d like to have something in the area of the church fathers because we haven’t had as much of that as we would like to have. And at the time I was working on a St. Maximus the Confessor project, so I said, well, would that be acceptable? And he said, fine, so here we go. We have four talks tonight and then three more of two hours duration. So this will be a fairly, I consider this to be a kind of short but intensive seminar. And we are, for better or for worse, we are tackling, it’s rather ambitious, we’re tackling an ecclesiastical writer, a 7th century father of the church, who is without a doubt, and without even a close parallel, by far, the most difficult ecclesiastical writer in the entire patristic canon. You think of difficult writers like maybe Gregory Palamas, or Gregory of Nyssa, or I don’t know who, they don’t even come close to Maximus the Confessor in terms of the complexity of his language, which is extremely sort of, I don’t want to say overwrought, but it’s extremely elaborately wrought. So just on the level of the language itself, he’s an extremely difficult writer. And then once you’ve been able to untangle the complexities of his sentence structures, then you’ve got to figure out, well, what on earth is he saying, right? What are the concepts? The language, words are expressions of concepts, so the words themselves are difficult, and then trying to figure out what the concepts mean is, of course, a much harder thing still. So as the days go by, I’ll have excerpts from various texts in translation, so you’ll get to see for yourself just how difficult some of his writing and some of his thought can be. I would consider it to be a kind of spiritual exercise to work through a text by a Maximus the Confessor, because it requires not just the external silence, but a degree and a quality of attention and concentration that we don’t bring to most of the texts that we read, to newspapers or books or even spiritual books that we read. It’s very demanding and very taxing in terms of what he, the sort of process of thought or sequence of thought that he invites us to walk through with him. We’ll get to more of that later on. So for tonight, I thought I wouldn’t drop you in the middle of a dark ocean and just leave you to swim on your own. I thought tonight we would take things a little bit more simply and ease ourselves into maybe increasing levels of difficulty. And tonight I wanted to do basically three things. I wanted to say something in general about the church fathers. I’ll say more about that in a minute. Then I think it’s important to say something about the life of Saint Maximus, because the ideas emanate from a particular life. They’re not disassociated from this lived individual’s life, so it’ll be good to know something about his life. Then maybe we’ll take a break at that point and come back and say something about the reception of St. Maximus’ thought in the subsequent tradition. And I think this is important because historians, people who are trained as historians, including patristic scholars, including people who study the fathers of the church, have a tendency to collapse historical texts into their historical antecedents. So you’ll read a work by St. Basil, you’ll read St. Basil’s homilies, for example, on the six days of creation. You’re a historian, you’re a historian of theology, you’re a historian of the church fathers, and you sit down to study, as a patrologist, the homilies of St. Basil on creation. And you’re trained to ask questions like, well, you’re trained to make observations like, okay, well these ideas he’s getting from Stoicism. These are Stoic ideas. These ideas he’s borrowed and modified from Origen of Alexandria, who was an earlier ecclesiastical writer. These ideas, and so on. The idea is to sort of show where the text came from. Like a lot of New Testament scholars, you give them the prologue to the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Logos. They’ll say, oh, that’s ancient philosophy, you see. They’ll give you the history of the Logos doctrine up until the time of the Gospel of John, and then they feel their work is done, right? Because I’m an expert on the Gospel of John, not what happened 500 years or 1,000 years after the Gospel of John was written. So I can get you to, historically, to the idea of the Logos, and that usually means collapsing it into antecedent, prior philosophical or theological or religious ideas, and then my work is done. Of course, this is completely… Well, this is not exactly helpful for the church.

Because it is important to know where things came from, but it’s also important, and sometimes even more important, to know what people did with them, how people read them, how the church received that gospel, how that church received the homilies of St. Basil on creation, how the church received and read and studied and reflected and continued to refract and redact what it had received from the tradition. That’s important because if I study scripture or a church father or a liturgical text without referencing the larger tradition, I can end up reading the thing in a direction that might be incorrect. And even if it is correct, why wouldn’t I want to know how 2,000 years of tradition read and received this work that I’m now reading? People who read this thought this was really important and they emphasized this and they connected these things and drew a conclusion. I’d like to know that. That’s what it means to be a church. That’s what it means to be embedded within, to appropriate for yourself the tradition, not to read it in the light of historians’ categories or some other kind of approach. So I will spend a few minutes talking about the reception of Saint Maximus’ thought in the subsequent tradition, because I think that’s just as important as anything he himself had to say, because it’s what the Church decided was useful and interesting and important and so on. Let’s now turn to the first of the three sort of areas, and I’d like to say a few words in general about the church fathers. Now some of you might say, Father Maximus, we know who the church fathers were, we know something about them, and we came here to hear something about Saint Maximus, so why don’t you just get to that? Well, I find my experience is that we often begin, in theological discussions or when we get together in church and ask questions and have dialogues and so forth, we often begin at a point too far down the road. So, for example, people will come and they’ll say, tell me something about the meaning of this passage in Genesis. Tell me something about what St. Paul means here in this particular letter. And after a while it becomes clear, so wait a minute now, before we commit ourselves to the details, we need to have a clear idea of the larger picture. So I’m not sure. We have to talk about what is the orthodox understanding of scripture first. Let’s not just pull out a passage here. What did Jesus mean when he said, or whatever it is, a difficult passage? But let’s put that aside for a moment. And let’s back up and ask more fundamental questions. Let’s make sure that we know what this book is and what it means to the church and with what sort of a mind we should bring to it. People ask questions about, they want to ask a question about salvation outside the church, for example. And then again, do you even know what sin is before you start talking about salvation, for example? That sort of thing. So I think it’s always helpful to go back to the roots of things, to the original forms of things, and to ask basic questions, often very general questions. Because sometimes these things are not always clear to us. We get a lot of detailed information about something, but we don’t know the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is important. So that’s why I think it’ll be helpful and important to say a few words about the church fathers. And I didn’t bring my brother with me all the way from the East Coast to operate the slide projector, but that’s what he’s going to be doing tonight. So can we have the next? This is a modern day painting, an icon of St. Maximus, it’s a wall painting, and we’ll come back to these images later, but we can go one more now. This is a 12th century image from an illuminated manuscript that’s at the Vatican, and it shows a group of church fathers, starting on the right, it’s Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Athanasius, Basil, Nyssa, Gregory the Theologian, who is that, I don’t remember. St. John Chrysostom, Maximus with the cowl. I’m sorry, Cyril of Alexandria is in there. That’s who that is. Chrysostom, St. Maximus the Confessor with the monastic cowl, and behind him, St. John of Damascus. I’ve got those there because we’re going to be talking about church fathers, and here’s a group of formidable patristic figures. So, again, to begin with some questions, what is a church father? We throw this word around. We use this word. We invoke this word. We invoke their authority. What is a church father? What is a church father? And why are the earlier fathers so important? Because there’s a sense in which the great ecclesiastical writers of the late antique period have a kind of value, both individually and collectively, that’s not always the case. Why is that so? Why are they more important? Why study them? Why study the church fathers? What is to be gained, somebody might ask, by reading texts written, in the case of Maximus the Confessor, who was a slightly later writer, text written 1,300 years ago. What possible relevance could a 1,000-year-old plus text written in a foreign language in another time and place, what possible relevance could that have for us sophisticated modern people who have iPhones? How could it possibly be relevant to us? So let’s start with the first question of who or what is a church father. That brings us to the next slide.

Now, this is a classical list of criteria for church fathers that was actually established by Roman Catholic historians and patrologists, and we’ll use it as a point of departure because it’s convenient and it’ll open up certain areas for us. There’s a lot in it that we would be very happy to accept, but there are other things that we would also question. So you see there are these four criteria, who or what is a, they have a whole sort of Roman Catholic mind, right? Very orderly, very schematic, very categorical. Who or what is a church father? Well, whoever this individual is has to fit these criteria. Antiquity, by which they mean, by the way, they had to have lived and died before St. John of Damascus, which is problematic for us, obviously, right? But antiquity is their orthodoxy of doctrine. Personal sanctity and approval by the church. Let’s just talk about each one of these in turn. St. John of Damascus died circa 750. So if you were to draw the line there and say that anybody, any ecclesiastical writer who lived and who worked after 750 is not a church father, well, think of all of the individuals who would fall off the list. These are the ones that come to mind. Phocius the Great, St. Simeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas in the 14th century, and many, many, many others. So obviously, the criteria of antiquity alone and is insufficient for us, is insufficient for us. Because we would say that, well, I mean, it would seem to frustrate or limit the work of the Holy Spirit, who is active, operating in the early writers, but who continues to write in the later ones. So we’re not too happy so far about antiquity. On the other hand, though, Neither should we be in a hurry to call anybody a saint, right? We shouldn’t be in a rush to canonize anybody either. I mean, there are some cases, I mentioned Gregory Palamas, he was canonized within a very short period of time after his death. There were very unusual circumstances, theological controversies. The patriarch at the time happened to be one of St. Gregory’s disciples, so he helped in the canonization process, but that is very unusual. Sometimes 50, 100 centuries sometimes. past before the church in its wisdom moves to canonize someone as saint. And I say this now because there are modern elders, such as the elder Porfirios or the elder Paisios, both of whom have reposed. There are living elders. You see icons painted for them now, even though they have not been canonized by the church. There’s a sort of one-upmanship that people play with their living elders and spiritual fathers. They’ll say so-and-so is a saint or a saintly gifts and so on. And I think we need to be a little circumspect about that sort of thing. Aristotle had a phrase called no one blessed before the end, right? Because until the day you die, right? Until the gates of heaven close behind you, anything can happen, right? So there has to be a certain immaturity, I think, in that kind of… I mean, it comes out of devotion. And if you love your spiritual father, if you love your elder, if you’ve experienced the grace of God through your elder… You’re going to believe that he’s a saintly person, right? But that’s one thing, and broadcasting his sanctity and having icons painted of him is another thing. So there is something about the antiquity that’s important, in the sense that we shouldn’t be in a rush to fit people for halos before the church as a whole has actually gotten to that point. There’s a story about a… A Western journalist who interviewed Mao, Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong in China many years ago, and he asked the chairman what he thought of the French Revolution. And Mao’s answer was, too soon to tell, right? So, sort of the long Chinese view of things. So the church has a much longer view. We’re, I mean, the 24-hour news cycle, I think, is given away to the 15-minute news cycle. So we’re in a rush, we’re impatient, we want to see things happen, we feel frustrated when they don’t, but the church has a different mode of existence, a different manner of life, and we can’t impose our sort of hectic sort of schedule or desires on it. The early fathers too, getting back to antiquity, the early fathers of the fourth century and around there, do have a special importance. We’ll come to that in a moment. The second one, orthodoxy of doctrine. Well, we would say certainly, certainly. You’re not qualified, you’re not cut out to be a church father if your teaching was not orthodox. But again, you have to say that. Not absolutely everything. that every church father says or wrote is dogma. There has to be discretion here. There has to be a kind of discrimination here too. Just because an individual is a saint, just because an individual has written authoritative theological works does not mean that absolutely every single thing that that individual has written is on the same level of doctrinal authority. Which is why we need the tradition. This is one of the things you learn fairly quickly on the Holy Mountain. People have a tendency to read books, to read a saint’s life, and they get inspired by the saint’s life. And they want to emulate the saint’s life. So what do you do? You read the life of Saint Simeon the Stylian. What are you going to do? I mean, saw off the top of a tree and live on top of it because that’s what he did? Or you read the life of Anthony and you’re inspired to do something similar. What do you do? Go throw yourself into the middle of a national park? Like he did in the desert? The answer to that is not necessarily. So we say, and I think this is from the ladder, from the ladder of divine ascent by St. John Climbacus, who says, sort of paraphrasing, that everything in a saint’s life is worthy of, it rhymes with the second word I need, I can’t think of the rhyming word. Everything in a saint’s life is worthy of praise, but not everything in the saint’s life is worthy of imitation, which means it’s not necessarily worthy of imitation by you.

There might be someone else for whom this or that practice in this or that saint’s life, maybe that’s what they need to do, not necessarily you. What’s the word that rhymes with imitation that I’m looking for? I’m sorry, everything in a saint’s life is worthy of admiration. as it truly is, but not everything in a saint’s life is worthy of imitation, which is why you need discernment, which is why you need a spiritual father, which is why you need to be in a community where, you know, if you start doing things that you read in a saint’s life in the middle of what we’ve celebrated as a fool for Christ on the calendar, if you came into church on Sunday and started throwing walnuts at people like some of these holy fools did, that would not be acceptable behavior in your, right? So worthy of admiration. They did far worse things, but I’ll stick to the polite stuff. I think there’s the life of Saint Simeon of Edessa. He makes his grand entrance into the city of Edessa, I think, by either he had, either on his behind walking in or he had tied strips of meat to himself and the dogs were chasing him or some very outlandish sort of thing. So, yes, orthodoxy of doctrine. But that doesn’t mean that absolutely every single thing that we find in ecclesiastical literature is on the same level, let’s say, as other things. The other, obviously, personal sanctity. It’s not enough to just be intelligent. It’s not enough to simply have read a lot of books or to be erudite or to be good at theology. There’s a moral dimension here. There is the dimension of personal sanctity, which is really non-negotiable. So we have a lot of intelligent people, but we don’t have nearly as many people who are saints as we would like to have. So yes, which is why there’s the formulaic, if you go to a monastery and they have a reading in the refectory, they say, a reading from our holy father, the word holy in Greek is aios, it means saint. Aios Ioannis. St. John, aios, also means holy, like aios, aios, aios, the thrice holy hymn. So in Greek, the word aios gets translated two ways in English, as holy and as saint. So we say a reading from our holy father, or sometimes our sainted father. So when a text by a church father is read in church or in the refectory, the reader announces to the hearers, the audience, that what they are hearing is the work of a, not simply a smart guy, Right? But of a holy man. And that’s key. That’s critical. I don’t want to sit in the… I was appalled the other day. Somebody told me they were somewhere and they were having a meal and they were playing a tape recording of me. A talk that I had given somewhere and I thought, oh my goodness. And that’s just, you know… You could have done better, I think, but anyway. And then finally, of course, approval by the church. We don’t have church fathers that are made church fathers by… groups or organizations that are outside the church or alongside the church or has to be an expression of the life of the church so yes approval by the church but at the same time we don’t the church does not have an official list of of approved church fathers right and again how do you know this it requires discernment and that okay these writers are maybe near perfect or perfect these writers well they have lots of good things in them but you have to watch out for this these writers they do have a few good things but Or these writers have very good works, but these other works don’t read at all. They’re just not of value or of use to you. We don’t have an official list that tells people anything like that. That’s part of the whole spirit of, which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a hierarchy. There is a hierarchy. It doesn’t mean you can take somebody from the bottom and move them to the top. But the church goes about sort of what? Initiating people into the mystery of theology. and into the mystery of the life of the church in a very different way. But it’s not by giving people lists. So those are the basic categories, and I think they’re not perfect, but they’re helpful, provided you know how to qualify them in the necessary ways. Antiquity, orthodoxy of doctrine, personal sanctity, and approval by the church. So why read the Church Fathers? I think that it’s… easy, I think, to underestimate, especially in our modern society, I think it’s very easy, it’s part of our modern hubris, right, to underestimate the contributions of the past and to overestimate the contributions of the present. We think we’re always, every generation thinks it’s the most modern and the most forward-looking and the most progressive, and this is just the hubris and the arrogance of this generation, right? So, so, To open up a text, and this is true even of a non-ecclesiastical text, to open up an ancient text is to open up to yourself a source of ancient wisdom. There might be wisdom there that’s no longer available to us. There might be truths there that are rejected by our society or simply can’t percolate to the surface of the sorts of discourses that we normally hear. And why would you want to deprive yourself of… that opportunity in the case of an ecclesiastical writer of that blessing. So that would be sort of kind of a temporal reason. Our own time is a limited time like every other time, and the more that we can bring to that, the better off we are. So also,

Especially for Americans, it’s also very easy to overestimate the importance of our culture and of our cultural habits of thinking and of the various cultural assumptions that we make unthinkingly, because every culture has a tendency to naturalize itself. You’re brought up in a certain culture, you think, okay, this is how people live. You don’t think this is how people on my class level and in my part of the country live. You don’t think that this is peculiar to class, race, gender, whatever. You assume it’s perfectly natural, until you go to Europe or to the Middle East or to Southeast Asia and you see that people live totally differently. They eat differently, they speak differently, they get up at different times, they have different kinds of foods. And you start to realize, oh wait a minute now, maybe there’s a lot more to it. Maybe there are other options. Maybe there are other ways of living. We see this with people who come to the Holy Mountain. And one of the things I think that they find so refreshing and so energizing about it is that they see that, yes, there is another way to live. That the way that I live my life in the world, the routines that I have established for myself, the habits into which I’ve become habituated, they don’t have to be. They don’t have to be. There is another way to live. And I think, again, by immersing ourselves in the writings of the Church Fathers, we are exposed to this other way of living. There’s a great line from the Paschal Canon. It speaks about alis viotis is the word. This is another mode of living that has been made available to us through the grace of the Resurrection. And that’s what we’re all about as Christians. So this idea of time and place and overcoming these kinds of cultural and spatial temporal limitations, those are there, but this is still all very human. Because I could say what I just said about Plato, or about Shakespeare, or about Dante, or other languages, other times, other cultures. It’s possible to have a kind of a humanist education, and that can broaden you. So what I’ve said so far is very, very human. It’s purely human. You don’t read the church fathers to be culturally broadened. They’ll have that effect on you, but that’s not what it’s all about. That’s just sort of a human part of it. So to move on then. We would want to underline that the fathers of the church are saints. The fathers of the church are saints. Which is to say that they are people who have been thoroughly and completely transformed by the grace of God. They’re not like us anymore. I mean in that sense. I mean to the extent that I am living a sinful life, to the extent that I am not open to the grace of God, I’m one kind of person. But to the extent that I can overcome those difficulties, break some of those bad habits, open up my heart to God’s grace and allow the Holy Spirit to enter into me, to allow the grace that was given me in baptism to realize its potential, I begin to change qualitatively. That’s the gift and the power of God’s grace. Well, the church fathers were individuals who were thoroughly transformed by the grace of God. And this is so obvious to anyone who picks up their writings and reads them, because the words contain and communicate grace. The writings of the Church Fathers are grace-filled writings. And if we approach them in the right spirit and with the right heart, that same grace will be conveyed to us. St. Isaac the Syrian says somewhere that a virtuous man, when he speaks, conveys grace to his listeners. And those of you who have been in the company of saintly people know that just by being in their presence, just by conversing with them, sometimes just by seeing them, the way they move or something like that, can convey God’s grace to you. It’s not their grace, they have become a vessel for that grace. God now is operating through them. And it’s not simply while they’re in the body, it’s also their words that are not simply receptacles, but sources of God’s grace. The same is true with scripture, obviously, and all the other spiritual and liturgical and ecclesiastical books. They are all filled with grace. Of course, if we read them, we can access that grace. It can become accessible to us, and it gives itself to us, let’s say, let’s put it this way. The grace that is in these words is given to us to the extent that we open ourselves up to it. And this brings us to, I think, our first small text. It’s our first text from St. Maximus. Now, St. Maximus here is talking about St. Gregory the theologian who lived a couple of hundred years before him, and St. Dionysius the Areopagite. So we have St. Maximus the confessor, a church father, talking about two earlier church fathers. We have a saint talking about saints. What does he say? They received within themselves all the outpouring of wisdom that can truly be attained by the saints. That’s a big statement. In other words, human capacity, God made us in such a way that we can receive a certain amount of grace, the grace that is appropriate to human nature. Angels receive a different kind and so on, a different sort of measure, let’s say.

They receive within themselves all the outpouring of wisdom that can truly be attained by the saints. And by setting aside a life conformed to nature, they occupied themselves with the substance of the soul, and so took hold of the living, unique Christ, who, to say what is even greater, became the soul of their souls, manifest to all, through all their deeds, words, and thoughts. Think about that. He picks his words very carefully. That Christ became the soul of their souls, sort of like St. Silouan’s soul as a cave for the Holy Spirit. The soul of their souls manifest to all through all their deeds, words, and thoughts, everything they did, in other words, by which one is persuaded that their works were authored not by them, but by Christ, who by grace has exchanged places with them. If that strikes you as extravagant, if that strikes you as an extreme statement, that is essentially the Orthodox teaching on divinization. We talk about assimilation to the divine. We talk about growing in likeness to the divine. That’s what he’s talking about. So if that seems excessive, if anyone is offended by the idea that a human being can attain that, not simply that degree of grace or that level of grace, but that degree of likeness to Christ to be virtual identification, well then, you need to think more deeply about what the Orthodox Church teaches about the possibilities of human transformation that have been made possible in Christ, because that is our doctrine of divinization or deification. So this means then that to study the Church Fathers is really to study Christ, that the spirit of the Church Fathers, the spirit animating the Church Fathers, is the Spirit of Christ. And it’s also true, of course, to study the works of a Church Father is to enter into the communion of the saints, obviously. Not just reading Shakespeare or Dante or Milton or anything like that. There’s something else that’s at work here. And in most cases, I think it’s safe to say that this gift of sanctity, this gift of divine grace that the Church Fathers received, all the saints received. Grace, but not all the saints are Church Fathers. So the Church Fathers received grace, but almost always this grace was woven together with outstanding intellectual ability. Many of the great Church Fathers were among the most highly educated men of their day. Gregory the Theologian, Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor. The list goes on and on. Often they were from upper class families, which is how they were able to have the education that they had. And so they cultivated themselves from a human point of view, their minds, their intellects, their gifts of speech, their gifts of writing. And all of that, of course, was chosen by God, taken by God. And God took their natural gifts of nature that they cultivated and wove them together with his own grace. And to go back to the earlier categories, of course, a deeply moral, spiritual life, which is an irreducible part of this. All right, I said I would say something about why these early fathers, your fourth century, your third, fourth, fifth century fathers from this so-called golden age of patristic literature, are necessarily a little more important. Why do they have an added value, to put it that way, or why do we keep returning to them? It’s what I said earlier, you want to go back to the roots of something. You want to go back to the original forms of something. And this is where these early writers come in, because these early writers, your Chrysostomes, your Basils, and your Gregories, and so on, were not simply on hand during the sort of early, originary period of Christianity. They simply weren’t present at that time. They weren’t simply eyewitnesses to the fact that Christianity was a new faith that was taking shape at that time. They were the architects and the builders of the Church. They weren’t simply on hand at that crucial period. They were the ones who gave the faith its current shape. And everything that we have, our theology, our liturgy, our hymnology, our iconography, our church architecture, our spirituality, our canon law, and anything else you can name came from the hands of these individuals. So this gives them a tremendous importance. You want to know about monasticism? Go to the original monastic writings of St. Basil the Great, who formulated the traditions and the principles of Cenobitic or community-oriented monasticism. That’s the source. If you go to a monastery on Mount Athos today as a novice, they will say, have you read the monastic writings of St. Basil? No. Well, start reading. Everybody in the monastery has read it many times because that’s our source. We continue to live the kind of monastic life that was articulated by St. Basil the Great. What greater exegesis of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament could you hope to find apart from, other than that given to us by St. John Chrysostom? Which is not to say, don’t get me wrong, we can add to that. Other sources can shed light on that, but if you want to have a wonderful, beautiful, insightful, correct, sound, Orthodox interpretation of scripture, you go to St. John Chrysostom. The church has always done that. Throughout the whole, there are thousands and thousands of manuscripts containing the exegetical homilies of St. John Chrysostom. Why are there so many thousands? Because people copied them to read them, all the way through the end of the Byzantine period and beyond. And those of you who might read someone like Theo, I saw up in the bookshop upstairs they have an English translation of the commentaries of Theophilaktos. Some people say of Okhrid, some people say of Bulgaria, that’s irrelevant. He was a devoted reader of St. John Chrysostom.

He sort of massively appropriated the kind of Chrysostomic hermeneutical tradition, and then of course added his own elements to it as well, but it is largely Chrysostomic both in spirit and largely in letter. And some people hear these kinds of ideas, they say, so are we simply fated to repeat ancient formulas? And the answer to that is no, because they’re not ancient formulas for one thing. It’s part of the… anybody who takes this material seriously and approaches it in a prayerful manner will find their whole being transformed. This is not repeating an ancient formula. And I’m not saying, I don’t rule out novelty, I don’t rule out additions, I don’t rule out developments. But any development that is not rooted in the tradition is something we should all be suspicious about, or at least we should ask questions of it. And if it’s contradictory, then… and this happens. We hear people saying things now that are contrary to the tradition, and we should be very careful before agreeing to accept ideas like that. All right, another aspect now of the church fathers. We said, what is a church father? Why read church fathers? What is the importance of these foundational figures? Another key element here is what we might want to call spiritual paternity. This gets us now to the idea of a father. Why do we call the fathers of the church fathers? Because the irony, if you wish to see it as an irony, is that almost none of them were married or had children, right? There are maybe one or two that I can think of that might have been married at one point, but for the most part, none of the church fathers, they were all celibate. Many of them lived monastic lives and were called from the monastery to serve the church in the world. Chrysostom, Basil, so many of them, right? So we do call them fathers. We do call them fathers. Obviously not in a biological sense, but how exactly do we mean this? Well, maybe the first thing to do is to quote St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 4.15. It’s a passage that everybody knows. He says, if you have 10,000 teachers or 10,000 instructors in Christ, you do not have many fathers. It’s not just the teaching, right? You do not have many fathers. He says, for in Jesus Christ, by the gospel, I have begotten you. So St. Paul understands himself as a father in the sense that in Christ and through the gospel, he has given spiritual birth to individuals who are now his children. And the medium of that procreation, let’s say, is the word. It’s the logos. This is, there’s a very… earlier I criticized people who collapsed ideas into their historical antecedents. It would be fun to take a tangent here and talk about the whole notion of logos in the ancient Greek world and how that was appropriated by, in the Christian tradition. I should keep an eye on the time here, but it would take us too far afield. Although it might be worth mentioning that Socrates understood himself as a midwife. That was his chief designation for himself because he helped his disciples bring birth to the ideas that were forming in their minds. And he says, and as midwives did in those days, when he saw that some ideas were deformed or incapable of life, he would actually destroy them in the womb of the mind before they came to full term. It’s not a very pleasant image, but it’s graphic and it makes the point. But his chief business was to help individuals not simply give birth to ideas, but in a Christian context, to help individuals become themselves in God, in Christ, to help Christ be born in them, which is not I’m over here and Christ is over there. It’s not just Christ is something separate. It’s a transformation of the whole self. So you understand that there is this notion of spiritual paternity, and this is who the church fathers are. And when we read their writings, that same grace, as I said earlier, is communicated to us, is conveyed to us, and we can become their disciples, their children, their sons and daughters in our own way. We could have spent the whole evening talking about just the word, the notion of the logos, of the word. I remember years ago as a seminarian, I was impressed by a moment in the life of St. Francis of Assisi. This is in the Middle Ages, before there was printing and words were valuable things, and to have a book was difficult, somebody had to copy it by hand. He was walking down the road and he saw scraps of paper on the side of the road, and on the scraps of paper were letters. And they were so precious to him that of course he stopped and picked them up and kept them because words and language were… we don’t appreciate them anymore. We’re just so sick of words actually, right? But not these folks. And more recently there’s a new English translation, new, it’s the first ever English translation of the life of Saint Simeon, the new theologian that’s just been published several months ago. And I was very surprised because I’d never seen this sort of thing before. It said that the saint loved letters so much because it was through letters and through words that the gospel came to him and the grace of God came to him that when he would open a book he would press his eyes to the… this is what the text seems to be saying… he would press his eyes, touch his eyes to the pages of the book because he felt like people touch icons maybe something like this, right, because they are a source of grace and one last sort of anecdote and maybe we can take a break. And actually one of my students brought this to my attention. I wish I could say that I found this myself. I didn’t. One of my students mentioned it to me.

There’s a moment in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who I think was mentioned in Sharon’s talk. Is that correct? Yeah. Because Mother Gavrilia had apparently met Helen Keller at one point. Among the many beautiful and touching moments in that autobiography is one that involves language, obviously, but in a very particular way. And it’s at an early point in—I haven’t seen the film, somebody told me that this actually figures prominently in the film—Helen Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, is very frustrated at this point because despite all of her patience and all of her efforts, she cannot seem to get through to Helen Keller. And she’s been trying to; she would sort of give her an object to hold, cup or water, and then she would try to write the word on her, but Helen Keller just could not make the connection, which is admittedly not easy. What does this have to do with this? How do you even? And Helen Keller says in the autobiography that before I learned to speak, before I learned language, not only did I live in a world of darkness, but I lived in a world in which individual objects were not differentiated from each other. To us, that would be nightmarish. For everything to be somehow one kind of blur in a sense, in a physical sense. She did not have a clear idea that they were separate physical objects in the world. Of course it’s not going to be easy for her to figure out cup, water, W-A-T, whatever. And at one point the teacher had given her a doll and Helen, being a slightly impetuous child, broke it on the ground and the teacher, I think, began to scold her and Helen Keller ran out of the house into the backyard where there was a well. And the teacher, talk about saintly people, didn’t give up, chases her out of the house, sees an opportunity for learning, and brings Helen Keller to the source of the spigot and starts to pump the water so that it comes down her hands and arms. And I think at that point writes water. And she says, that was the moment when I got it. That’s when I realized that there was something in the world called water. And it was cold and refreshing and sweet and that it has a name. And she wrote, of course, the name. There’s a biblical verse about God writing names. Is it our names in his palms or something like that? I forget exactly. But it’s this whole idea of logos, that without the logos, without the word, even, again, on this very fundamental human level, there’s no mind. There’s no thought, there’s no enlightenment. And machines can’t do this, by the way, as much as they’d like us to believe that in artificial intelligence and all. Animals can’t do this either, right? Sit and write some beautiful dogs running around the property here. No matter how many times you throw water on them, they’re not gonna… It’s part of the gift of what it is to be human. So that story to me, the first time I heard it, it was so powerful. That’s it. Nothing better encapsulates the connection between mind and sensation and experience and language and logos. And it’s really remarkable. Actually, you can find her whole autobiography online. I found it for free. And if you just search the word water, you’ll probably find it within the first two or three. So it’s an amazing thing to read. We’ve been here for about an hour, I think. Modern pedagogy says that most folks can’t handle more than 45 minutes of somebody else babbling. So I’ve taxed you for 15 minutes beyond that. Let’s take a little break, maybe five minutes, and then come back. Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Father Maximus Simono Petridis. Lecture 2. An Overview of the Life of St. Maximus. Keep an eye on the clock because I don’t want to run over time. So we said the second item on the agenda tonight was just to give you kind of an overview or sketch of the life of St. Maximus the Confessor. He was born probably around 580, so late 6th century, and he died on August 13th, on which day the church continues to celebrate the translation of his relics. At one point, I don’t know exactly when, his commemoration was moved from August 13th to the month of January, when the church celebrates most of its great so-called doctors and church fathers. So he was moved to late January, January 21st, although the church still remembers the feast on the 13th, which was actually the day he died. There’s a little sort of humorous element in this because I’ll be flying back to the East Coast on August 13th, so there’ll be another translation of another Maximus to another place. If you read through enough of his writings, he very, very infrequently makes remarks about himself. Most church fathers never talk about themselves. They don’t talk about their personal experiences, very, very rarely. They don’t tell you about their lives, their childhood. Again, very different from our American culture of therapy, where you sit down next to somebody on an airplane you’ve never met before, and they feel compelled to tell you their whole life story from DNA forward, right? That’s not the sort of thing they engaged in. But if you do read enough of his works, you do get sort of information about him. And we find out he seems to have been actually on the short side, because he often puns about his inability to reach certain kinds of intellectual heights and puns on his short stature, which he says is a metaphor for his spiritual sort of shortness. He also seems to have had very poor eyesight, because he does talk about this… but the difficulty he had in reading certain things that were sent to him. And again, he very frequently puns on, he talks about his intellectual myopia, or actually the Greek word is amvliopia.

Is there an amblyopia? Has anybody heard anything about it? There is, you see, so the work has survived. What exactly is it, by the way? It’s not… Oh, interesting. That’s a problem, isn’t it? So, we know… The few things we know about him is that he wasn’t very tall and he suffered with bad eyesight. Now, being born in 580 means that he was born at the end of the Justinianic period. He was born at the end of the so-called first golden age of Byzantium, which peaked under the emperor Justinian, who reconquered lost Roman territories and expanded the Roman Byzantine Empire to its greatest extent from Spain in the west all the way across the Mediterranean and North Africa to as far as the Caspian Sea. So he had really exerted the military and the fisc and all of these sort of social forces to recapture these lost territories, but was not able to hold on to them for very long because it was a lot of territory, and there were other problems as well. So Maximus is sort of born at this moment of very high civilization, but this also happens to be the same point when that high civilization begins to enter a decline. What happened basically was that Justinian had spent a great deal of his time fighting the Persians. Persia was always the other superpower to the ancient Greek world, because all the way back to antiquity. And this continued through the early Byzantine period. And after repeated wars between Byzantium and Persia, both of these two superpowers basically wore themselves out. And their weakened condition made it relatively easy for the armies of Muhammad to move into that territory and take over both Persian territories and Byzantine territories. And Maximus is alive at the time when all of this is going on. And we could say more about that, but it’s not terribly important for us right now. In terms of his education, we don’t have a lot of information about his early life. We certainly don’t have as much information as we’d like to. And we just have little bits of it. And he tells us that he really didn’t have a kind of proper education. He says that he was an idiotis, like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It doesn’t mean an idiot, it means somebody who’s actually sort of eccentric or formed somehow in a way that’s peculiar or private, perhaps. It could even mean he had a kind of private education. And what it really means is that he did not have formal training in rhetoric, which was prized among the Byzantines, which is also why his writings are very complicated, because it doesn’t adhere to sort of standard form. He’s a sort of a philosophical thinker and kind of goes off on long tangents and does things that were considered inappropriate in terms of the literary and prose and rhetorical fashions of the day. And he often apologizes about this, and we’ll see some of that at a later point. What is clear, I mean he didn’t have a literary or a rhetorical education, but what is clear is that he had the highest philosophical education available to anybody in that period. How exactly he acquired this, who his teachers were, where he studied, I mean Constantinople is most likely where, but we don’t really know as much about that as we would like. And since we’ve brought this up, I’ll say now that this is one of the things that makes Maximus so difficult because while he was a man of profound spiritual experiences, he was also a man with a profound theological vision, and he was also a man who had this elaborate and highly sophisticated philosophical training so that when it came time for him to talk about those experiences or to talk about the experience of grace, for example, to talk about the life of prayer, to talk about the experience of being assimilated to God or to express his theological vision, he had the full panoply of the whole of ancient philosophy at his fingertips. And he does not adhere to it slavishly. He makes creative and, again for us, alas, eccentric at times use of that philosophical tradition. So this is what makes him very, very complex because there’s a tremendous depth of experience behind his writings. And the experience is expressed through this highly elaborate and rhetorically sometimes messy sort of prose style. We’ll be seeing more of that. I’ve got a number of texts for us to look at over the next few days. So this might sound intriguing to you now, but after you read a few lines, you’ll be like, oh, this is really hard. But we’ll get to that. As far as the traditional life of St. Maximus goes, and there are some questions that people have raised about it, but they’re not that important for us right now. He was in the service of the emperor as a younger man, as a layman. Before he became a monk, he actually was on the secretarial staff of the Emperor Heraclius. And there’s some information that he might have been a distant relative of the Emperor Heraclius, because the Emperor Heraclius actually seized power in Constantinople and had to form a new government, and Maximus was one of the first people that he called. And there’s some indication, there’s some literary evidence that they were actually distantly related, which is why maybe Heraclius knew about him and trusted him and got him to work in the court. But Maximus seems to have grown tired of this. He may have never wanted to go there in the first place, we don’t know. But around 613 or 614, as best we can tell, he resigns his position in the imperial chancery, and he crosses over into Asia Minor, where he becomes a monk in a monastery at a fairly older age in life, so around 613 to 614. By 618, he’s in a city called Chrysopolis and living in a monastery. And he already has a disciple, a fellow by the name of Anastasios, who will stay with him for the rest of his life. The two will stay together.

And then about six or seven years after this, after 618, that is, six or seven years later, he moves to another city. He was always a bit of a wanderer, as you’ll see. So Constantinople, Chrysopolis now, another city. They used to say Syzykis. Now they say Kyzykos or Kyzykis. Doesn’t sound very good either way, but a major city in Asia Minor. And it’s here where he begins to write his earliest works. Now, tomorrow, I’ll spend some time going through all of his works with you. So we don’t need to worry about missing anything right now. But this is where he begins to write some of his letters, the chapters on love that are in the Philokalia. They’re also translated separately in other books. Some of you may have read those. There’s also A Life of the Virgin Mary that survives only in a Georgian translation. It was recently translated into English and published, I think, by Yale University Press. That is ascribed to St. Maximus, but there are lots of doubts about whether or not he actually wrote it. But his name is the one on the text, and it’s available. And then what happens around 626, I mentioned the Persians earlier. In 626, the Persians, every year they’re on spring break. And they come into Byzantine lands and they raid and they rob and they destroy. And actually the Persians had teamed up with the Avars for a kind of a pincer movement on the city of Constantinople. This is the time, this is the story behind the Akathist hymn, which you all know. Yes? Heads nod so that I know that we can… Okay, in 626, the city of Constantinople was under siege by Persians and Avars and others. And I think the Emperor Heraclius was away fighting some battle somewhere else. The defense of the city fell to the then Patriarch Sergius, who was also a hymnographer, by the way. The Cherubic hymn from the pre-sanctified liturgy, Now the Powers of Heaven Invisibly Worship With Us, you’re familiar with this? That’s written by Sergius, other hymns as well. The defense of the city fell to the patriarch Sergius, and of course he organized the people and took the icon of the Virgin Mary painted by Luke. These days we’re in the period before August 15th and in one of the hymns we sing in the Paraclesis it mentions the directress, the icon known as the directress painted for us by Luke the Evangelist. There’s a procession around the walls of the city with the icon and at that moment the enemies have made their final attack and I think a fierce storm breaks out and all the ships in the sea that are attacking the city are swamped and there’s maybe heavy hail and rain, I forget all the details, and if I’m not mistaken in some accounts a figure of the Virgin appears and this is enough to frighten all of the hosts away. This is why they call it a cocculio, this is a special sort of… what’s the English word for it, the proimio, I don’t know if that’s an English word either, but. To you, the champion, leader, it obviously has a military context to it, and that’s the story, the invincible, to you, the invincible, and the word is, to you, is the general, to you, the general or the military leader who cannot be conquered, we, the city, offer you our hymns of thanksgiving. It all comes out of that. Anyway, Maximus was alive at that time, living in Asia Minor, which the Persians had overrun. They destroyed towns and cities, monasteries. We have letters from St. Maximus writing to abbots and asking about what happened to the nuns who were in that monastery that were destroyed and were scattered. Have they been found? Have they been brought back? Or this monastery? So it’s devastation, terrible devastation. And it’s at this point that Maximus leaves Asia Minor and travels south a little bit, probably to Cyprus for a while, before settling for a very long time in Carthage. Right, the city made famous by Saint Augustine for the most part in Northern Africa, modern-day Tunisia, I think. And you might think, well, what’s he doing in North Africa? Carthage was really an important late Roman city. It was no hick town. There was an amphitheater and a coliseum and public baths. The ruins are magnificent. It was a first-class, late ancient city with a large Greek emigre population that had fled there from the Persians. There were already Greeks settled there, but more went after the Persians. And that’s where Maximus goes and settles in North Africa for many years. We have a map here, it might help to look at a map. So this is Byzantium, I mean it should say Constantinople. Here’s where he starts in the service of the emperor and then crosses the Bosporus and spends some time in this area here, I think. I think Kyzykis is about here. I forget the location of modern-day Chrysopolis. The Persians, see the Parthians here, okay, the Persians sweep into Asia Minor, all the way up to the capital. You have other armies coming in this direction. Maximus, along with many others, leaves, travels south probably to Cyprus, and then we don’t know if he stopped in the Holy Lands. He might have. Seems also to have stopped in Alexandria before traveling to Carthage, very close to Rome, as you can see, where many Romans had fled after the fall of Rome in the fifth century.

And the Roman connection is important because at this point the Christian East is lapsing into various heresies that I’m not really going to talk about. I mean, the Monophysite heresy, the Monothelite heresy, especially the Monothelite heresy in Maximus’ day, whereas the Latin West has remained faithful to the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon. So Maximus and other sort of Chalcedonian exiles find a welcome in the West, and later on Maximus actually relocates to Rome, becomes very good friends with two successive popes, Pope Martin, and I forget the name of the other pope right now, and is actually involved in very early church councils that are held in the Lateran. So he’s one of the few church fathers that kind of moves back and forth between East and West in this very interesting way. 630s, 640s, sort of middle, starting to get to the latter half of the 7th century. Now, of course, the emperor now has embraced the heresy of monothelitism, a big ungainly word, which means simply that Christ has only one will and not two wills. Whereas the teaching of the church is that because Christ has two natures, human and divine, each nature has its natural energy or activity and also its natural will. Will means something a little different than just power of choice here. Will actually means something much more deep, much more vital. Like the will to live, let’s say, that’s different than I will to go here or there. They’re very different things. So will in the sense of natural vital energy. And because Christ had two full, perfect natures, he had to have the attributes and qualities of those natures, including activities or operations, energies, we say often, but also felimata, wills. So the emperor now is very upset because he’s got things sort of under control in this part of the world, but over here we have a pope and this unruly monk. Saint Maximus, by the way, was never ordained to the priesthood, never became a bishop, of course, which is unusual because most of the church fathers were bishops. They were leaders of churches and so on, not in the case of Maximus. And Maximus now had become the unofficial head of the Church of Africa. There were always African bishops, North African bishops. Everybody recognized Maximus’ theological brilliance. They would have these gatherings of bishops, and he was there basically leading the conversation because he was just head and, despite his short stature, head and shoulders of the rest. And then he’s taken to Rome, where he does similar work for the Pope. The emperor becomes very angry at this, right? Will not tolerate. And no totalitarian regime tolerates this kind of embarrassment on the one hand, but also this disobedience. So to disagree with the religious policies of the emperor is not simply to be a heretic in the eyes of the emperor, it’s to be a traitor. So this is a political crime, right? To disagree with the imperial religious policies is treason. It’s a political crime. The emperor sends his agents to Rome. They arrest both the Pope and Saint Maximus and they bring them. The Pope is exiled for a while under house arrest on a Greek island. I think he dies there. Maximus is brought to Constantinople, put on trial and then sentenced to a period of incarceration somewhere in Thrace over here. They can’t quite kill him because he’s too popular. He’s too well known. They’re actually trying to win him over. They had offered him the patriarchal see of Constantinople. If you subscribe to our theological beliefs, we will make you the patriarch. He’s like, absolutely not. And this is very distressing, by the way. All of the ancient patriarchates at this point, because they were bullied by Constantinople, basically, right? The rest were weak at this point. So Constantinople, where do we go from here? Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria. All of those patriarchates were in heresy. The only anciency that was not in heresy at that time was Rome. So poor Maximus is brought back to Constantinople in chains. He’s about 75, 80 at this point. In chains, naked, humiliated, abused. I mean, brought before the equivalent of congressional subcommittees. And hauled before the Senate, reviled, abused, interrogated. And they said, listen, they said, what? The whole world is in agreement with us. Who do you think you are? What, you’re, all of us are wrong and you’re right? Turned out that’s the way it was. But think of the pressure, right? How do you not doubt yourself when the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, when all of them are, right? How, I mean, this is almost superhuman. How do you not doubt yourself? How do you, I mean, how are you not filled with just anxiety, right? God, is it possible I’m wrong? Right? Unflinching, unflinching, right? And finally, when they can’t bend him to their wishes, he’s tortured, has his 80, I think he’s 85 now, 83, 85. He has his right hand cut off, his right hand is amputated, because this was the hand that dared to write against the emperor, right? And just to make sure this doesn’t happen again, his tongue is torn out. My brother teaches biology, he knows a lot about physiology. We were talking about just how deep the tongue goes and what a strong and powerful muscle it is and what it must be like to… I won’t even say the words, right? And of course, this is part of Roman bureaucratic barbarism. They were very adept at cutting off noses and hands and feet and probably cauterizing, is that the word? And then the poor fellow, at his age… His disciple, too, by the way, was also treated very poorly. And he’s sent from Constantinople to the far coast of the Black Sea, where he’s locked in a military prison. And that’s where he lives for a few more months and dies.

He died, by the way, without seeing his theological views vindicated. He died before the true theology was sort of affirmed. We complain about, oh, this bishop is no good, or there’s a problem in the church, or I don’t like the priest, and we can’t endure five minutes of a difficult thing, or two years, or five years. These are people who live their whole lives. You could have been born during the iconoclastic period, for example, which lasted for 150 years, and you would have gone to your grave and would have never seen the triumph of orthodoxy. That’s a hard life. That’s a hard life, right? But if it wasn’t for people like these who had the physical and the spiritual stamina to endure the pressure, we wouldn’t have a church for the most part. It would have all collapsed. So he dies there, and he’s buried there, presumably, obviously. And the Georgians, to talk about sort of the ongoing tradition, the Georgians have had a long history of devotion to St. Maximus the Confessor. Lots of folk traditions, and there are some folk traditions where St. Maximus becomes sort of like a rain god. He becomes sort of like a hobbit character who lives in a hollowed-out tree, and you pray to him when you need rain for your crops. There are more sophisticated theological appropriations of Maximus than that, but that’s the kind of a folk story one. And there’s even some details about his life in final exile, and they had made a prosthetic device. They took sticks, basically, and tied them to his hand so that he could continue to write. And they kept those sticks after he died. And his disciple outlived him. That’s how we know about this. His disciple wrote about it. Anastasios survived the death of his teacher. And he died during the divine liturgy at the precise moment when the priest said the words, thine own of thine own, these we offer unto you. That’s when he expired. And then for a long time, the lights were seen over the grave of St. Maximus. And then it was just lost to history forever, partly because that part of the Empire was lost to the Empire. Things changed under the Soviets, what have you. There was no chance of looking for St. Maximus’s grave. But some of you may have heard that I think two or three years ago, there was some excavations done in that area, and they found a late antique chapel dedicated to St. Maximus with a carved sarcophagus, a late antique chapel with a carved sarcophagus under the pavement that they unearthed, and in it they found a skeleton missing its right hand. And there’s a funny story about this. There was a pilgrim from Romania who comes to the monastery every year. Got to know him pretty well. He knows my name is Maximus. I hadn’t heard about this yet. So the moment he saw me, he was, oh, he goes, I have the greatest news to tell you. I said, what? He said, they found the remains of St. Maximus. I’m like, what? He says, yes. He goes, they know it’s his, he said, because he’s missing the right arm. I said, oh, my goodness. He goes, yes. He goes, and he’s also missing a tongue. And I’m like, oh, okay. You got it right with the first one. So the Georgian patriarchy is open. They’re saying, well, we are prepared to believe that this could be the body of St. Maximus, but we need to do more investigating. Wait till we get more reports and that sort of a thing. So it’s not been confirmed, either scientifically or ecclesiastically, but there’s a chance of that. Okay, we only have a half hour, so let’s move on to, let’s advance to the next slide, look if we can. I was going to say some more here about the reception of St. Maximus the Confessor, as I promised. I actually have an article that I’ve written about this, and it’s been published, and I’ve got a PDF version that I’ve given to the community here. So if anybody is interested and wants to read that article, because it’s far more than I could ever say here, covers centuries of the reception of Maximus’s thought. If anybody’s interested, please don’t bother poor Father Mark, just out of curiosity, if you really want to read it, Father Mark or Deacon Matthew, somebody here has it. But there’s one moment that’s really nice and it’s worth sort of throwing a spotlight on. This is from the 11th, 12th century. This is from the hand of, her name is on the bottom, Anna Komnena, Anna Komneny. She was the daughter of the famous Emperor Alexios. The first Komnenos, one of the greatest Byzantine emperors of all time, she wrote a book about her father called the Alexiad. It was Alexios, sort of modeled on the Iliad. It was a great sort of heroic, it wasn’t poetry, it was prose, but it was a great heroic recounting of her father’s life and achievements. And during her lifetime, during the 11th and 12th century, there was a tremendous resurgence of interest in Maximus the Confessor. And we’ll talk more about this tomorrow. But it seems that even the royal family would read St. Maximus the Confessor. And here’s just a snippet from the text. I will digress here for a moment. The law of rhetoric will not grudge me that privilege. Many a time when a meal was served, I remember seeing my mother with a book in her hands, diligently reading the dogmatic pronouncements of the Holy Fathers, especially of the philosopher and martyr. Note the two epithets there. Especially of the philosopher and martyr Maximus. Inquiries into the physical nature of things did not interest her so much as the study of dogma, which here means doctrine, church teaching, for she longed to reap the benefits of true wisdom.

It often occurred to me to wonder at this, and as a result I once asked her, how could you, of your own accord, aspire to such sublimity? How could you read such lofty and difficult things? For my part, I tremble and dare not give ear to such things, even in the smallest degree. The man’s writing, Maximus. The man’s writing, so highly speculative and intellectual, makes the reader’s head swim. She smiled. Your reluctance is commendable, I am sure, she replied. And I myself do not approach such books without a tremble, yet I cannot tear myself away from them. Wait a little, and after a close look at other books, believe me, you will taste the sweetness of these. This is remarkable. We’re at the imperial breakfast table in the great palace of Constantinople, and there the emperor’s mother is reading Maximus the Confessor. Could you imagine the first family sitting in the White House reading? The highest level of aristocratic culture, of political power and authority, and then this… Deep devotion to bring it to the breakfast table. It’s a beautiful thing. That’s just one example of, I hate to use the word vogue or fashion, but he really was just the thing in this period. He was always popular, I guess. But this period in particular just had a very remarkable and unique interest in him. So maybe one last thing to mention. You probably know that some of the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor are in the Philokalia. Did you know though that no other writer occupies as much space in the Philokalia as Maximus the Confessor does? Again, that alone I think is a testimony to the importance that the editors of the Philokalia saw in Maximus. That’s tremendous. The Philokalia is an 18th century compilation but it’s based on compilations of ascetical works that were compiled by the Hesychasts in the 14th century. So it’s not an 18th century invention. It’s an 18th century publication of late Byzantine compilations or anthologies of mystical and ascetical writings in which Maximus the Confessor figured very prominently. And in the Philokalia, as I’ve said, St. Nicodemus and St. Macarius, the editors of the modern Philokalia, gave him the largest space of any other author. That alone is, what a thing to have on your resume. That you’ve got more space in the Philokalia than anybody else. Just an example of what a history of reception can tell us about the value or the prominence of the church fathers. The last part hopefully will be, everybody likes icons, so I have a series of just images of St. Maximus for us to look at. We can go to the title here in just a minute. Now, Maximus is one of these saints who does not have an absolutely fixed iconographic tradition. Some saints, especially the big saints, Peter and Paul, for example, their iconographic images were fixed at a very early period, probably going back to ancient portraits of them. We have very old images of them that are now in the Vatican museums. So we have a very stable and continuous portrait type, if you will, for people like Peter and Paul from a very early period. The image of Christ, interestingly enough, remains in some small degree of flux through the 6th and 7th centuries, at which point the church council decides that the type that we know as the Pando Crator, the classic image of Christ with the longish hair and the beard, and this becomes the kind of standard type. Before that, there were other types. There was a younger, sort of cleaner-shaven type, not Christ Emmanuel, but people think it may have come from the Syriac world. They’re not really sure. But other saints, let’s say St. Demetrius, again, very stable types. Why? Because they were popular saints from an early period. A cult grew up, a tradition of devotion grew up around them, usually with a martirion, a shrine housing their remains with an iconographic program. They would also give out souvenirs, blessings, these sort of ampullae, they called them, little lead or tin, metallic containers, either with dust or holy water from the shrine or the holy site, with an image of the saint on it. So people would go to Thessalonica, and go back to another part of the empire with their St. Demetrius image. The same thing is true with the sites in the Holy Lands. If you went to the church in Nazareth, where the Annunciation took place, they would have given you a souvenir of sorts, an evaluhia, a blessing, from ancient times, with Gabriel and the Theotokos there. And that’s how these things would diffuse, because people would bring these things home and they had a lot of prestige value. And so they were diffused throughout the entire Christian world, which is why the iconography of the great feasts is so standard throughout the East to this day. And in the West, through the Renaissance, through Giotto and some later painters. But in the case of some saints who did not have a lot of popular devotion, let’s say, we don’t have the same degree of fixity in terms of their type. So you’ll see, I’ll show you, we have some fluidity here, but one type did come to prevail at one point. So let’s just go now to the, this is actually a ninth century manuscript. It’s known as the Sacra Parallela. We won’t go into the details of the book itself, but it contains what art historians call marginal illuminations. In other words, there are little pictures and paintings in the margins. These are marginal illuminations. It’s a pretty big book. It has 146 folia or folios, folio pages, which means every folio page, the one on the right, that would be folio, let’s say 10A.

10B is the back. So if it’s 146 folios, you have to double the number to get the actual number of pages. So it’s 290, do the math. So it’s a pretty big Manuscript, it contains 1,658 marginal illuminations. And in many cases, these are the oldest images we have for a lot of saints. Now, they’re not done with… I have another image. to show you. They’re not the most highly sophisticated or detailed drawings, but in many cases, they are the first images that we have. And the very first image of St. Maximus, known to me, I don’t know of any that are older, are actually in the Sacra Parallela. To my undying shame as the presenter tonight, I could not find, I do not have, an image of St. Maximus from this book to show you, but they would have looked something like this. I can give you a verbal description, though. He does have a pointed cowl, which we saw earlier, and a kind of a pointed beard, which we will see in some later images. But this is the book that contains the earliest image of him. By the way, this manuscript was on display in New York City from March through July in 2012. There was an exhibition at the Met called Byzantium and Islam, Age of Transition. And if you had the good fortune to be there, you would have seen the Sacra Parallela. which is now in the National Library of Paris in New York City. But the unfortunate thing is that you can only see two open pages, right? You’re not allowed to sit there and flip through it. Okay, another one. We saw this earlier. This is a 12th century image from a manuscript that shows Maximus among a group of church fathers. And he’s second from the end on the left. I said on the left is St. John of Damascus. And Maximus, the depression. Note the pointed monastic cowl. that will drop out of his iconography in later painting, and the beard takes on a slightly different form as well. I said a word about this earlier, so I won’t say more about it. The next image now, please. This is from the church of Saint Luke, but not Luke the Evangelist, Luke, an ascetic, Saint Osios Lukas in Greece, not too far, about an hour and a half from outside of Athens. It’s a magnificent sense. 11th century Byzantine church that was built by a Byzantine emperor. So even though it’s sort of in the middle of nowhere in Greece, it was built with imperial patronage. So it is a magnificent piece of architecture with this very impressive mosaic program. And in this, we’re looking up into a dome with sort of four apsidal spaces here. The figure on the bottom is Saint Maximus. Notice there’s no cowl here. He has a full head of white hair and a pointed white beard. That will change too. Notice he’s also holding a cross, which is not so much a symbol of a monastic, but a symbol of a martyr. But he’s a confessor, though, because he died of injuries sustained for the faith. He didn’t die under torture, but he died shortly thereafter. Okay, the next one now. This is a contemporary church on the island of Chios. It’s also an 11th century church. It’s Nehemiah, the new monastery. It was built by Constantine XI, so it’s another imperial foundation. Beautiful architecture, marble revetments on the walls, wonderful mosaics. This is in the Litti, so you would have the main part of the church, then another part of the church, and then the narthex. This Litti space is only part of monastic architecture, now we don’t have it in our regular churches. I have a pointer here. And St. Maximus is right here, and I have a close-up to show you. Next one, please. Okay, and here he is in this sort of medallion. O aigios maximos. There’s the cross. But notice now the hair is grayer, darker, full head of hair still, and a slightly pointed grayish beard. So if I showed you these without the names, you might not guess they were the same person. All right, another one now. This has become… The classic image of St. Maximus the Confessor. When most Orthodox people think of St. Maximus the Confessor, this is what they see. And this is a remarkable late… I think it’s late 13th century painting, about 1280, 1290, on Mount Athos in the church of the Protaton. The Protaton is the only basilica church on the Holy Mountain, and it has a remarkable series of murals, wall paintings, that were done by a painter named Pancelinos, and the whole church is decorated with his paintings. And it’s kind of hard to tell just from one, but if I could show you a series of these images. Many of you have probably seen these and not without knowing where they’re from. They’re among the masterpieces of late Byzantine painting because of the degree of, I mean, because of the special qualities that the painter brings to these depictions. This is not the world’s greatest slide, but I think this is because this is painted in 1290. I said we read the text by Anna Komnena. It was the 11th, 12th century was when the Byzantine world. sort of discovered or rediscovered Saint Maximus as a speculative theologian, as a philosopher, and as a mystic. And I think it was through that Comnenian revival of Saint Maximus that this new image of him solidified as a kind of a mystic. And I think that’s reflected in this very different prototype that we have now. And this is the one that’s really become standard since then. I said 1290. 1300 is the rough date, we can’t really be sure. Most people argue for 1280 or 1290, we’re not exactly sure.

Let’s look at some post-Byzantine images now, images painted after 1453. This is one that we’ll see now, it’s a series of wall paintings that were done on Mount Athos during the so-called Cretan Renaissance. In the 16th century, the island of Crete was occupied by the Venetians. And the fates of the Venetian Republic and the island of Crete were very much woven together for a very long period of time. There was a great artistic renaissance of Venetian painting, people like Titian and Tintoretto and many others. And that had an impact on the Cretan painters who adopted some sort of Italianate forms. They did adhere to the Byzantine prototypes, but you do get some westernizing elements. So most of the monasteries on the Holy Mountain are decorated with 16th century Cretan Renaissance paintings. Probably the one Cretan painter who is the most representative and the one most of you will have heard of is St. Theophanes the Cretan. Does that ring a bell? He is from Crete, traveled to Greece, painted at Meteora, painted on the Holy Mountain, and is rightly recognized as the most representative and the most outstanding of all of the Cretan painters. So here we have an image of Maximus and not quite what we’ve seen before. Certainly go back, look very quickly to Pancelinus. See the differences of the balder head and go ahead. Let’s see another one now from the same period. Rather difficult. Look at this longish beard now. Another one from the same period. Has kind of a dour face, but again that much longer beard and the head. So for some reason the type remains in flux in this period. Let’s go on to another one now. But ultimately, it’s this type that comes to prevail. So let’s move on. And now we’ll look at a series of modern icons of Saint Maximus, all of which tend to be based on this. So this is from the refectory of my monastery, Simonopetra. And here’s the saint with that classic panselinos type, and again, holding the cross. There’s actually a bookcase here where we keep the books that we read from during the meals. So the iconographer, most of the saints are full length, but he’s cut off here and he’s leaning his hand on what’s the top. You can’t see it here. It’s the top of the bookcase. So he was a very bookish kind of person. So I think he would have liked actually being the kind of guardian of the refectory bookcase. Another. This is a modern icon. It’s actually the icon that was given to me after my tonsure, after I received the name of Saint Maximus. And it was painted by the nuns at Ormilia. They have some very fine iconographers there. And you can see that they have very closely respected and followed the prototype, partly because I told them that they said, what kind of, I said, well, it’s got to be the Pancelinos type because that’s Maximus, right? So there it is. The color is not a great slide, but it’s really a beautiful icon. Another. This is a modern icon by a Serbian painter whose name I have here somewhere. I’m not going to lose time trying to find it. I don’t know what the sort of inscription says, but again, notice that the type is what we’ve seen. Another. This is, I think, a late 16th, early 17th century Russian icon from a town that I’m probably going to mispronounce very badly. Solovitch-Shigotsk. And it’s the only sort of older historiated or vita icon of Saint Maximus that we have. It depicts the saint here full length with scenes of his life. This is the only, as I said, older icon of the saint that shows the scenes. I have a couple of close-ups of the scenes, another one. Here he is debating with the emperor, another. Here he is probably going into exile, one of his exiles. Now we’re back to a modern image of Saint Maximus, but here we have the Russian painter now deviating from that late Byzantine Greek type and going back to the cowl and the long beard. Why exactly that is, I can’t say. I don’t know the painter personally or why he chose to depict the saint this way, but it’s an exception to the increasing rule that we have. Another, it’s not really an icon. It’s more of a work of art in iconographic style. I mean, you really wouldn’t want this. It’s not really for veneration. When I say it’s not an icon, I mean it’s not entirely suitable for liturgical veneration because it’s not painted to be venerated. It’s a modern painting by a very talented modern Greek iconographer who experiments with different kinds of styles and compositions. Not always with great success, but here is the saint looking up at Christ and I have no idea what the symbolism is. Maybe these are Alaskan salmon. How does that sound? You like that one? Although I can’t explain the little chameleons, if that’s what they are, or the trees. The figures up top, so, I think it’s George Cordes is his name. He’s a well-known, he comes to the U.S. He’s good friends with Bishop Maksim in the Serbian Diocese of the West. So, he might come to California, he’s come here before, you might be able to bring him up to Eagle River. Another, this is again,

Another work of art by a very talented iconographic painter, but this is no icon, right? It’s not, for it’s not appropriate or suitable for use in church. And it depicts the saint penning a text here, Christ. I don’t know why there’s a ship. Then we have a globe or a world with Christ creating. There’s Adam and Eve here and the sun and the moon, et cetera. And this is actually inspired by a particular essay by St. Maximus. It’s actually translated by Paul Blowers in a little book from St. Vladimir’s that I saw up in the bookstore. And I think it’s Questions to Thalassius, I want to say 61 or 62. Sorry, it’s question 60, which he has translated. This particular question is translated in that book, and he titled it On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ. This icon and the previous icon, by the way, were on display in Belgrade last October. There was an international conference about Saint Maximus, and part of the events included an icon painting contest. Did I say international conference? I should have said. Did I say contest? International conference at which there was an icon painting contest. And the previous one and this one were entries. Another now? We’re almost done. Here we have, this is a medieval Bulgarian manuscript. And the paint is flecked from the surface of the parchment, so it’s not very clear. But here we have the emperor and the torturer cutting off what appears to be both of Saint Maximus’ hands, even though only one was cut off. So artistic license, I suppose, I don’t know. And here you can see either the same fellow, perhaps, with what appear to be a set of pliers of some kind or tongs, wrenching out or uprooting the tongue of the saint. Another image, this is actually a scene from that historiated icon I showed you a moment ago, much more dispassionate in its depiction. The saint is standing here very calmly while one Byzantine soldier here pulls out his tongue and another is getting to work on his right hand over there. So one more. The right hand of Saint Maximus the Confessor for many years now has been at the monastery of Saint Paul’s on Mount Athos. I’ve been able to venerate it at the monastery. Luke was with me once, we venerated it. And it’s a great joy to be able to have actual physical contact with your patron saint, but they have the hand in the monastery. And at that conference in Belgrade, the Serbian hierarchy contacted the monastery of St. Paul’s and they said, would you please be willing to send some of your monks to Belgrade for the conference and to bring with them the relic of St. Maximus? Because we’re going to have people, hundreds of people here from all over the world, mostly Orthodox, but not everybody will be Orthodox. We will have the relic in our seminary chapel throughout the conference and people can venerate it. They agreed, which is very unusual, but they agreed. I think Bishop Maxim has good relations with them. So the next picture then, which is the last, shows three monks from St. Paul’s Monastery. The clergy here, this is in Belgrade, downtown Belgrade. The others here are all local Serbian clergy and others. And here they are with the relic of the right hand of St. Maximus that was brought to Belgrade for the conference, as I’ve said. I think as the next slide says, this is the end of lecture one. We’re just about at the outside limit here, but Father Mark, do you want to open up the floor for some questions? We have time for some questions, so who will have the courage to be the first to raise their hand and ask a question? It’s always difficult. Yes. Yeah, the question for those of you who might not have heard it was, do we know anything about how the right hand was saved or recovered? We don’t have anything specific about that, but we know that the saint went into exile with his disciple and with some others, and also actually found support among the local Georgians, the Orthodox Georgians there. So we know if you go all the way back to a text as early as the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, which is a very early second century text describing the martyrdom of Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, who is killed in the arena. And where the text tells us that after his death, the people from his community went and collected the remains. So this is an ancient practice. And I mean, if you had a close relationship to a person, there’s a natural, I think, desire to want to keep something, to preserve something. So we don’t know who did this, or it would have been probably very easy to bribe. I’m sorry, the hand was removed in Constantinople. I’m sorry, I was temporarily confused. The rest of the body made it to Georgia, where the saint died. So the hand was severed in Constantinople, where we don’t know who kept it and how it made its way to St. Paul’s Monastery. But obviously, pious Orthodox Christians, probably in the circle of the saints somehow, were able to perhaps bribe a guard who nobody wants a severed hand anyway, right? So they were able to take it and to preserve it, and that’s how we have it. So, yeah. Yes. I mean, he must have been an outsider. During his lifetime, you mean? I think that, the question was, I mean, during his lifetime, did he have followers? We know he had an inner circle of two or three disciples. And it’s a little confusing because the two of them had the same name. There are two Anastasii, right? There are two, one Anastasios, Anastasios I and Anastasios II. It sounds like Dr. Seuss or something, but what can you do?

And there were others, and he also had very powerful patrons. The Bishop of Syzygous was a very close friend of his. Because of his career in the court, he had very powerful friends in the court with whom he maintained correspondence throughout his lifetime. I think by the time he reached his 80s, those men had died and he didn’t have a whole lot of people. People were afraid or whatever. One of these fellows was a eunuch who was very popular in the government at that point, a fellow by the name of John the Cubicularios, the keeper of the imperial cubicle, or the chancellor as they call him in some translations. So he was apparently a very popular figure. In North Africa he became very popular among the local clergy and then in Rome too. So he did have the support of people around him, and especially in the West, but not under the emperor. It would be dangerous to come out in support of him at a time like that. Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Father Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 3. An Introduction to the Works of St. Maximus Part 1. We’re with it from the liturgical holy week for the death of Christ. And on Mount Athos in particular, this is a very important period. The whole month of August, in fact, is given over to the Theotokos, and many of you will know that the peninsula of Athos is sort of dedicated to the Virgin. And you may be familiar with an ancient tradition which says that she’s the only woman to have set foot on the peninsula. And when she did and saw the beauty of the place, she prayed to Christ and asked that he would give the place over to those people seeking their salvation, and he did. So we have very elaborate traditions about the Virgin on the Holy Mountain, a large number of miraculous icons of the Theotokos on the Holy Mountain, the Aksyon Nesti, the Portaitisa, the Keeper of the Portal, there’s so many, the Tricherousa, the Virgin with the Three Hands, the Gorgoipikousa, she was quick to hear. I mean, many, many, many very famous and miracle-working icons and other traditions related to the Theotokos. And I’d like to begin tonight, in honor of these holy days, with a portion of a prayer to the Theotokos written by St. Gregory Palamas. I say a portion because the prayer in its entirety is about three or four pages long, and it would be too long to read. This is actually from his life. If you read the life of St. Gregory Palamas, 14th century saint and Archbishop of Thessalonica, you will find this prayer in there. Before he became a bishop, he lived for many years as a monk on Mount Athos in a number of different monasteries, Esphigmenou, Vatopedi. I think he was in Lavra for a while and in a couple of smaller skits. So he’s really an Athonite figure in addition to being a hierarch and he’s somebody held in tremendous regard on the Holy Mountain. So here’s just part of St. Gregory’s prayer to the Virgin. In my travels, accompany me. As I sail on the sea, sail with me. As I keep my vigils, give me strength. In my distress, comfort me. When I lose heart, console me. When I am sick, grant me healing. When I am treated unjustly, deliver me. When I am slandered, reveal my innocence. When I am in danger of death, quickly rescue me. When the demons attack me, repel them, so that all those who unjustly oppress and tyrannize me may know who I have as my protector. It’s a very classic way, a biblical way of praying. You entreat either the deity or the holy figure, help me for your glory, for your success, so that everybody will know that you are the one who did these wonderful things. So it’s sort of a strategy. By helping me, you will add sort of luster to your own name. I thought it was a very touching and a very beautiful series of as I or when I and imploring these responses. Anyway, tonight is our second sort of lecture or talk on St. Maximus the Confessor. Last night we said some general things about the church fathers and then focused on St. Maximus’s life and with some icons at the end. Tonight we move forward a little bit and we want to do a few things. I want to begin by very quickly going over his works and all of you should have a handout that has a list of his works. I think it’s important to know something about the life and it’s also helpful to have a sense of what this particular ecclesiastical writer wrote. That just helps throw more light onto the darkness we might have about this father of the church and his writings, to take a quick look at his writings. And then after that, I want to focus on one writing in particular, which has the name of the Ambigua. We’ll say more about that as we get to it. And I want to talk, so there are sort of three parts to that, once we get to the Ambigua. I want to say something about the textual tradition about the manuscripts, about the printed version. And about how it is we come to have the text. Most of us read the Church Fathers in English translations, but they weren’t written in English. There’s a Greek text behind that, and behind the printed Greek text there are handwritten manuscripts,

And I’d like to spend just a few minutes telling you something about how it is that we get the text that we have, because it’s interesting and it’s important to know. I’m going to try to keep that brief because there are other things to do. After that, I want to look at three sample texts from the Ambigua, just to give you a feel for some of the features of the work, which is a very lengthy work with very diverse kinds of elements in it. I will just touch on three things, and then this will occupy us for most of the evening. I want to look at two major texts, one dealing, generally speaking, with the doctrine of creation, and the second lengthy text dealing with scripture, because those are the two foci of our seminar this week. These will be very difficult. They will be very challenging. You might at one point start rolling your eyes and saying, what is all this mumbo-jumbo? I warned you about this last night, but we’ll see how it goes. It is difficult. It can be tedious. But even that somehow can be informing and enlightening, just how complex this is and maybe how much more work we need to do to be able to actually wrestle or tackle a text like this. So let’s turn now to our handouts. We also have a version to project onto the screen. What will appear on the screen is exactly what you have on the sheet, so we can begin. The one thing to know about St. Maximus, which is very helpful, is that he began to write later in life. When he first began to write, he was already a mature thinker, which means that there’s no question of development of his thought over time. There are other church fathers, for example, Gregory of Nyssa, who began to write at a much earlier age and wrote into old age, and there is a development in his thought over time. People who want to study St. Gregory of Nyssa seriously need to understand the order in which the works were written and to try and come to terms with the development of his thought over time. This is not the case with St. Maximus the Confessor, who, as I said, began to write as a mature thinker, and there’s actually no question of development across the works that we have, but rather tremendous consistency. It’s actually quite remarkable across his corpus. Some of the works are easy to date, other works are not so easy. The major principle that scholars or historians use to date the works is actually the Christological controversy that Saint Maximus became involved in around the 630s. So when he became drawn into this theological controversy, it basically consumed all of his time and all of his life, and it’s what ended his life as we described last night. So everything that he writes after the 630s bears the mark of the Christological controversy. He had no time to write anything else. So the general assumption is that the works that we have by St. Maximus that don’t make reference to the Christological controversy were most likely written prior to the 630s. This is a general way, sort of like a B.C., A.D. kind of distinction. And for the most part it holds. Now, having made that major distinction between the works that were written before 630 and those that were written after 630, of course, it becomes difficult, but for the most part, we have a fairly clear idea, and we’ll talk about that. Now, as I say at the top of the sheet, the works listed on the sheet that you have are grouped according to subject matter. That’s kind of conventional. But as I say here, there’s considerable overlap among the works. And within each group, the works are listed in the order in which they are believed to have been written. Let’s just go through them very quickly. I will say almost nothing about some, and linger over others a bit more, but we want to move through this with some rapidity. So one of his early works is this On Psalm 59, and it’s a short essay that deals with Psalm 59. It’s considered to be an early work. Some people think that it was written in response to the Persian invasions that we spoke about last night. Why? Because in Psalm 59 the psalmist prays to be delivered from war. So people have speculated that it might somehow reflect the context of military conquest, but of course we can’t be clear about that. Second work, Questions and Answers, contains 239 questions. It’s a lot of questions. Some of them are answered with a few sentences or a paragraph. Others receive answers of two or three or more pages. E.T., by the way, is not the extraterrestrial, but it means English translation. So the items on this sheet that are marked with that E.T. mean that there are English translations of these works available for anybody who wants to go further with us and read them. So 239 questions. People describe this as a mixed collection of questions and answers. Mixed. Why? Because some of the questions are biblical, related to difficult passages in scripture. And other questions are based on difficult passages in the writings of the church fathers. So it’s neither a strictly exegetical work, although it’s primarily exegetical, but it’s also sort of patristic. So, again, people wrote to St. Maximus and said, what does scripture mean when it says, or why, for example, here’s an example. If scripture says, blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God, why does scripture also say that no one has ever seen God? So a lot of these difficulties or questions bring together passages or verses from scripture that appear superficially to contradict each other. So what’s the answer to that question? And there are 239 of those. Yes? Can you define exegetical? Yeah, exegesis is a Greek word. It means to lead out. Ex and ago being the two constituent elements of that. And it’s kind of a learned and academic word. Exegesis is what biblical scholars do with the Bible.

I’m working on an exegesis of the Gospel of John. It means nothing more than an explanation or a commentary of the Gospel. Moving on, the next text is another exegetical work, a work of biblical commentary, a work of biblical interpretation. That is a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. This is available in an English translation in the Philokalia. It was one of the works by St. Maximus included in the Philokalia. It’s a short treatise, but it’s very dense and has a lot of great ideas in it. The one that I took from it and never forgot is St. Maximus’ idea that the Lord’s Prayer is actually a Trinitarian prayer. We take it as the prayer of the Lord to God the Father, and maybe we don’t think more about it, but he says it’s addressed to God the Father. From Christ, where’s the Holy Spirit? He says the Holy Spirit is in the phrase, Thy kingdom come. El feto y vasiliasu. What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit. The kingdom of God isn’t a mythical kingdom or a region with castles and palaces with flags flying from the turrets or anything like that. The kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit. And that el feto, Thy kingdom come. That el feto, that come, is very much the liturgical language that we use when we address the Holy Spirit. In the prayer, Heavenly King, Comforter, what do we say in there at one point? Come, right? El fe, right? Come and abide in us. That is actually an epiklisis. Are you familiar with this Greek word? An epiklisis is the technical liturgical word for the invocation of the Holy Spirit. This is primarily known to us from the Divine Liturgy, when the bread and the wine, the offering of the community, the gifts of the community are placed on the altar, then the Eucharistic prayer is read. And at one point, one component in the Eucharistic prayer is the so-called epiklisis, the invocation in which the congregation through the priest asks God to send his Holy Spirit upon these gifts, etc., etc. That’s something peculiar to the Eastern Liturgies; it’s not ever been a traditional part of the Roman Catholic Mass, although they’ve actually added an Epiclesis after Vatican II. We’re being drawn away now into a parenthesis here, so we’ll come back. But the idea here is that thy kingdom come. That is an invocation of the Holy Spirit. And when we read the prayer, Heavenly King, when we get to that part where we say, come and dwell in us, those are not just casual words of a prayer. We are actually invoking the Holy Spirit to come and abide and to dwell in us. That’s an epikletic moment. That’s an epiklesis, not over the Eucharistic gifts, but over ourselves. It’s a very sacred, very solemn moment, and the same language appears in the Lord’s Prayer. Thy kingdom come, el feto y vasiliasu. That’s the biblical and liturgical language for the invocation of the Holy Spirit. So, to me, it was wonderful to be told, or to read, or to learn, that the Lord’s Prayer actually has a Trinitarian aspect, and it’s not simply a prayer to God the Father. All right, moving along. The questions to Thalassius. This is actually, arguably, the most important work by St. Maximus the Confessor. I’ve got some translations that I’ve made that I’m working on right now that I’ll share with you over the next couple of nights. Actually, on the last night, we’ll go into that in much more detail. But it’s a very large work. It’s a massive work. It contains 65 questions. These are all questions based on difficult passages in scripture. We’ll look at these, as I said, soon, so we won’t say too much about it. Some of the answers are short, a paragraph, a page, two pages. Some of them are 10, 20, 30, 40 pages. They’re actually mini monographs or small essays or treatises in their own right. This Thalassius was an abbot of a monastery in North Africa. He’s sometimes called Thalassius the Libyan because his monastery was in Libya. He was a very close friend of St. Maximus when St. Maximus was living in North Africa. And he wrote to St. Maximus with a list of these 65 difficult questions from scripture. And Maximus wrote back, and this is the work that we have. After this is another exegetical work, the questions to Theopemptos, a very short work. Three questions, one on the unjust judge in the Gospel of Luke, another one on being struck on the right cheek, and then on the famous phrase that the Lord utters to Mary Magdalene, the touch me not. These are the three exegetical questions that are asked. Then we have the oddly titled opusculum. The Latin word opus means work, plural opera. Opera, everybody knows that word opera, simply from the Latin word for a work. A magnum opus, that’s a phrase that we have in our language. So, opuscula, opusculum simply means a little work. So, it’s just a fancy Latin title for a small work. This is number six, and this deals with Matthew 26:39, the Lord’s agony in Gethsemane. And this becomes, this text actually moves to the center of the Christological controversy because it appears to be the case that Christ is actually afraid and was accused all the way back in the second century by pagans of acting in a cowardly manner in the face of death. Because the Romans, who had these stoic notions, were able to say that our sages, our wise men, are not afraid of death. They’re not cowardly.

Your Savior, this fellow Jesus who you say was divine, doesn’t even appear to have the qualities of our Stoic sages who were stoic in the face of death. So this difficult text comes up again during the time of the Christological controversy when there was discussion about two wills because the Lord says, “Not my will, but thy will be done.” So there are actually two wills there. We’re not going to say too much more about that right now, but it might come up at a later point. Then after this, we have these sort of exegetical scolia. Scolius simply means an annotation, like a comment. During the later Byzantine period, the compilers of anthologies went through the works of Maximus and removed passages that spoke about scriptural texts, and they used them to create other kinds of works. Let’s move on to the second category, spiritual and ascetical works. The first one is On the Ascetical Life. It’s another early work. We have an English translation of that, and it’s sort of in a dialogue format between an elder and a disciple asking different theological and ascetical and monastic kinds of questions. We believe it was written while Maximus was still in Asia Minor before he was expelled by the Persians. Why? Because there are lots of quotations from the writings of the church fathers in this work, which means he had access to a library, which he did not have when he was in North Africa. He had fewer books, and he complains about this in some of his letters. And he apologizes, “Well, I would add more patristic footnotes here, but I don’t have the sources ready to hand.” So because this work has lots of citations from the church fathers, we conclude that it was written when he had access to those libraries in Asia Minor. The next work here is the Chapters on Love, and many people say this is the most popular work by Saint Maximus, or it’s the most beloved work by Saint Maximus, which I think is odd because it’s actually very difficult. It’s a collection of 400—they call them centuries, which is confusing to people—400 aphorisms, 400 sort of short sayings. Now, if I gave you 400 short sayings about the virtues, about love, it’s difficult to try to find a pattern in the 400 aphorisms or how these things are connected. And they’re in four groups of 100 each, so they’re called four centuries, centuries because there are 100 in each collection. And you can work very hard to try and extract the underlying structure or pattern, but it’s not always very clear. But it is a great work. It’s pretty much worth the effort to read through, even though it’s not meant to be read all at once. It’s a monastic genre written for monks who are meant to read maybe one aphorism a day and kind of ruminate on that throughout the rest of the day. People pick it up, they try to read page after page after page in one sitting. It wasn’t meant to be read that way. It was meant to be slowly digested over time. But it is a great work, and there are a lot of… one of the things he says, for example, it’s all about love, about divine love, and in one place he says, it’s one of the many takeaway lines, he says that, what is love? Love is voluntary blindness, which I take to mean sort of overlooking the faults of others. If you love, if you have love, if you love others, you choose not to see certain things. Or you overlook them or you look past them. And again, that’s something that requires discernment. Moving on, in this same category, we have letters, many letters written by St. Maximus, and some of the letters deal with spiritual themes such as Letter 2, which is about love. You have an English translation of that and some of the others. Moving on to the liturgical works, a very famous and a very important work by Maximus here is the Mystagogy, or the Mystagogia, which is a commentary on the Divine Liturgy. It’s available in English translation, and again it’s very much worth reading. It’s very complex in places, but in other places not so difficult. In this same work, St. Maximus also offers a spiritual interpretation, or an allegorical interpretation, if you will, of the church building. Narthex, nave, and sanctuary, sort of the three-fold division of the church building. Not what is the meaning, because for Maximus there are always multiple meanings. What are the various meanings of the church and its threefold distinction? I won’t say more, maybe I’ll leave it sort of to tantalize you to go and find the work and read it on your own. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t comment on what we call the anaphora, or the Eucharistic prayer. He completely ignores that, and that’s been a traditional puzzle for historians. And it could simply be the case that as a monk, as a non-ordained person of the church, he did not stand at the altar. He did not read that Eucharistic prayer, and perhaps he felt it was inappropriate for him to comment on it, or it could also be this is still the 6th century, and the mysteries of the Church are still shrouded in mystery, sort of the disciplina arcanae, where the catechumens would be dismissed, and you didn’t broadcast the mysteries. Now we have live streaming of our divine liturgies on the Internet, and years ago, when the Catholics first started to broadcast their masses on television, some theologians stepped forward and said, wait a minute now. We’ve had a long tradition of guarding the mysteries, of withholding the mysteries, of not making them available. It’s one thing to not make them available even to catechumens, and now we’re putting them on television.

And there are obviously things to be gained by broadcasting the liturgy in this manner, but there’s also something that’s lost, I think, so it’s something we should be concerned about. Personally, I think because technology makes it so easy for us to record and to film and to copy everything, we do it now automatically. Sacraments, communion, someone, some poor chap’s going up to receive communion, there’s somebody there with a camera. Is this necessary? Anyway, that’s sort of personal kinds of things. Okay, where was I here? Oh yeah, the Mystagogy. And then there’s another very short work called Explanation of the Date of Pascha. Very, very complicated sort of astronomical work dealing with arcane issues of the calendar. And I had to look up dozens of Greek words here because I had never seen them before. A lot of them are Latin words that came into Greek and intercalated days depending on leap years and I couldn’t deal with it. Then our fourth category is these doctrinal and philosophical works. The first two items on the list are the Ambiguity of John and the Ambiguity of Thomas. We’ll talk more about those in a few minutes, so we’ll just leave them aside for now. Then we have more chapters, Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation, and the 15 chapters. These are all available in the Philokalia, so they’re there for you to read. Then we have Scholia. We said these are sort of notes or annotations on Dionysius the Areopagite. St. Maximus the Confessor was a devoted reader of the writings of St. Dionysius the Areopagite and actually wrote comments on the more difficult passages in that corpus, annotations or scholia as they’re called. Then we have a very long list, 28 short theological and polemical works. These all deal with the monophysite or monothelite problem. Which is to say that they deal with the Christological controversy that St. Maximus was drawn into after the 630s. Nearly all of them are short essays focusing on particular themes. And even though there are 28 of them, they really constitute a kind of an integrated whole because they do deal with a single theme, namely the doctrine of Christ or the Church’s teaching on the person of Christ in his two natures and two wills. We have some English translations for these. The most important is the last one, 28, the dispute with Pyrrhus. This is a great story here. Pyrrhus was a patriarch of Constantinople who was a heretic. He had adopted the monothelite heresy, but had political problems with the empress. They fought over different issues, and even though she was a monothelite and the patriarch was a monothelite, they still fought over other matters, and she kicked him out of Constantinople, and he made his way to Carthage, which was a bastion of Chalcedonian Christians. And what the church in Carthage did was to stage a public dialogue, a public debate, between Maximus, the simple monk, and this former patriarch of Constantinople. And the two of them debate Chalcedonian versus non-Chalcedonian. The two of them debate the church’s traditional teaching about Christ versus this heretical teaching that had been espoused by the patriarch. And the whole debate is recorded in this work. And of course Maximus wins the patriarch over to the orthodox view. It’s not a fantasy or a fiction. It happened in fact, because we have other sources that support that. So that’s available in English translation and it’s very much worth reading because it’s a great work. It’s not long and it really kind of gets to the heart of some of the questions here. Then we have a number of letters here. Letters 12, 15, and 19. These are letters, but they are considered to be Christological documents of the highest importance. You can take them as important statements of Orthodox Christology, even though they’re only written in the form of letters. They are very important theological treatises. Then we have other documents like the record of the trial. When Maximus was put on trial in Constantinople in 655, we actually have a record of the proceedings. And, of course, in addition to the political charges that were brought forward, they also discussed theological matters including the Christological ones of course, the same is true with the others. Then we have a number of letters. I won’t read anything, you’ve got that on the handout. So that’s just a very quick overview of the works of Saint Maximus the Confessor. And now you have a sort of a global look at what he wrote. And I think it’s always, for me it’s always helpful, we’re talking about a writer, what exactly did he write? If it’s Shakespeare, how many plays did Shakespeare write? Or if it’s Henry James, how many novels did he write? It just helps to know. Is it two, three, ten, 25? What are we talking about here? So we have just an overview here of his writings, and I’ve indicated which ones are available in translation. Those of you with time and the interest and the energy are encouraged to pursue these things further. Now we shift gears a little bit and start to move in the direction of this one work called the Ambigua. And before we get into the text proper, I want to say a few words, as I said, about the tradition of the text, as we call it, and how texts come to be texts. So most of us read the works of the Church Fathers in English translations, and we probably don’t think much about the original Greek text. We assume that somewhere there’s a Greek text that our translation is based on and probably don’t think much about that. Well, where did the Greek text come from? Where did the Greek text come from? And the Greek text comes from the hands of people that we call textual editors, people who work with manuscripts, because before the invention of printing in the mid-15th century, all books before that were written by hand.

And any copies of any books that you had had to be copied from an exemplar or an original. Do I need to bring this microphone with me? Again, this is more of scholarly or philological interest, but if you’re teaching a seminar on a church father, this is an aspect of the discipline in a sense that’s good to know about. So people who are called text scholars, in other words, let’s back up and be simple. I understand that there’s a work by St. Maximus the Confessor, maybe it’s called the Ambigua. We don’t have a printed version of it. So what I have to do as a text editor is to go out and round up all of the manuscripts, all of the handwritten copies that contain that work. It could be 10, it could be 20, it could be 100. Think about the New Testament too. Those of you who have seen critical editions of the Greek New Testament will see that there’s an apparatus at the bottom of the text. There are hundreds and hundreds of copies, Greek copies, of the Gospel of Mark. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copies of the Gospel of Matthew, and so on. What text editors do is to collect all of those copies and then collate them. And to collate them means you collect all of the text and then go through them word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. And every time you spot a difference, it could be a different tense of a verb, there could be a missing word, there could be an additional word. You have to make a decision as an editor. What do I do? Which is the correct reading? Or maybe these two manuscripts agree and these two disagree with them and agree with each other. How do I decide between these four? They’re called witnesses, actually. How do I decide between the four witnesses which two are telling the truth? So it takes skill and lots of other things. The Greek letter A, the alpha at the top here, indicates the archetype, which in most cases is lost. We do not have any handwritten works by Saint Maximus that came directly from his hand. Follow me? All the copies that we have are copies of a lost original. So the text editor has to round up the manuscripts, has to collate them all, and then, I won’t get into this, but it’s much more complicated, because you’ve got to figure out the relationship between the manuscripts. Because it could be that this manuscript was actually copied from this one, but it also contains elements from this manuscript, or it might come from somewhere else. This is called a stemma, sort of like the branch of the whole history of the text, because the later text had to have been copied from the earlier texts. And again, the task of the textual editor is to try to bring all of this together. It’s a very complicated, very tedious, very painstaking work, partly because to find these manuscripts are not all in one place. The world’s largest collection of Byzantine manuscripts is where? Take a guess. No, that’s the number three place. The number one place is Rome. Where in Rome? The Vatican Library. Huge library. Has the world’s largest collection of Byzantine manuscripts. Many obtained illegally and many others not. The world’s second largest collection of Greek manuscripts is… St. Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai. Number three is Mount Athos. And then there are other very important collections of Greek manuscripts in places like the National Library of Paris, the National Library of Athens, the Bodleian Museum at Oxford, the British Library, the Prado Museum in Spain, the Patriarchal Library at Moscow. So it could be the case that my 20 manuscripts are in 15 different libraries. So I’ve either got to go to these places or order photocopies. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. So we really need to be grateful to the scholars who round up the manuscripts and collate them all. But sometimes they make mistakes too, which is why they have to be responsible. They’ve got to give you the variant readings. Because maybe another scholar will say, no, I disagree with your interpretation. These two were wrong. These two had it right. That’s just a very brief overview as a prelude. I’m going to close this now. As a prelude to what I want to show you here. So can we go to the… I think it’s slideshow number two. Okay, can we just advance to the next slide? All right, so let’s get my pointer. So when we talk about… oh, I’ll go back. The other direction, yeah. So when we talk about this work called The Ambigua, and I’ll say more about the title and what that means in a minute, we’re actually talking about two works. The Ambigua to John. John was the Metropolitan Bishop of Syzygous where Maximus was a monk. That was written around 630 and sometimes that’s referred to as the earlier Ambigua. This is a very lengthy work containing over 65 questions to which Maximus gives very lengthy answers, and the longest answer is 50 pages, so it’s a very lengthy complex collection. We’ll say more about it. And then a few years later, he received a letter from somebody called Thomas, who had only about four or five questions. So this is a much shorter work. This is about 10 pages, this is about 200 pages, something like that. And at a later point in his career, Maximus brought the two collections of Ambigua together, which is how it came to be known as a kind of a collective work. But it is actually two separate works, and it’s confusing because the earlier Ambigua are actually the second part of the work now. So people start to talk about it in the… Ambiguity 1, Ambiguity 2, the earlier, the later. It gets a little confusing. It’s really not that confusing. So we have five chapters or sections from the Ambiguity of Thomas. Then we have the remaining through 71 from the Ambiguity of John. So we’ll say more about this in a minute, but right now we want to focus on how the work came together as a text. So let’s go to the next slide.

An image of a 17th century French Dominican patristic scholar by the name of Francois Combefi. He was one of the great early modern patristic scholars. He knew Greek and Latin like few people before or since and spent a lot of his time going through the libraries of Europe, finding these patristic manuscripts and collating them. And the very first printed edition that we have of the works of Maximus was actually established by Frère François over here, Combefi. So let’s advance the slide, and this is the front page, Saint Maximus the Confessor works, volume one, Paris, and the date I believe is 1675, so that’s a long time ago. Now, let’s go ahead one more please. And here’s the first page from Maximus the Humble Monk. Prosthalasion, this is the first page of the questions to Thalassius. Here’s his critical edition of the Greek text. He also provided the text with a Latin translation. He was a world-class scholar. Now, a very unfortunate thing happened, because Combefi had projected a three-volume edition, that the works of Maximus were to be published in three volumes. He published one volume, he published the second volume, and then he died. He died without having brought the work to completion and we know that he had actually completed the third volume but he died before he sent it to the publisher and it was in his cell or his office and after he died it got jumbled up and confused with his personal papers and it’s been lost. So the problem for the Ambigua is that the third volume was to contain the Ambigua. So we did not get an edition of the Ambigua in 1675, right? And it’s unfortunate because he was such a great textual scholar that we would have had a very good version of the text. So let’s advance now another image. So we had to wait about 200 years till about 1857 when a French scholar, Franz Erler, was in Paris. And it was, I don’t know what was going on politically, there was a siege of Paris, there was, I don’t know if it was a civil war, somebody who knows more about 19th century European history or French history than I do can enlighten me, but during this period of civil unrest, Franz Erler locked himself in an attic and he had a Greek manuscript, one Greek manuscript that contained the Ambigua. And he sat there and he transcribed it and then he gave it to the printers afterwards. So this is the Greek printed text of the Ambigua that was published in 1857. And to this very day, 2013, is that the year we’re in? Yeah. This remains the only Greek text of the Ambigua that we have. And I said, this is not really an edition, it’s a transcription. He had a single Greek manuscript and he simply printed it, basically. Now, remember what I said here. Erler did not round up all of the manuscripts of the Ambigua. He only had one manuscript that he used as the basis for this edition. So, the result is that it’s actually not a very good edition. I’ll leave it open. So, this is the Greek text that has continued to be reprinted in later editions, and it’s the Greek text that patristic scholars continue to work with. And the story goes on because two other scholars tried to publish a critical edition of the Ambigua and were unsuccessful. Around World War II, a French scholar by the name of Raymond Flambert, born in 1911, was hard at work on a critical edition of the Ambigua. He had rounded up all of the manuscripts and was about to finish his work when he died in 1944 at the age of 33, when the Germans bombed the city of Orleans where he was living at the time. So keeping track, Francois Combefi dies prematurely, doesn’t bring the work to completion, and now we have Flambert in 1944, dies during the Nazi bombardment of Orleans at the age of 33. And then closer to our lifetimes, a scholar by the name of Raphael Braque also set out to establish and publish a critical edition of the Ambigua. He died prematurely of cancer at the age of 41 in 1984. So one suspects there’s sort of a curse associated with the text of the Ambigua, which is why I was very, very troubled when I myself undertook to establish and prepare the critical edition of the Ambigua. And I prayed. I felt safe. I was a monk with the name of Maximus in a monastery in Monathes. What are the chances, right? But I did, I prayed to God, I said, God, I said, let me do this. I mean, I was scared. I was taking a chance. I said, let me do this. And once I finish this, then you can take me. After that, I don’t care. This will be my life’s work. And I’ll have done something that people have been trying to do since the 17th century, but have not been able to do. And glory to God. And thanks to the help of St. Maximus, I was actually able to establish the Greek edition of the text and provide it with an English translation. It’ll be published probably in January or February of the coming year. It’s actually on its way to the printer, so I survived. So what I had to do was I had to actually gather up the manuscripts. Like I said, let’s go ahead to the next. So, all right, let’s go ahead. This is actually a very beautiful 11th century Byzantine manuscript containing the text of the Ambigua. My slide is not very good, so it’s not very clear, but this is actually a very, very large manuscript produced in Constantinople, either for an imperial patron or for a wealthy monastery. It’s sort of a deluxe manuscript. It’s in Rome, but not at the Vatican. It’s in a private library, the Bibliotheca Angelica. So here’s one page from it. Let’s see another. Here’s another. It’s not very clear. I’m sorry. I have another one. I have a close-up. Another. This is the last page, and the scribes were often in the habit of writing the text in the shape of a cross. Another.

Here you get to see the Greek aplanus, theoria, sexemelus, peritaphia, spoudis, et cetera. It’s a very, very fine, very, very clear Greek hand with punctuation and accent marks, and it’s an impeccable kind of text. Another one forward. This is a much more complicated manuscript with, also this is in the Vatican, another 11th, 12th century manuscript, but in a very compressed kind of handwriting that’s difficult to read. Another one. This is another version of the Ambigua, also double columns, but much easier to read. And then finally, does anybody recognize this? It’s money. It’s an Irish banknote. And it has an image here of a 9th century Irish philosopher, historian, scholar named John Eriugena. John Eriugena in the 9th century was one of two people in Western Europe who had an unbelievable command of the Greek language. He was born in Ireland, he learned Greek there, we don’t know how or from whom, and seems to have left Ireland after the Vikings invaded and then made his way to the Carolingian court, the court of Charlemagne. Actually, it was Charlemagne’s grandson with the name of Charles the Bald who was the Carolingian king at that time. And Charles the Bald was a Philhellene and was very happy to have this Greek scholar now come and take up residence in his court. And among his many talents, Eriugena was actually a translator of Greek text into Latin. And he translated the Ambigua into Latin in the year 850, and then other works by Maximus and other works by other Greek church fathers as well. Now here’s the remarkable thing. Those earlier manuscripts that you saw, right? They’re 11th century, 12th century, that sort of thing. Those are the oldest Greek witnesses to the text of the Ambigua, 11th century. The text was written in the 600s, but the oldest Greek version of it we have is from hundreds of years later. Don’t worry, the scribes were very faithful, by the way. The texts are good. The Latin translation made by Eriugena, however, predates the surviving Greek manuscripts by hundreds of years. Do you follow that? There are two additional bonuses here now. The first one is that Eriugena was a slavishly faithful translator. I mean, the Latin text is basically a mirror of the Greek text, often following the same word order, and it’s very difficult to read in the Latin, but he basically replicated the Greek text into Latin. The second thing, let’s go ahead to the next slide. The second thing is that we actually have the autograph. We actually have the Latin translation that Eriugena wrote with his own hand. It shows you how different the history of civilization was in the west where 9th century manuscripts have been preserved, whereas we have nothing like that in the east because of wars and invasions and so on. This is not the Ambigua; I couldn’t find a slide of that manuscript. It’s another work by Eriugena so you can see his early medieval Latin handwriting. It turns out that the oldest witness to the text of the Ambigua is not a Greek manuscript at all, but a Latin one. And the Latin manuscript is extremely important in sort of establishing the Greek text. And I found that whenever—and think about it now—if he was translating, if Eriugena was translating the Ambigua in 850, that means he had a manuscript that was what, from 800? That was 750? Might it have been a copy of the Ambigua brought to Rome by Maximus himself? We don’t have his Greek manuscript, it’s been lost. But he undoubtedly had a very ancient version of the text, which he has mirrored or replicated in his translation. And every time I found a problem among the Greek witnesses, Eriugena always had the solution. Whenever there were things missing from the Greek text, you always found them in there, in Eriugena. So it was really just that we wouldn’t have the text of the Ambigua in the form that we have it were it not for the work of Eriugena. I think this is a good place to take a break. We have a question, that’s fine. How many manuscripts are there total? There are only about 25 or 30, which is actually not a bad number. There are some church fathers who only have one or two. Justin Martyr, for example, only has one or two manuscripts. Clement of Alexandria, again, a very small number. Writers like John Chrysostom, are you ready? Thousands. It has to do with popularity and use. And obviously Clement of Alexandria was not really canonized as a church father. His theology has some sort of questionable aspects. It never became part of the canon. We didn’t need too many copies of it, but these other writers have, or the Ladder of, we don’t even know how many copies there are of John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent. Again, there must be many, many hundreds, if not thousands. Which again poses problems for the people who have to collate thousands of manuscripts. You need teams of people to do it. Was there another question? Yes, Father? I had studied some Latin, believe it or not, in junior high school, and some more during my doctoral studies. But if you know Greek, and you’re reading Eriugena’s translation of the Ambigua, I mean, it’s more Greek than Latin, so. Okay, okay, yeah. Well, because you can’t… well, because we have the Greek manuscripts, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you could do that, but then, I mean, if you did that, you would probably… I mean, I haven’t sat down to think through this. If you translated the Latin into English, you would probably have a text that was maybe 80% accurate. But they’re going to… I mean, he’s actually very consistent in terms of what he does, but not absolutely. There are things that he doesn’t always understand, right? I mean, he has his own difficulties with the text, and he was actually reading… he had,

There are two forms of Greek fonts, majuscule and minuscule. The oldest forms, the oldest handwriting styles, were majuscule, which is just a pretentious academic word for uppercase. Not only was it uppercase, but all the letters were run together. Minuscule is upper and lower case. If I were to write the opening words of the Gospel of John in modern minuscule, upper and lower case, it would be. En-ar-hi-in-o-logos. In the beginning was the Word. Clear to anybody who’s had some basic New Testament Greek. That’s the minuscule. You saw the text, with the up and down characters and the punctuation. But the majuscule text, Eriugena would have had a majuscule uppercase Greek text of the Ambigua. So it would have looked like this. That’s a little more complicated now. 200 pages of this, by the way. It’s not the simple language of the Bible. Jesus wept, in the beginning was the Word. We’re talking about sentences that go on for hundreds of words. In some cases he did misdivide the words, and it’s funny, he didn’t know… What Symmachus was. Symmachus is a Greek, we know the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, but there were other Greek translations of the Old Testament, including Symmachus. Symmachus was the name of the translator. This is Symmachus in Greek. Those of you who study scripture, I think it has two M’s, will have seen this in different places. It might have two M’s. In Greek, the syn is syn, which is the Latin con, like a synod. And simachos, machi is a battle or a fight. So simachos really means an ally, someone who’s fighting with you. Apparently, Eriugena didn’t know who Symmachus was, and he thought it was a reference to a military ally. He didn’t get everything. He translates the word faithfully, but he translates this into the Latin word for a military ally. Do you follow me? He’s not, I don’t want to diminish the praises that I’ve bestowed on Eriugena, but he’s not absolutely perfect. In any case, if you have a Latin translation, no matter how good, and if you have the Greek text, you’ve got to make use of the Greek text. But you use the Latin as a kind of control. Let’s take a break and come back in a few minutes. Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of Saint Maximus the Confessor by Father Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 4. An Introduction to the Works of Saint Maximus Part 2. Now these are all extracts from the earlier Ambigua to John. Maximus had actually spent some time as a monk in the city of Cyzicus in Asia Minor and got to be good friends with the local metropolitan bishop of that city. It was a pretty big city, it was an important city. The two men, the monk and the metropolitan, sat up late at night apparently studying the writings of Gregory the Theologian, who was a 4th century church father and very much one of the most beloved and popular ecclesiastical writers who all the later Byzantines studied. Because they studied Gregory so closely, people had questions with certain ideas and phrases and concepts in Gregory’s orations. Part of the problem was that Gregory was a very poetic and literary and elusive writer. He didn’t write theological treatises in a very straightforward way. These are orations, they’re sermons, they’re 45 sermons, and it’s really poetry. Anybody who’s read poetry knows that poetry sometimes can be difficult to understand. Maximus and John of Cyzicus stayed up late at night trying to solve puzzles and problems in the writings of St. Gregory. That’s what the Ambigua is. The Ambigua is a collection of 70 ambiguous passages from the writings of St. Gregory. And ambiguous, difficult, obscure, unclear passages from the writings of St. Gregory the Theologian. The Ambigua is Maximus’ response to his attempts to clarify and unpack and explain the meaning of those. There’s one question, number five, which is based on a difficult passage in St. Dionysius the Areopagite. It’s 99.9% Gregory, but there’s that one chapter dealing with Dionysius. We can forget about that for now. This is the cover letter now. What happens is that Maximus leaves Asia Minor, because the Persians are on his trail, and arrives in North Africa, and after a period of time receives a letter from the Metropolitan, who says, hey, remember when we sat up late at night and we went over those difficult passages in Gregory the Theologian, he says, do you think you could write that down for me? That’s what this work is. When I read, this is Maximus now writing to John, this is the cover letter. When I received your honorable letter urging me to write down and send you the interpretations of the passages that perplexed us, that’s the word, that’s the ambiguo, the perplexity, that perplexed us in the orations of St. Gregory the Theologian, which we had labored over when we were together, I forced myself to respond to your request. To the extent that this was possible, taking no account of the fact that many will judge me to have acted impetuously. This continues. I ask that when reading the following you not look to me for any literary refinement, since I have not that power over words to make them ring winningly in the ears of the audience, and know not how to round them out with calculated pauses and stops, which I try to capture in the punctuation, the sentences just go on for pages sometimes. Insofar as I am unschooled in the rules of style and inexperienced in their practical exercise, it seems preferable, indeed desirable, for me to concentrate on the inner meaning of what our holy and great teacher has written, though I do so in rough-hewn phrases and only partially at that, more. These were smart guys.

Moreover, I implore you not to reproach me on account of my drawn-out explanations. He can be very prolix. For you are well aware that St. Gregory the Theologian was a man of profound thoughts, but of comparatively few words. And so he compels his interpreters, even those who command extraordinary powers of speech and philosophical brilliance, to go on at great length and touch on a wide range of subjects. How much more so, then, will this be true of someone as uncultivated as myself? As I said, for one passage alone, he goes on for 50 pages. Unpacking. I think of it like the Big Bang Theory. The ambiguous or difficult particle from Gregory’s writings is this dense piece of theological matter that Maximus has to crack open and out of which he unfolds a whole universe. And it’s all in that elusive, obscure, ambiguous saying of the great Gregory. So that’s just to give you the background. Let’s go to the second item. Now, one of the things that’s so charming about the Ambiguo is Maximus’ love of St. Gregory. The title he has for St. Gregory is the teacher. Gregory is the teacher, the teacher. He must refer to him as the teacher over a hundred times in this work. Of course, he has other titles of honorifics that he uses as well, but Gregory is the teacher. And sometimes John writes to him and says, well, some people believe that Gregory means this, and of course it’s incorrect or it’s a heretical reading of Gregory. Maximus is very upset at this. He’s very protective of his teacher, even though, of course, Gregory lived centuries before. And here’s a great example of Maximus coming to the defense of St. Gregory. And it’s also one of the few very rhetorical passages in the Ambigua, so it’s worth sharing. And this is exactly what the enemies of the truth did long ago to that holy man, Gregory. When they jumped up from their seats and rushed forward because of the things that he said, even before he said them. Now he’s referring to a moment when Gregory was giving a sermon in Constantinople and Aryans had packed the house, hanging on his every word, and they actually rushed at him. And there was another time where they actually paid someone to try and assassinate Gregory while he was in Constantinople. And the fellow actually failed in his attempt. I don’t even think he was wounded; I think they stopped him. And later on there was a reconciliation between the two and Gregory forgave him. So there were verbal and physical assaults on Gregory in Aryan-dominated Constantinople. So this idea of these Aryans rushing forward because of the things that he said, even before he had said them, rather like cavalry horses or those used for racing which even before the races and the blast of the trumpet prick up their ears and stamp their feet on the ground scraping it with their hooves rousing themselves for the race and not infrequently breaking away from the gate and bolting forward before they have felt the sting of the starting whip. So they’re these creatures that are rushing like animals at St. Gregory. The next one this goes on. The difference, of course, is that horses are irrational beasts. And no one censures them for not waiting for the start of the race. Whereas for those men who rose up against St. Gregory, no amount of censure would be commensurate with their wickedness. They are experts in the theory and practice of lying and in obstructing the truth. So he’s describing those men of old who attacked Gregory, but he’s really talking about his contemporaries who were misinterpreting Gregory, heretically. There’s more to this. Such men are rightly said to have itching ears and tongues. I think that’s from Timothy, and in yet another coincidence, Sharon mentioned this phrase earlier today. For just like an extremely bitter and thick secretion that has accumulated deep within the body and which through scratching is often irritated and rises to the surface, so too does a concealed disposition irritate those who hate whatever is well spoken, who take the opportunity to spew forth the malignancy of their soul and the more it spreads the deeper it lodges within them. For the disposition of degenerate and depraved men does not leave them simply because it has been manifested in their deeds but to the contrary it unrestrainedly befouls and corrupts everything around them without, as I said, ever departing from the cavity of their soul. Which is a very terrifying thing to say. When I first read this I shared it with somebody in the monastery and he said, ‘This happens here every day.’ But if you see this in context, most of the text is this very calm, philosophical discussion. And then there are these moments like this where he just gets upset because people are maligning the teacher. They’re misinterpreting the teacher. And his devotion to Gregory is very, very endearing and very, very charming. But I have another example from the text. I’m showing you this just so you can see just how creative and intriguing, and I don’t even know how to describe it, how inventive Maximus can be with scripture and theology. This is just an excerpt. Now the chief characteristic of the book is that it is a book of the same nature. The mystic of joy is a leaping and rejoicing in God, which we see in John the Baptist, who leaped in the womb. We see it also in David, who leaped for joy when the ark came to its rest. For it is true, though it may be a jarring and unusual thing to say, that both man and the Word of God, the Creator and Master of the Universe, exist in a kind of womb, owing to the present condition of our life. In this sense-perceptible world, just as if he were enclosed in a womb, the Word of God appears only obscurely, and only to those who have the spirit of John the Baptist.

Human beings, on the other hand, gazing through the womb of the material world, catch but a glimpse of the world who is concealed within beings, and this again only if they are endowed with John’s spiritual gifts. For when compared to the ineffable glory and splendor of the age to come, and to the kind of life that awaits us there, this present life differs in no way from a womb swathed in darkness in which, for the sake of us who were infantile in mind, the infinitely perfect word of God who loves mankind became an infant. So this is an aside, right? This is a parenthetical aside that he’s making in the course of a larger statement. He’s talking about joy and leaping and the joy leads him to leaping. Leaping leads him to John the Baptist and also to David and then this leads him to the story of Mary and Elizabeth. That’s where it comes from. The babe leapt in your womb. We read it now at the small paraclisi service, and he has this image now of John the Baptist, a human being in the womb of his mother, right? Confronting the Word of God made flesh in the womb of the Virgin. So we have two figures, human and divine, encased or enclosed within these wombs. And the one, actually, the human figure, intuits or observes or recognizes the presence of the divine through his womb and through the other womb, right? So we have these two wombs and this is what he says. So Maximus uses this as a kind of metaphor or an allegory. We are physical, corporeal, sense-perceptible beings living in the womb of the physical world. And of course the divine infuses everything with its presence, but sometimes this is obscured because of the corporeal reality, and then obviously because of sin and these kinds of things. And only somebody with the spirit of John the Baptist can see through the dark womb of the material world. And the word himself is encased in a corporeal body and has entered into the sense perceptible world. So if you think through it, it makes sense, but I thought, well, where did he get this from? I didn’t know. No one had said anything like this before him or since. So it’s a great example of Maximus being very traditional because he’s actually taken this moment from the Gospel of Luke and turned it into a metaphor for the larger human condition. So it’s a remarkable thing, and it’s just an aside, right? Just an aside to give you a sense of how remarkable his thought or his thinking can be. Now we move to our two major texts, and here now we enter some very treacherous and difficult waters. And before we start, this is probably nine or ten paragraphs that we’re going to go through. I don’t know how far we’ll get or how much endurance we’ll be able to bring forward for this, but we’ll do our best. But before we get into this, I need to make a couple of introductory remarks because what we’re going to be talking about now is really a theology of creation in a sense. And I heard somebody say once, and it was actually very helpful, there are different ways to think about the relationship between God and the world. And different religious traditions construe that differently, and different Christian traditions understand that relationship differently. Of course, the Orthodox Church has its understanding of that relationship. And one way to put it is in terms of a question. And is God related to the world as an author is to a text? Because that’s been the classical view in many Christian traditions, either the watchmaker or some other object, right? Is God the author of the world, the maker of the world, in the same way that an author writes a text? There are Christian traditions that understand the God-world relationship like that. That’s actually not very good, right? Because authors and texts can be separated. An author can write a text and put it down and walk away or die, right? He might revise the text at some later point, or the text can be misunderstood, misinterpreted by someone in the absence of the author and so on. So that relationship is not a good one, even though it’s been put forward by Christian theologians in the past. It’s not a good one. It’s not much of a relationship at all. The better way to think about it is not as author and text, but as text and meaning. Think about the words on the page as the physical world. And then think about meaning. When you read words on a page, you see more than W-H-O-K-N-O, right? There’s meaning that’s somehow contained in those words. There’s an intelligibility there beyond the letters of the alphabet. Writing is a remarkable thing. We take it for granted if we don’t think about it. So what is the relationship between the text and its meaning? That’s a tough question. Can you separate them? We translate texts, a French poem now in English, but the meaning changes because the text has changed too. It’s hard to translate poetry. Poetry, poiesis, is the Greek word for creation too, to make. So when we think about the relationship between God and the world as a text and its meaning, we’re talking about something much more interconnected, much more co-interpenetrating, to use a theological word, and something that’s very difficult to disentangle. So we have a closeness there without a fusion or a complication. That would be a very general thing to say, to understand that God and the world somehow mutually coexist and are mutually present to each other. When I was younger, I had this idea that God is somewhere out there. Either he’s a concept or an idea or a force or somehow just different from the world or separate from the world. That’s not the Orthodox view.

And the Orthodox view is that the divine actually permeates and penetrates the whole of creation, in the same way that meaning permeates and penetrates a text, right? That’s a very different kind of a world to live in. It’s not the Hegelian or whoever, the divine clockmaker that God created the world like Aristotle said and then sort of went somewhere else, wound it up and left it there to kind of run on for millennia. That’s not the world, that’s one kind of a world to live in, isn’t it, right? Not a very good one if you ask me. But the Orthodox, Orthodox cosmology, the Orthodox view of the world is a very different one. And that’s the one we live in. Now, there’s more to this. And I think the best way to approach it is to think about the divine and the human as somehow having or possessing or exhibiting, or relating, let’s put it that way, relating to one another through two, what, ecstasies. That for God to create the world and for God to enter into the world, he has to go outside of himself. The whole idea of sort of Paul’s notion of the self-emptying or the kenosis of the word, Philippians 2, divine self-emptying, there it’s used for the incarnation. But creation itself can be understood as God going outside of himself to bring a reality into existence that is other than himself. So we have this notion, I mean it comes to the fore in Dionysius, we find it in Maximus and it’s in the text that we’ll look at. That’s the one ecstasy. Think about the divine energies. It’s not God’s essence that comes at you. It’s God’s energies that are forever rushing toward you, even at this very moment. God is, as if God is eternally running toward you, running toward you to find you. So going outside of himself, from his place of divinity, to enter into relationship with, to create the world in the first place, and then to enter into relationship with that creation. That would be the one ecstasy. Human beings now are created with this capacity to go outside themselves, right, to ecstatically go beyond themselves. Even on a very human level, people have ecstatic raptures listening to, I don’t know, Brahms or Bach or something, right, through artistic experience or other kinds of peak experiences that people have. There is this idea of transcending oneself, of going outside of oneself, right? There are good forms and bad forms. And this is a sort of basic human desire and capacity, I think is proven by the fact that everybody’s addicted, right? Look how addicted this culture is, whether it’s the drugs or alcohol or sex or food or all the things that we heard about earlier today. That susceptibility, let’s say, to addiction, that’s a human fallen desire for… There are even drugs called ecstasy, aren’t they? Ecstasy for us is a theological word related to divinization. For most people, it’s a drug you take in a nightclub. How pathetic is that? But this desire for… There was a psychologist, I forget his name, he said that human beings have a desire for peak experiences. They want to jump out of airplanes, they want to climb up mountains, they want to… There’s this thirst for intensity, to be more than we are, to go beyond ourselves, to experience something. All of that is just the way that our culture very poorly tries to manage this capacity that we have to be more than what we are, to go outside of ourselves, to transcend ourselves. And in the highest, if you read the writings of the saints, in the highest experience, the highest moments of divinization, as the saints draw closer to God, God draws them out of themselves. Ecstasis means to stand outside of yourself. And they are sort of like Paul is raptured up to the third heaven. He doesn’t know if he’s in the body or out of the body because he’s entered into that state of ecstasy, right? In the body, out of the body, no idea, not sure, right? But I was in paradise, I was in the third heaven, I heard things that, words that cannot be heard or repeated, etc. So there it is already in Paul. So God and man meet by virtue of these two ecstasies, to put it that way. I think the human ecstasy is something you know, it’s something you’ve experienced. It doesn’t require further sort of elaboration on my part. The notion of the divine ecstasy, though, that’s probably newer, or maybe you’re hearing it for the first time. And it’s a complicated kind of a thing. We’ll say more about it. But if you read Dionysius on the divine aims, he says that because of his love for the world, God, he uses the language of God is beguiled. God is bewitched, in a sense, by love and drawn out of himself, right, in this act of creation. And God actually, well, we’ll see how Maximus puts it, but God himself is self-involved in the constitution of the world, right, by making himself present now to something that is other than himself, right? So I said this was going to get a little complicated theologically or philosophically, and we’re getting into that right now, but we’ll do what we can. It’s a difficult text, probably one of the most difficult passages in Maximus, but it is that one passage that talks about his doctrine of creation and the indwelling of the Logos, the Word of God, in the created order. So that was all the setup. Let’s look at the text. Who, knowing that it was with reason, there’s Logos there, reason and wisdom, that God brought beings into existence out of nothing who if he were carefully to direct the contemplative power of his soul to their infinite natural differences in variety. In other words, somebody contemplates the variety of creation with his soul and with the analytical power of reason were to distinguish in his mind the logos. It’s hard to translate, it really means principle, inner principle, reason, cause, very difficult to translate into English, so I’ve left it, I’ve simply transliterated it.

The metaphysical ground of something, the cause, the divine cause of the thing. You can look at a tree and just see a tree, or in a moment of mystical transport or contemplation, you can actually see the presence of God in that tree, the presence of God to that tree. The presence of divine life as it makes that tree the tree, which is the logos of that tree. It’s God’s mode of being in that particular creature. Because God’s not present in the tree in the same way that he’s present in a human being or in a rock. For the simple reason that a rock is not sentient, and for the simple reason that a tree has growth, vegetative life, and for the simple reason that human beings have mind. So God is present in the rock simply as existence. He’s present in the tree as the life of the life of that tree. He’s the being of the being of the rock, the life of the life of the tree, and the mind and the wisdom and the reason of rational creatures. It gets philosophically complicated, but this is the teaching of the church, in the way that Maximus unfolds it. So who could look at the physical world with his soul and his reason and his power of contemplation and not distinguish in his mind the logos according to which they were created. Who would not, I ask, fail to know the one logos as many logoi? He’ll say more about this in a moment. Indivisibly, the logos now, indivisibly distinguished, made multiple in a sense without division. Indivisibly distinguished amidst the differences of created things, owing to their specific individuality, which remains unconfused both of themselves and with respect to one. That’s one sentence, one question, by the way, so get a sense of how complicated it is. So what we’re talking about here is a notion of creation as a theophany. Creation is not other than God in any absolute sense. It is a manifestation of God. It is a theophany of the divine. Very much like an incarnation of the divine, but not in the way of the historical incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in Christ. So creation is a burning bush in a sense, on fire with the energies of God. That’s a simple way of translating his more complicated philosophical prose. This continues, let’s move on. Moreover, would he not also know that the many Logoi are one Logos, seeing that all things are related to him without being confused with him? See, that’s important now. This is not pantheism. This is not the confusion of creatures with God. But at the same time, it’s this very profound connection of God and creatures. The one is the many and the many are the one. The one Logos is self-multiplied in the principles of creation, the ground of creation. This is the way God is present to creatures without self-dividing and without confusing himself with the creatures. All things related to him without being confused with him, who is the essential and personally distinct Logos of God the Father, the origin and cause of all things. They have a biblical quote, help me here, is this Ephesians? In whom all things were created in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, with their thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities, all things were created from him, through him, and returned unto him. So the image is one of God self-multiplying in the created order, and then the creatures now have been created with this capacity to return to God. So we have a kind of a cyclical motion here of a kind of a procession from God into the world, and then of preachers back to God. That’s what he’s describing there. The biblical quote is from where? Ephesians. Very kind of you to whisper. You don’t want to embarrass me, but I’m asking you to help me here. The problem is that the biblical references for the translation are in the Greek text. That was the editor’s decision, which is why they’re not here. I’m pretty sure it’s Ephesians, though. This continues. From all eternity, he contained within himself the pre-existing Logoi of created beings. Now the Logoi are not anything separate or other than the Logos. The Logos is one, and in himself he contains all of the principles of created things, but in the Logos they’re undifferentiated. They’re not multiple within him. They only become multiple from our point of view as they find self-expression in the multiplicity of creatures. People say when you’re a kid, oh, God has a plan for you. It’s kind of like that. This is the logos. Every creature has its origin in the divine and its telos, its end in the divine. That’s the plan. It’s created with a natural capacity to reach that end. So from all eternity he contained within himself the pre-existing logoi of created beings. When, in his goodwill, he formed out of nothing the substance of the visible and invisible worlds, he did so on the basis of these Logoi. Some people describe, Augustine describes these as ideas in the mind of God, almost like platonic ideas or platonic forms that become the blueprints for the created world. The Greek fathers don’t quite use that language, but it is helpful to know that because it’s sort of like that. But they’re not platonic forms or ideas. It’s the Logos himself who contains the fullness of everything, undifferentiated within himself, but differentiated when seen from the perspective of creation.

By his word and his wisdom he created and continues to create all things, universals as well as particulars, at the appropriate time. We believe, for example, that a Logos, a principle, an idea, something within the divine, a Logos of angels preceded and guided their creation. And the same holds true for each of the beings and powers that fill the world above us. He’s talking about the angels. A logos of human beings likewise preceded their creation. And in order not to speak of particulars, a logos preceded the creation of everything that has received its being from God. These are the divine paradigms of creatures. You can also understand these as the divine wills. The eternal will that God had to create absolutely every single thing that has ever existed, that exists now, that will ever exist. It’s not as if 100 years from now God is going to think of new things to bring into being. It was all there, not simply from the moment of creation, but before creation. Co-eval with the Trinity itself. Think about that, the idea of yourself, the principle of yourself, your ground in God. It was there from the beginning, because in the beginning was the Logos as we saw a moment ago. It’s an extraordinary thing. That is our cause, that is our source, that is our divine origin, it is our alpha, but it’s also our omega, because we came from there but we’re also returning, that’s where we’re also headed, because it goes beyond the regular logic of time and space, it’s our beginning and it’s our end. We came to the end of that. Another one now, this just continues. We believe that He Himself, by virtue of His infinite transcendence, is ineffable and incomprehensible, and exists beyond all creation, and beyond all the differences and distinctions which exist and can be conceived of within it. We also believe that the same One is manifested, and here’s the word, multiplied, He says it. The same One, God the Logos, is manifested and multiplied in all the things that have their origin in Him, in a manner appropriate to the being of each as befits His goodness. So it does sound terribly sort of pantheistic or Hinduistic or Hindu to say that God is self-multiplied in the world. But if said and understood with the proper qualifications, it’s not Hinduism or panentheism or Meister Eckhart or Neoplatonism or what have you. It is the theology of the church, which allows for a kind of absolute presence of God in the created world without confusing God and creation and without destroying creation by that presence and at the same time allowing for God to be radically transcendent. So radically imminent and radically transcendent at the same time. Fully and completely present in God’s own self to every blade of grass, every tree, every stone, every cloud, but at the same time, which is why Dionysius says that God is all things in everything and nothing in anything. All things in everything, but no thing, no particular thing in any one thing. Do you get that? All things in everything, but nothing in anything. Everywhere and nowhere in a sense. Everywhere in the sense of his imminence, nowhere in the sense of his transcendence. Radically present, radically absent. Radically imminent, radically transcendent. It’s not simply a kind of a koan or a mind game. There’s no other way you can have it. Otherwise you end up with a God who’s confused with matter. Or a kind of a Buddhist absorption into the divine. The material world becomes an illusion, that it’s just sort of absorbed into the divine on the last day. Here we want to have it both ways and we do. The full absolute reality of creation to which the divine is totally present without compromise on either side. Another one now. And he recapitulates all things in himself, for it is owing to him that all things exist and remain in existence. And it is from him that all things came to be in a certain way and for a certain reason, and whether they are stationary or in motion, participate in God. For by virtue of the fact that all things have their being from God, they participate in God in a manner appropriate and proportionate to each, whether by intellect, by reason, by sensation, by vital motion, or by some essential faculty or habitual fitness. These are technical terms from Aristotle, by the way, according to the great theologian Dionysius Theriopagite. That is to say what I’ve already said, that God is not present to all things in exactly the same way. He’s present to rational creatures as the ground of their reason. He’s present to living things like plants and so on as the life of their life. He’s present to things like rocks or other kinds of things like that, simply as the being of their being or the existence of their existence. That’s what he means when he says that in a manner appropriate to each. It would be inappropriate for God to reveal himself to a dog, let’s say, in the same way that he reveals himself to a prophet. There are different modalities of presence that God has that are proportionate and appropriate to the different levels of creation. So that every creature participates fully in God, absolutely fully in God, in a way that is appropriate to each. Do you follow me? That’s why he has to say that. So it’s not as if, well I’m a dog and I’m a little angry because I found out that human beings participate in God in a way, they get more God than I do because they’ve got, no. Iris, the dog, the creature without reason or what have you, participates in God in a manner that is full and perfect and appropriate to that creature. And so on with human beings, with angels and what have you. We could all go to the beach. That’s probably a very bad analogy to use here in Alaska.

But we could all lie on the sand of the beach and above us is the sun, and there might be a hundred people on the beach. And no one is thinking, if a few of these people would leave, I would have more sun. Everybody on that beach feels the total presence of the sun to him or herself. Nobody feels that their experience of the sun is diminished because there are other people on the beach. You go to some of these beaches in the summertime, there are thousands of people there. Nobody can play unless someone gets in the way. But if everybody’s receiving the light of the sun, the sun is present. The light, physical light, it’s a created thing. Physical light has the ability to be present to a multiplicity of objects without diminishing itself, without fragmenting itself. It remains one while distributing itself to, and everybody receives it in the way they can. The guy with the olive skin, maybe he’s drinking it up in one way and someone else only stays out for a few minutes and so on. It’s the same sun; we all receive it without its fragmentation or loss or reduction. This is, think of God as giving himself to creation in this way and bringing beings into existence. They all receive the same light. They all receive the same grace. They all receive the same gift of being and existence, but in ways, in manners, in modalities that are appropriate to each and every one. Which is to say, just so there are no doubts, that all human beings have the same access to God. It doesn’t matter age, gender, anything, nothing like that. We’re all one class of beings in a sense. So there’s no, it’s not that the bishop receives more, he’s a human being too, or the lay person, or in so far as we are human beings, we all have been given the same capacity to receive the grace of God, without exception. The difference is because of us. The difference comes in to the extent that our will either inclines or declines in relation to the divine. Okay, so I think we can go to the next one. It follows then that each of the intellective and rational beings, that’s fancy theological talk for angels and human beings. Intellectual and rational beings, whether angels or men, there it is. Insofar as it has been created in accordance with the logos that exists and with God, is and is called a portion of God. You see that phrase in quotes, that was the difficult passage in Gregory. Gregory had said that we are portions of God that have slipped down from above. Uh-oh, that sounds like Gnosticism or New Age thinking or little pieces or fragments or parts of God that fell down from, well Gregory can’t mean that. So all of this is a way to put Gregory’s phrase in the right context. So in as much as these things are true, we can be called a portion of God precisely because of that logos, which as we said, pre-exists in God. If such a being moves according to its logos, it comes to be in God, in whom its logos of being pre-exists as its origin and cause. Movement and motion is very important for Maximus, because God simply does not create beings. He creates beings and empowers them with a kind of a dynamism. Movement is not locomotion here. It’s not physical motion from point A to point B. It’s spiritual motion. Where is your life going? What is the quality of your prayer life like? God has given us this power of spiritual motion to return to him. That’s why if such a being moves according to its logos, if it moves according to the nature that God gave it, which picks up on some of the moral themes that we heard about earlier, because all of those lapses in morality are movements contrary to nature. The types of things that we heard were human lives that are not moving according to the Logos, according to which they were created. They’re transgressing it, they’re going against it, they’re perverting it, they’re doing something other than, they’re doing violence essentially to the nature that God gave them. A little more? As long as it wishes and yearns to know nothing apart from its own origin, nothing other than God, it does not flow away from God, but rather in its upward movement toward God, it becomes God, and is said to be a portion of God, through its proper mode of participation in God. Because according to nature and through a properly ordered movement, it attains its own origin and cause. He’s talking about the process of divinization, the movement and return to God, having nowhere else to be moved besides its own beginning, or beyond the ascent and restoration to the Logos according to which it was created. It’s another way of talking about image and likeness. We have the image, we’ve lost the likeness. Move closer to God, we restore that likeness. It’s a philosophical way of talking about it in terms of spiritual movement or spiritual motion. To which it was created, nor any other way of being moved, since its movement toward the divine goal clearly takes as its final limit the divine goal itself. More, there’s more here. Another one. In God, the Logoi of all things are steadfastly fixed, and it is on the basis of these that God is said to know all things before they come into being. That was something else we heard earlier today. For in absolute truth, in Him and with Him are all things, even though all things, things present and things to come, were not called into existence simultaneously with their Logoi or with their being known by God. Instead, in the wisdom of the Creator, individual things were created at the appropriate moment in time in a manner consistent with their logoi, and thus they received in themselves actual existence as beings. Can we see the next slide? There’s a ninth one, another one.

And that’s the last one. I think we didn’t get to the second major text. We have about seven minutes. This was a lot to go through, and I think this is probably a good place to open up the floor to questions, hopefully about the things that we’ve talked about here. I know it’s complicated. I know it’s difficult. But this is the time to ask questions for clarification. Yes, Father, is it Robert? Yes. This is the difficult passage at issue here, from St. Gregory’s 14th oration. And this is on love for the poor. And it’s a very lengthy oration that we think St. Gregory probably delivered at the ribbon cutting for a philanthropic institution of St. Basil, which has the theme on the love for the poor. And in the course of this lengthy oration, there is this phrase that we are portions of God. It’s almost like fragments of God that slipped down from above. Problematic, right? Because it sounds like originism. And not to mention the other kinds of things that we noted. Okay, yes. Well, this is really the heart of the matter. The Logos is the Son of God, is the second person of the Trinity. It’s the Word of God, who in himself is absolutely single and simple and not composed of parts or pieces or anything like that at all, right? Yet… Well, let’s put it in terms of a question. How does this one radically simple, radically transcendent God relate to finite, multiple composite creatures? How do you bridge that gap? Is it the author and the text, which we said is two separable? Are we like a clock that God made and wound up? Or is it the text and the meaning thing? Again, it goes back to the idea of participation in the Greek philosophical tradition. And the Greeks knew that things were beautiful. This rose is beautiful. That architectural form is beautiful. That painting is beautiful. That face is beautiful. Well, how are all of these things beautiful? And what is beauty? Is there some sort of ultimate beauty in which all of these things, here’s the word, participate or share? I understand that to be beautiful or this is beautiful. Okay. Tell me then, what is the ultimate criterion of beauty that you have on the basis of which you say that this or that particular beauty is beautiful? What is that? It must exist somewhere, right? What is the ultimate absolute source or category or form of the beautiful in the light of which you understand created particulars to be beautiful? That was Plato’s question. And this is how he came up with the idea of the forms. Somewhere in some divine sort of dimension or realm or level of reality, there is something that is the beautiful. And in that beauty, all things share or participate. Or to look at it differently, that one beauty. That archetypical beauty is the cause of all the other beauties, which are the effects of it. There’s lots of different images. The light image is one. The light reflected in the mirror is another. The image of the seal, which is the deeply Christian image in baptism, the seal inscribes its beautiful form on the clay or the inert matter and gives it its beautiful shape, right? And the matter will correspond to that beautiful shape depending on its degree of malleability and so on. So the question is again, how do finite particular things share in God? How do they participate in God? And the answer is that the Logos gives himself in a sense to particular beings, but they don’t exist without him. He brings them into existence by making them to share in himself. Do you follow me? And that presence of the divine, that beauty that creatures have, that splendor that creatures have, that truth that creatures have, is something that’s not theirs. It’s something that they participate in, it’s something that they share in. And that sharing, that participation, is God’s presence to that thing in a manner appropriate to that thing. Do you follow me? I talked about that earlier. And that mode of communion that God has with you and with me and with the tree and with whatever it is, that’s what we’re calling the Logoi. And these are multiple. Bless you. These are multiple. Is there a Logos for a sneeze? I don’t know. And those Logoi are multiple. The one Logos self-multiplies because creation is multiple. Creation is diverse. Creation is filled with many distinctions. And God is present. The one God is present to all of these things in ways that are appropriate to each. And that mode of presence is what we call the Logoi. I don’t know if I can make it any simpler than that, but I’ll try if I need to. Is Logoi the plural? The plural of Logos, yeah. In Greek it’s Logi, or Logos and Logi. But I say Logoi. For some reason I revert to Erasme in pronunciation here. I don’t know why. It’s just clearer. The Logoi. The singular is Logos, and the plural is Logoi. And he says the many are the one and the one is the many and, right? It just depends on sort of what perspective you’re looking at them at. But there is this mystery of the divine presence whereby God actively sort of makes himself present to creatures in a full and permanent way to their very natures, to their substances, to their beings, to… It’s a very, very robust and a very, very profound doctrine of creation. And all other theologies of creation are just so weak and so impoverished in comparison. So it was all of that, centuries of Greek philosophical speculation on the doctrine of participation, on the nature of beauty, on the nature of divine, taken up into the Christian tradition and subjected to centuries of maximus, this is after 600 years now, of Christian reflection on these questions and on these problems. So it’s really just the fruit of so much thought and of so much grace and of so much revelation, right? So, I go with you. There’s a guy way in the back and I kind of like the underdog, so we’ll go with him. He’s standing too, so that’s got to count for something. Yes, yes.

Yeah, no, of course not. But, well, yes and no. Which reminds me of a funny story. When I was working at the Archdiocese many years ago as a layman, they were just getting computerized at that point. I had a computer on my desk and I didn’t know how to use it, and somebody from IT came. Already in those days they had a reputation for being a little patronizing, right? So I called the IT guy in and I said, well, I need to do this, this, this. Can I perform this operation on my computer? And he says, well, he says, yes and no. For you, no. Okay, I get it. Okay, so here, if we back up a minute and look at Saint Maximus’ notion of the universe. At the center of God’s creation is the human being. Because the human being is not simply the summation and the recapitulation of the created order, which is why Adam and Eve are created last. As Saint John Chrysostom says, God creates their royal palace first, and then he brings in the king and the queen, who are also the royal priests over creation. So human beings are actually not simply the summation, in the sense of recapitulating all the lower orders. Because we are physical beings, we have the existence of the rock. Because we grow, we recapitulate the growth of, let’s say, the vegetative realm. We have mind and sensation and so forth. So all of the lower physical and animal and sense-perceptible forms of creation are recapitulated in the human person. But it’s beyond that. Why? Because the human person is also a link between creation. We recapitulate creation within ourselves, but we also have a capacity to participate in the divine world. So man, to use the generic category, the human being is the link. It’s not simply the summation of creation, but it’s the link between the material and the spiritual. So it is through, this is Maximus’ notion, that Adam had a priestly calling, and that God made Adam the priest of creation. And Adam’s goal was to, like we say, thine own of thine own, these we offer to you. Adam’s call was to return, was to recapitulate, was to sort of Eucharistically offer the created world back to the Creator. As the link, as the linchpin, as the bond between these two worlds, this was part of God’s plan to unify the material and the spiritual in human life and ultimately in Christ. Adam, of course, failed in his priestly vocation and did not return the gifts of creation to the Creator, but kept them for himself. And hence the whole domino effect, everything just collapsed at that point. And St. Maximus and other church fathers talk about the fall as a transfer of spiritual energy now to a kind of biological animal level, right? And hence the passions that we heard about earlier today. And the desire that God gave me for the infinite, I’m now trying to, is the word slake or sate, with finite things. And Maximus says that God has given us a capacity, an infinite desiring capacity in the face of which no finite thing can ever satisfy us. An infinite desiring capacity in the face of which no finite thing can ever satisfy us, right? We still haven’t figured this out. We still think, if I can just add one more acre or one more car or a better haircut or whatever it is, right? This is how our society sort of brainwashes us too, of course. So yes, those things, because they are material, the rocks and the trees and everything else, and think we do offer the elements of creation, right, on the altar table, right? From grapes, from wheat, and so on. So they’re there, they’re put on the holiest place of the church. And we invoke God’s blessing on them, right? So yes, all of those things are recapitulated in and through the human person, which is why, well, I’ll leave that out, recapitulated through the human person and through us, offered to God in this kind of Eucharistic motion, which is God’s plan for the divinization of the world. Long answer to your question, but it was a good question. So, yes. Is it Andrew? Okay. Leading to? About God? What do you mean exactly by anthropomorphism here though? Yeah, I mean, if I understand your question, perhaps the best thing to do is to just go back to the text of Genesis, and what is the promise of the serpent? What is the devil’s temptation to Adam and Eve in the garden? Okay? To be God without God, right? In other words, that’s another kind of divinization, isn’t it? That’s not a divinization at all, it’s a self-divinization. It’s the human being trying to become divine, omnipotent, omniscient, all these things, apart from God, without God. So I think that, is that what you’re saying? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. No question about that. In fact, one of the key words that St. Maximus uses here, he sees this as really the cause of the fall, is a Greek word, philaftia, which means love of the self. Self-love. Which he even understands to be not simply a love of the idea of myself, that’s part of it, but it’s actually even baser than that, because it’s man’s love for his own body. That became a greater value to human beings and is a greater value to us than just about anything else. Think of what you would do to save your skin, right? And just think of how enamored we are of the flesh in a sense. And look at the world that we’ve created for ourselves. It’s very much a world that’s almost psychotically fixated on carnality in the body and so forth. And again, part of that transfer of spiritual energy to a kind of biological plane or level is an inversion of the proper order. Because the idea is that sensation is to be taken up by sense perception, and the concepts that we acquire through sensation and through sense perception are to be taken up into reason, and ultimately into the intellect or the noose or the mind or the heart. So that there has to be a kind of hierarchy in a sense.

That sensation is subject to sense perception. Sense perception is subject to reason, reason is subject to the spirit, and the spirit is subject to God. With us, it’s the reverse. Everything is subject to sensation. And the mind, and St. Maximus says this, at a very young age, reason and the intellect, the mind, the self, becomes addicted to and enslaved to sensations. And you do that once, you do it a second time, you become habituated into, and you become a slave to whatever your passion is. So there’s a total inversion of the, sort of that human ecstasy is to rise from sensation through reason up into, this is a total turning upside down of what God has established. And we know, everybody loves pleasant sensations, everybody loves to feel good. Everybody loves good food or a good glass of wine or something like that, but you know what happens when that takes over. Father Dmitri Stanilov, the famous Romanian theologian, speaks about this beautifully. A cup of wine is something that’s meant to be shared. Think of the Eucharist, ultimately. But a cup of wine is a beautiful thing. Think of the beautiful things the Psalms say about wine. A cup of wine gladdens the heart of man, and so on. Okay, if I have a cup of wine and I’m a dispassionate person, I can share it with you. But if I acquire a taste for wine, I’m going to keep it for myself now. I’m not going to share it with you. So I develop a passion for the alcoholic high. What happens now? Immediately, my relations with others begin to break down. It becomes very selfish now. I’m not interested in sharing my wine with you. When you’re going to come over and, remember in high school, kids would say, hey, you have a cigarette? And the kid had a pack of cigarettes in his pocket and he’d say, no, I don’t have any cigarettes. Because he didn’t want to share his cigarettes. So passion, passion by definition, is self-isolating, it’s destructive of community, and ultimately self-destructive too. And it enslaves the whole self. What is more pathetic? Think about Job who says, I hate my life. The person who hates his life is the person whose life has become enslaved to base material sensations. And they’re fun and they’re charming and they’re pleasant, but when they get their hooks in you, they keep you much longer than you intended to stay and take you much further than you wanted to go and try getting loose afterwards. I mean, the Church Fathers talk about passions. I think we use the language of addiction today. These are really addictions. They’re sicknesses of the soul. And ultimately, we are powerless to do anything. The good news is that we can’t do anything about this. As Elder Emiliano used to say that, when you’re impassioned, when you are subject to the passions, it’s like you’re all tied up. And when you’re all tied up, you can’t untie yourself. Someone’s got to come and untie you. We can struggle against them. Physically, cognitively, we’re always going to fall, we’re always going to fail. We need the grace of God. St. Paul, the famous passage from Romans, the thing that I don’t want to do, that’s what I do. The thing that I know to do, why don’t I do that? Paul’s living in this middle state between the pledge of God’s grace and the not yet of the fullness of the kingdom. And we’re in this kind of middle place of struggle and of asceticism, and we’re always going to fail. I mean, if we could conquer our passions, what would we need the grace of God for? So we suffer, we struggle, we fall. We get up, we fall again. We get up, we fall again. And I think the only point to all of that is for us to get to a point where we have to totally surrender and realize, you know something? I can’t do this based on my own inner resources. And that’s when you can turn to God and be receptive of his grace. You have to be totally broken down in a sense and realize your own abject incapacity. Sounds a little Calvinistic but it’s not. So anyway, I apologize. I had another… Thank you. I told somebody there’s a little story from the monastery. And we all have the names of different saints. And when it’s the saints feast day, of course, they put a little treat by your plate on the table. And people wish you many happy years and that sort of a thing. And some of that is an old kind of a monastic joke. And someone will say, happy name day or whatever. They’ll congratulate you. And one monk said once, he goes, One guy got the grace, all I got was the name. So our thanks always to God, and we should always sort of ascribe our joy and our appreciation to him. I apologize for not getting to that second text, but we’ll try to catch up tomorrow night. Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Fr. Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 5. The Theology of St. Maximus. Part 1. The Ambigua. How’s everybody? Good afternoon. I’m sorry. So this is the third of our four talks, and I think it’s fair to say that we’ve covered a lot of ground so far, and that was sort of part of the plan that I came in with, to just sort of toss out a lot of things, put a lot of things out there, knowing that the audience would be diverse, and in the hope that there’d be something for everyone, and also to give you a sense of the complexity or the richness of these disciplines and of these discourses and of the study of the Church Fathers. But because I did say so much, and a lot of information was given to you, and we haven’t quite had the time that I thought we might have had to ask and answer questions, I thought rather than launch into yet another complicated and difficult discussion, I’m willing to give, let’s say, a half hour if we need it, to just open up the floor and ask questions. Initially, primarily about the things we’ve been talking about, and if we move in different directions, that’s fine too, but

I think it’s a good idea to stop at this point and take stock, and if anyone has questions or comments or would like something clarified or wants to express outrage, this is the time to do it. Translation is, I wouldn’t call it a science, but it’s certainly an art, and it has a very long tradition obviously, and there are theories about translation that go back to antiquity, and in fact the ancient theories have, the ancients figured out, it’s basically the difference between, do you try to be faithful to the text at the cost of intelligibility in the new language, or do you try to almost write a new text? And I think that because this is a work of theology, because it’s also a very highly technical work, and it’s a work of doctrine, that there has to be a tremendous degree of faithfulness. I could make it easier, there’s that awful expression to dumb it down for readers, but you’re not giving them Saint Maximus. And English, every language has its own genius. And the genius of English is in very short sentences for the most part, concise, short sentences. This is not the genius of Greek, which delights in long sentences with multiple subordinate clauses, and it’s very complex, and there are all kinds of chiastic and other rhetorical structures that these trained writers can use. So what do you do at that point? Most translators of St. Maximus have opted to simplify his language, to break the long sentences into shorter ones and so on. But I disagree with that because there’s a train of thought. And I addressed this in the introduction to the translation because people such as yourself want to know what happened here. How did the translator do it? So I felt that the text is difficult. And working through it is something akin to a spiritual exercise. It requires focus. It requires attention. It requires not simply concentration or attention, but a particular quality of attention. And it’s very difficult at first because we don’t have that mind. We don’t have that quality of attention. We’re distracted. We want things pre-chewed and pre-digested. We take global historical political situations and reduce them to the most facile of good guy versus bad guy thing, right? And he said well this is where it counts, this is politics, this is war, and the simpler the better. So I felt that to have broken these long sentences down into shorter sentences would have made it more palatable to the reader, but it would have come at the cost of misrepresenting, not only misrepresenting the way the writer wanted you to experience the text, but the benefit to be derived from actually laboring a little bit, right, to enter into this kind of labyrinth, you’re always having to go back to check and to reread. So there’s that. The other thing is that there’s a lot of very technical language in here. Philosophical terms, let’s say, from Aristotle’s categories, or theological technical terms like hypostasis and so forth, and those have to be rendered in a very particular way and consistently throughout. So it was challenging because I wanted the reader to really have an experience of the text as it is, as a Greek reader would have it. But of course it also has to be readable. And in places this barely qualifies. If you work at it, it’s readable. But it’s not an easy read. That’s the difference. I didn’t make it easy, but it is readable. If you read it quickly, you’ll get lost, you’ll stumble, I lost my place. If you go back and keep track, I mean just translating it, you start at the top of the page and you’re working through it, and you’re like, what on earth is going on, what’s he talking about, where is this going? And you’re about halfway down the column, and you realize, okay, this is just the first half of On the One Hand. And then, so you really can’t translate the first part until you know what the second part is. There was a Roman Catholic theologian, now deceased, a Canadian, Bernard Lonergan, who wrote these very, almost Maximian kinds of works. And he actually has sentences that start, In the fourteenth place, which is a real compliment to the reader, right? You judge the reader able to maintain fourteen points as you’re reading. So we could say a lot more. Translation is a fascinating thing, it’s a difficult thing, it’s a complicated thing. The best book that I know about translation theory is by a fellow by the name of George Steiner, who’s kind of a literary theorist and a scholar. He’s written a book called After Babel, and it’s one of the best things on the philosophy of language and translation theory. And he says, interestingly, that translators don’t have methods. They only have narratives. So if you ask the translator, how did you translate this? I can’t give you a methodology, but I can tell you stories, narratives about how I did it. Because every work is different, every author is different, and you can have working principles, but at the end of the day it comes down to the story that you tell about how you translated the text. Okay. We have, yes.

Right, well, we would say immediately that evil is not from God in any way, because if the evil that we find in human existence was from God, if the evil or the sinfulness that we associate with human nature, if that were from God, well, we wouldn’t be responsible for it, right? We wouldn’t be guilty of anything, we wouldn’t be, right? There’d be no… And if it’s nature, it’s not actually part of our free will anymore anyway. It’s a story about the old story about the frog and the scorpion. Do you know this one? And the scorpion wants to cross the river, but he can’t swim, so he approaches the frog and he says, gee, can I hop on your back and you can take me across the river? And the frog says, well, you’re a scorpion. If I do that, you’ll sting me and I’ll die. He says, no, I promise you, I won’t, I need to get across the river. Trust me, I won’t do anything to harm you. So the frog says, okay, the scorpion gets on the frog’s back and they’re going across the river. In the middle of the river, the scorpion starts stinging the frog. And the frog now is drowning and so is the scorpion, right? Because evil destroys itself ultimately. And the frog says, hey, wait a minute, I thought you said you weren’t going to do that. He goes, I’m sorry, because it’s my nature, right? So if evil was something on the level of nature, well then, it would be something that we’d… So for all of the church fathers, the Cappadocians, Basil, the two Gregories, St. Maximus for all of them. Evil arises as a result of really bad choices that people make, often based on poor judgments or misjudgments. So evil, we alone of God’s creatures have been given the power of free will, of free choice, of self-determination. Animals don’t sin, right? They might do things that look ghastly to us, but it’s not immoral, right? They’re simply acting instinctually. We don’t have that luxury in a sense. We are burdened with the gift of freedom, right? So we have to make decisions, we have to make choices, and we do the best we can, and things do go wrong. So it was by virtue of the gift of freedom that we received that evil things came and continue to come into the world. So there’s more to be said about that, but that’s sort of a thumbnail sketch of it. Also, evil in the context of the Logoi is that human nature has a Logos. Human nature has an inner principle, a spiritual principle. And that principle includes both its divine source, but also its divine end, the end for which God made it. So let’s say it’s the end of a bird to fly. Let’s say it’s the goal of a bird to fly. And if a bird doesn’t fly, that would be a failure, in a sense, for that creature to fulfill its nature. So, to the extent that human beings move, we talked about motion, right? Live, exist, to the extent that their modality of being is in conformity with their inner logos, which is ultimately God, right? Then there’s no evil. But the moment that we deviate from, when we move, the words that the church fathers use are motions by which they mean decisions in a sense and we would say maybe styles of life or habits of life or decisions impulses those kinds of things they can either be according to nature or they can be contrary to nature or unnatural let’s say and to move unnaturally to move to be in contradiction to yourself to be so self-divided like that is sinful and evil. Thank you. And it’s sinful because it’s really a failure of the potential that God has given us this potential to become like God and to become God, right? And the failure to realize that potential, that’s one definition of evil. Kind of a deformity in a sense, or a failure or a frustration for a thing to… I don’t know if anybody who’s worked in a garden, when the things don’t grow properly or when they die, I mean it’s a terrible pity, isn’t it, when you say it didn’t work out right. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Right, because he did act, absolutely he did not, he moved contrary to his angelic nature. And he maintained his, the nature even of the devil is not evil. It’s his mind, it’s the motion of, it’s the freedom of his will that has become enslaved to evil. I actually have a short text on this that we’ll look at tomorrow. So, the question of evil is a very difficult one, obviously, and that’s maybe a brief answer to your question. We have, who has… Okay, yes, I’ll… Yesterday you said something I’ve never heard, but anyways, God has given us an infinite desiring capacity which no material thing can ever slake. Which no finite thing would say, an infinite, no finite thing can ever satisfy. So that was really interesting to me. Does that mean then that… You have to turn that desiring to the love of God. Absolutely. That’s what we’re supposed to do with that, as opposed to the love of cars, houses, clothes, da-da-da-da-da. Absolutely. So this is like an innate capacity that… That we’re supposed to start to love God with that? Yes. How do you do that? Oh, the first part is easy, the second part is more complicated. When the lawyer goes to Jesus in the Gospels and says, what is the greatest commandment, what does he say? You shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, and mind. I think the order there is important too. It doesn’t say mind first or even soul first. It’s heart first. And you think about the emphasis that the Orthodox spiritual tradition places on the heart. The heart is foregrounded right there in… I mean, Jesus is quoting from Deuteronomy there. So the first commandment is to love God with everything you’ve got. Heart, soul, mind. And there’s a second commandment. like unto it which is to love thy neighbor as thyself. So there it is right there.

So it’s not Maximus telling us to give all our love to God or to love God. It’s a biblical principle. It’s the teaching of the Lord. Now, if you open up the long rules of St. Basil, which are a series of questions and answers about how to live, not simply the monastic life, but how to live the Christian life, the first question is, well, again, what is the first rule or principle that a Christian should have? And again, Basil gives the answer from Matthew about the greatest commandment. This is a simple question. He says, it’s the first thing, the first priority, the first thing that we need to attend to, the first rule, the first principle is to love the Lord with our whole heart, soul, and mind. And then the next question is, well, how do we do that? That’s your question. And he says, well, nobody can teach you how to do that, right, because it is a natural thing. It’s just like no one teaches you how to love your parents, and just like no one taught you how to love the sunlight or the fresh air, right? No one needs to or can teach you how to love God. I mean, obviously there can be examples, there can be experiences that stir up that natural capacity, right? But it’s not given to you; it’s all given to us by God. It’s inbuilt, it’s innate, it is natural for us to desire God and to love God with our whole being. Then the response was, well then why are we so cold? Well again, it’s the gift of freedom, because instead of choosing to love God, we have from our youth, right, attached ourselves to other kinds of loves, right? I mean, if we were to be honest, we would say that most of us might love money. I mean, if I had a choice, go to church every Sunday for the rest of your life for his 10 million dollars. I don’t know, people have different weaknesses. We love lots of things. Ourselves, first and foremost, probably, right? St. Maximus said that original sin, in a sense, was that philaphtia, that love of the self, love of the body. So, there’s a great text among tomorrow’s readings about this, and it has to do with why it is exactly that we have failed, we fail to achieve. Why we fail to actualize the God-given potential that we have. At the end of the day, there’s no one to blame but ourselves. It’s our unwillingness or our reluctance to surrender ourselves completely to God. Even people who are very pious and very holy, they might be holding something back. I’ll give 10%. 50% or the people who give 100%, those are rare people. Those are the great saints. So that’s why our life, we were talking about this earlier, our life is really a process, we’re never fully converted. It’s an ongoing process. And God accepts us where we are, we make our little steps, we see that there’s more work to do, maybe we make more progress, and it just never ends. And God sees that we’re willing and that we’re on the right track. He reveals more to us. You’re not quite as virtuous as you thought. You have these shortcomings and these weaknesses and I think you can handle a little more self-knowledge now. So it’s really more about letting go and giving up and surrendering. I think it’s a lot harder for men to do than for women to do. That’s been my experience. But men are very prideful and it’s very difficult for them to accept their inability and their incapacity. And to really be able to say, which is why St. Paul says, when I’m weak, that’s when I’m strong. It’s when I acknowledge my radical incapacity. It’s when I acknowledge my weakness. That’s when God’s grace can enter into my life. But if I think that I’m strong and I don’t need anybody and I have my own resources and I can do this and I can do that, and God says, okay, you go and do that and we’ll talk later. So, we’re told that God is continuously loving, and we’re told about the angels who are basically, because they are that love, and they’re so direct with Him, they experience it more profoundly than we do. And yet, you have Satan, who is the highest of the angels, and who was very close to God, and experienced God’s love continually, in huge amounts, and a third of the angels as well, who then rebelled against God and distanced themselves from Him and set themselves in opposition to God. And yet, they knew God far more than most of us do. That’s a real mystery, that’s a real conundrum. How could that happen? Yeah, I mean, I’ll underline one of your own words, that this is really a mystery, and people have struggled with this idea for a long time, and it’s one of those things that it’s probably impossible to kind of define in some way that we can understand. But part of the answer has to include the fact that the angels, too, were created with freedom. They weren’t robots, right? They were made by God so that they could turn away from him, because they were as intelligible, rational beings. I mean, the liturgical tradition calls them minds, their intellects, they’re these celestial minds. And by definition, there has to be freedom there. And they made the wrong use of it, they misused it. And there’s a tradition that after the fall, so to say more about that… What can I say about that, right? But just to add to it, there’s a tradition that after these angels fell, the good angels, seeing what happened and fearing a similar fate, well, if it could happen to them, right? They surrounded, this is the Feast of the Synaxes of the holy angels, they surrounded the throne of God and they offered God their free will. They said, take this thing away from us, right? This gift of freedom, this burden of freedom, right? God says, not going to do it.

But he did this tradition that he somehow bound their minds to him, which is why in many of their icons they have these ribbons around their heads, which indicates the sort of the binding of the mind to the divine. So Gregory the theologian says that they’re not akiniti, they’re not immovable, they’re not absolutely immovable in their wills, but they’re viskiniti, it’s extremely difficult for them to be moved. So at this point in, let’s say, the history of creation, they continue to have their freedom, but if you follow this tradition, or in light of this tradition, they’re very much fixed in the commitment of their will to God. But these are things, these are our human ways of talking about things. Can the fallen angels still repent? I should probably repeat your questions because maybe not everybody can hear them. The follow-up question was, can the fallen angels repent, which is a version of the question, can the devil be saved? And there have been some ecclesiastical writers in the tradition, not saints of the church, but theologians and ecclesiastical ancient ones, who believe that at the end of history, all will be saved. This idea of universal salvation. God made everything. A lot of stuff got messed up and lost. God will fix everything and restore everything to the way it was in the beginning. It’s kind of a cycle. That teaching was, and there are some contemporary theologians who are very happy with this. St. John Chrysostom says this is the theology of the hedonists. People think they can just do whatever they like and God’s going to take care of it all in the end. But this teaching was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 551 under the Emperor Justinian and others. So an Orthodox Christian can’t really hold to it. We pray for the dead and we hope, but we don’t believe that, we don’t teach that there’s repentance after death, first of all, and that the devil is, and again, that there’s a text about the devil for tomorrow, so. Any more questions or comments or, okay, should we move on? Should we move on? Yeah? Okay, alright. We have one text that we want to look at today, you should have a copy of it. If not, there are some over there. Just at the very moment that Father Matthew sat down, I’m going to ask him to give some water. I forgot to bring some. Just before we dive into the text, just a couple of comments to help introduce us to some of the ideas that we’re going to be exploring here. We all know that the Word of God, the Logos again, the Word, is the author of Scripture in a sense, which also means that, this is a tradition going back to the early Alexandrian fathers, we find it in Maximus the Confessor, which means that the Word is also somehow embodied in Scripture, that the ideas of Scripture, the language of Scripture, is somehow also not simply an expression of the Word, but a real embodiment of the Word. And even something like a kind of incarnation of the Word. Thank you, Father. Along the lines of what we talked about last night, about the mode of the divinity’s presence in the created order. Something very similar, something analogous takes place in Scripture. Scripture is not simply a book. It’s not simply pages with words on it. It’s not some sort of random thing that was, oh, it was written over a period of, I don’t know, a couple thousand years by a bunch of different authors and biblical scholars break it down into fragments and bits. And there’s Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah, and these letters weren’t by Paul. And they make a mess of the whole thing, right? That’s a historian’s way of looking at Scripture. But the church has never looked at Scripture that way. The church sees and understands Scripture as a whole, and it sees Scripture not simply as pointing to Christ, but it also sees Christ as the depth of Scripture. So the Word, the Word of God, the Logos of God, is present in Scripture, which makes Scripture something like the body of the Word. It makes the Word somehow incarnate in Scripture, which is why a lot of the early fathers talk about Scripture having a body and a soul. The body of Scripture are the words, the physical words, black letters on the page and the soul of course is the meaning of the, we talked about text and meaning last night so the body of the word in scripture would be that the actual physical words the letters syllables, the vowels, the verbs and whatnot. And the soul, in a sense, the soul, so to speak, of scripture is the meaning, is the intelligible meaning of those words. And we have these kinds of distinctions. Earlier, we heard some correct criticisms of dualism. This is not dualism. These are simply distinctions that are made that are not separations or divisions. But even St. Paul talks about the letter in the spirit. And the letter, he says, kills, but the spirit gives life. So here we have that distinction, letter and spirit. And if all you’ve got is the flesh, if all you’ve got is the body, without the soul or the spirit or the mind, you’re in a little, you’re not seeing the whole picture. You have an impoverished experience of scripture. So a strictly literal kind of reading of scripture wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough because it wouldn’t attend to the depth or to the deeper soul of scripture. So there’s that idea. There’s that idea that the world, the creation, the cosmos, the universe is a manifestation of God, is a theophany of the divine. The same thing is true of scripture. God is present in creation. He’s also present in scripture. So the world is a manifestation of God and scripture is a manifestation of God. That’s one of the points we need to enter into this text. So scripture and the world. And St. Maximus talks about two laws, the written law and the natural law. And the written law is scripture and the natural law is creation. And at bottom,

They actually come to the same thing, which is through the Logoi to the Logos. The Logoi of scripture, the meanings, the principles of scripture, the Logoi of creation, which are the metaphysical grounds in a sense of the created order, and all of these things are contained within the Logos himself. So both the world and scripture are self-expressions if you will, self-manifestations, self-disclosures of God the Word. Alright, so the presence of the Word then in both scripture and Creation is the mystery of God’s revelation to the world. And the paradigm, one of the chief paradigms for what I’m talking about is the transfiguration. This sort of messianic moment, this major biblical event, this major moment in the life of Christ, actually comes to the fore as a key witness to the things that I’ve been saying. And this is where we’ll turn to the text. One last point though, and it’s very important. There’s the world, and there’s also the world of creation. There’s also the world of Scripture. There’s the book of creation, as we’ll see, and there’s the book of the Bible. But these things are not realities that are outside of ourselves. We don’t look at them in some sort of objective sense. Both of these worlds, obviously, the world of creation and the world of Scripture, are two orders in a sense, or realms that encompass us, that we are actually ourselves contained within. No one doubts that we’re contained within the material world, but we’re also contained in a special sense in the world of Scripture. Scripture is not just a book, and it’s not simply a kind of culture, it’s that too. It is a much more… well, we’ll see what St. Maximus says about it. That’s why you have some of these early church writers who say that there’s really only one story, and that’s the story of the Gospel. And every person plays his or her part. And one person is a Judas, another person is a Peter, and so on. I don’t need to go through all the details. So there’s really only one story that’s played out over and over and over again. And of course we occupy different roles. So the Gospel is not just a story we read, it’s much more profound than that, it’s much more comprehensive than that. It’s a reality that we occupy in very particular ways. So let’s turn now to this text from the Ambiguum. It’s an excerpt from the Tenth Ambiguum. It’s not too long, but it’s very dense and it’s very complicated. It’s classical, St. Maximus the Confessor. But it’s just like the text about the Logoi, this is another central text that often gets cited by theologians and scholars and people keep coming back to it because it is so important. And we’ll go through it slowly. If anybody has any questions as we’re going through, please feel free to raise your hand. If there are too many questions, that might slow us down, but in mid-sentence, no less. Like those men who rushed from their seats when St. Gregory had yet to finish his… No, go ahead. Lance and I are old friends, so I can tease him that way. I was just saying Maximus is expounding upon it. It is, yes. This is the one that I told you last night was actually in its entirety. The single ambiguum is 50 pages long. It’s by far the longest sort of essay in the collection. And I won’t get into the phrase by Gregory. It’s a very long and difficult argument. We’re focusing on this excerpt here. What Maximus is talking about in general is the life of virtue and divinization and how it’s possible that human beings can move through the created order and come to know the divine. How does that happen? How does that actually work? What are the mechanics of it in a sense? What can we know about that? Other writers might talk about how to pray. He’ll talk about what happens in the soul when one prays. So he’s always on this kind of other level in a sense, seeking to establish the theology of the church and the practices of the church on these sort of really sophisticated theological and philosophical grounds. And that was necessary because these things were being challenged. It wasn’t just him idly exercising his intellect. These things had to be said to secure and preserve the teachings of the church in a very profound way. All right. So he says, thus it happened that some of Christ’s disciples, through diligence in virtue, ascended and were raised aloft. I think that’s important. We have an active verb and a passive verb here. On their own they ascended, they were able to exert some of their own energy. They ascended and were raised aloft, that’s a passive verb there. So they raised themselves up and were raised up. I think that’s significant, because there is an activity and passivity involved in the life of grace. We have to struggle, we have to work, but then at one point we have to also surrender and go from being active agents to passive recipients of God’s grace, and let God’s activity take over within us. So they ascended and were raised aloft with him on the mountain of his manifestation, where they beheld him transfigured, unapproachable by reason of the light of his face, and astonishing in the brightness of his garments. And the garments actually become something that Maximus talks about. And having observed his appearance made more august by the honor of Moses and Elijah standing at either side of him, they crossed over from the flesh to the spirit, prior to having cast off carnal life, through the substitution of their powers of sense perception by the activity of the spirit, who removed the veils of the passions that had covered the intellective capacity within them, by which he means their kind of higher mind. With the sensory organs of their souls and bodies purified through the spirit, they were initiated into the spiritual principles, that’s the Logoi again, of the mysteries that had been disclosed to them.

A couple of comments on this and then we’ll see if you have any questions. So the main idea here is that the disciples are raised up, I mean they’ve lived through diligence and virtue, they’re raised up to the mountain of manifestation, they behold this magnificent vision, and the impact, the result of this vision is that they crossed over from flesh to the spirit. This is a key notion in Maximus’ theology, this idea of passing over or of crossing over. The Greek word is diavasis from the verb diaveno, which is actually the word for the Greek word diavasis translates what Hebrew word? Pascha, Passover. This is the exodus. So the ultimate meaning of exodus was not a passage through water or a one-way ticket out of Egypt. It was this other kind of, this was a foreshadowing or a type of the passage of the self or of the soul sort of through the material world to the intelligible realm or to the life of God. And this is also the move, by the way, from the letter to the spirit. It’s an exegetical move, it’s a hermeneutical move, right? You read from the letter, you pass to the spirit. And at the same time that our carnal life or our fleshly life is transformed and transfigured into a spiritual one. So this notion of movement, of motion, of passage is key to him. So they crossed over from flesh to the spirit prior to having cast off carnal life. This was a miracle actually. This was granted to them by God. They weren’t dead yet. They weren’t fully sanctified either. This was before Pentecost. So this shouldn’t have happened. It was granted to them to happen. So before they had cast off carnal life, carnality, they crossed over. How? Through the substitution of their powers of sense perception by the activity of the Holy Spirit. If you’re familiar with the theology of Hezekasm or the theology of Gregory Palamas, this will be something that you’ve come across. The idea is that the great saints who rise to these levels of sanctity that are probably just beyond our ability even to imagine, right? There comes a point where their own power of perception, their own power of cognition, their own intellectual capacity to know and to… I mean, it fails them in a sense. It can only take them so far. And it’s at that moment that… Their own activities, their perceptive and intellectual and cognitive activities cease. And the activity of the Holy Spirit takes over in a sense. So the disciples at the Transfiguration see God. They see the uncreated light of God, but not with their earthly eyes and not with their earthly minds. They see God because the Holy Spirit now has come. to rest in them and they see God through the Holy Spirit in them who is seeing God. So it’s God’s self in the disciples sees his own self through them. Do you follow me? Do you understand that? We cannot see God. Mortal eyes and mortal minds cannot behold something immortal and infinite and divine and so on. The created cannot see the uncreated. But this can happen through the agency of the Holy Spirit. So my, let’s say, intellectual activity or capacity is not enough to take in this vision. But if the Holy Spirit is living inside of me, well then through the Spirit’s activity, that vision becomes possible. So through the activity of the Spirit, who removed the veils of the passions that had covered the intellective capacity within them. So part of the inability to see the divine was also the result of passions, which are like veils. or clouds that obscure the vision of God. And with the sensory organs of their souls and bodies purified through the Spirit, they were initiated into the spiritual principles of the mysteries that had been disclosed to them. So that’s the first paragraph here. Any questions about that, or comments, or, you know, just totally incomprehensible? Yeah, go ahead. Right, right. Yeah, it is the grace of the Holy Spirit. I mean, we don’t talk about this as a kind of incarnation of the Holy Spirit in the Christian soul or in the seer. But it’s the activity, the energy, which is the grace, the uncreated grace. The grace is the uncreated energy of God. that has entered into the disciples at this point and opens up their eyes in a sense, enables them to see things that they couldn’t see with their ordinary eyes. Well, I’m on the one St. James says, because you don’t know how to ask. There’s that, right? But it’s also because, you know, your child might ask you for, your 10-year-old might ask you for an automobile, and it’s like, well, you don’t know how to drive. So God is not going to give us something that’s going to destroy us or that we’re not capable of using, because that would make us even more culpable, right? Okay, I gave you all of these things, and look what happened. Now what? So if we’re not ready to… make the right use of that grace, if we’re not capable of it yet, if we’re not… Another way to think about this, again, I mean, actually these are very biblical ideas, even though they’re presented in a different kind of an idiom. I mean, this idea of the Spirit coming now, and I mean, St. Paul says, you know, it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. What does he mean by that? That this other agency, this other agent, this other actor, this divine presence now has come and… occupied his being in a sense. And now Paul Paul’s thoughts are Christ’s thoughts, and Paul’s words are Christ’s words, and Paul’s feelings are Christ’s feelings, and so on. There’s this kind of union of the two. And Paul also sees the uncreated light, and he’s raptured to the third heaven, and so on. So all of that, thanks to the gift of God’s grace, which is, as you said, the uncreated energy of God. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. No, there’s no, I mean… This is one of the many paradoxes in the tradition. The Trinity is one and three, right? And grace and salvation is unmerited and totally gratuitous and freely given, but you’ve got to work really hard too, right? There’s so many paradoxes like this.

So there’s a question tomorrow night that actually deals with the reception of grace, because grace always works in conjunction with free will. God never overrides the free will. That’s the problem, as we said earlier. God has done everything he possibly can. What more do you want me to do? It’s up to you now to appropriate the grace that I have made available to you in Christ. It’s we who simply, stubbornly and self-willfully refuse to actualize it. Because we have other pursuits. I’ll do it next year or that sort of thing. Any other comments about this before we move on? All right. The second paragraph. They were taught, these are the disciples still, and again, it doesn’t say they were taught, that’s passive again, too. Note that the use of the passive verbs here. They were taught in a hidden way, that the radiance that shone with dazzling rays of light from the Lord’s face, completely overwhelming the power of their eyes, was a symbol of his divinity, which transcends intellect, sensation, Being and knowledge. And so the light that they experienced overwhelmed them and they knew that this was an expression, in a sense, of the divinity itself, which is beyond everything. Mind, sensation, existence, everything. And here’s a nice transitional passage. From the observation that he had neither form nor beauty, and from the knowledge that the word had become flesh, they were led to the understanding of him as one more beautiful than the sons of men, who was in the beginning and was with God and was God, and we have a little subordinate clause in here, and by means of the theological negation that extols him as being beyond all human comprehension, they were raised up cognitively to the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. So they’re overwhelmed, they’re presented with something that’s beyond their capacity, but God gives them the grace, gives them the capacity to have this experience, and there’s a cognitive moment here too. They actually learn something and they go from this lower knowledge of Christ as a mere man, or someone who had neither form nor beauty. This is the passage from Isaiah. And from the knowledge that the Word had become flesh, they are raised up to this understanding of Him as being glorious and beautiful and more beautiful than the sons of men and in the beginning. And this is a manifestation of the glory of the divine in Jesus Christ. There’s nothing more remarkable than this, and this is what they are experiencing now. And we’ll ignore the bit about the theological negation, because we’ll come back to that in a later paragraph. They were also taught, and here’s where the garments come in, they were also taught that the garments, which became dazzling white, convey a symbol. First, there are two altogether. A symbol that is of the words of Holy Scripture, which at that moment became bright, clear, and transparent to them, grasped by the intellect without any dark riddles or symbolic shadows, and pointing to the meaning, there’s logos again, that lay concealed within them. And again, another subordinate clause, at which point the disciples received the perfect and correct knowledge of God and were set free from every attachment to the world and the flesh. We’ll say more about this, but the idea now is that the garments are the outer covering of the body. And in this case, they’re the garments of Christ. They become bright and radiant. And Maximus says that they are the symbols now of the words of Scripture. And second, the garments are symbols of creation itself, stripped of the soiled preconceptions of those who till then believed they saw it clearly, but who in fact were deceived and bound to sense perception alone, creation now appearing in the variety of the different forms that constitute it, all declaring the power of the Creator Word in the same way that a garment makes known the dignity of the one who wears it. He goes on to explain this, but the idea is not very complicated. We have the image of the garment, and the garment conceals or covers something else. And when the garment becomes bright or transparent or diaphanous, that which lies beneath it is revealed. And we have this double symbolism. The garments are the words of scripture or creation itself, both in a purified sense. Is that clear? He’ll go on to explain this in the next paragraph. For both of these interpretations are appropriate for the word, because in both cases he has been rightly covered with obscurity for our sake. Remember last night, or two nights ago, about John the Baptist and being in the womb? That’s part of that idea about being covered with obscurity. Covered with obscurity for our sake, so that we should not dare to approach unworthily what is beyond our comprehension, namely the words of Holy Scripture, for he is the word, or creation, for he is the creator, fashioner, and artisan. From this it follows that whoever wishes blamelessly to walk the straight road to God stands in need of both the inherent spiritual knowledge of Scripture and the natural contemplation of beings according to the Spirit. In this way, anyone who desires to become a perfect lover of perfect wisdom will be able to show what is only reasonable, namely that the two laws, the natural and the written, the creation and scripture, are of equal value and equal dignity, that both of them reciprocally teach the same things, and that neither is superior or inferior to the other. That’s an amazing statement to make. Any questions at this point? Because I want to keep moving forward. So either you understand it completely or it’s just so perplexing and bewildering.

Hopefully it’ll come a little clearer through this next paragraph. So now he goes on to talk about what he calls these two laws, the law of creation and the law of scripture. Now the natural law, on the one hand, is to the highest possible degree evenly directed by reason. Here he means sort of divine reason. So that creation is ordered and directed by reason. Through the marvelous physical phenomena that we see, and really who can look, who can come to a place like Alaska and not believe that, and fail to realize that there’s some mind, there’s some intelligence behind all of this, right? And there’s a logoy behind the individual beings and there’s a mind even behind that. So the natural law is directed by reason through these physical phenomena, which are naturally interconnected. So that the harmonious web of the universe is contained within it, contained within the natural law, like the various elements in a book. So the world is like a big book, right? For letters and syllables, it has physical bodies, the objects in the world. These being the first things that come to our attention. Since they are proximate and particular, having acquired density through the conjunction of various qualities. That simply is a way of saying that different things have formed by interaction with other things and have acquired the shapes that they have. So it’s got letters and syllables. It also has words, which are more universal than these, and are further removed. Now think about what he’s saying, that the letters and the syllables are the things we see every day. The tree, the bird, the river, the mountain, the cloud, those are the letters and syllables of the book of creation. Now if I scattered a series of letters and syllables on the floor in front of you, they wouldn’t add up to much, would they? It could be like nonsense poetry, or what does it all mean? Just letters and syllables, right? These are the things that are most immediate to us. Just like when you open up a book and you start to read, the first thing you see are the actual, like a child has to spell out a word or sound out a, right? That’s the first. But it also has words, he says, which are more universal than these, more general, right? And are further removed from us and much more subtle because the words now are the meaning of the thing. This is the inner meaning of the letters and the syllables and the trees and the birds and the mountains and so on. Further removed and much more subtle. And it is from these that the word who has wisely inscribed them, the Logos has written these letters and syllables and words into the world, who has wisely inscribed them and is himself ineffably inscribed within them. It is through all of these things that he is rendered legible when he is read by us, communicating to us solely the concept that he exists and not what he is. We can know from reading the book of creation, we can know that God exists. But what exactly he is, that the book doesn’t tell us. It can’t really. That he exists and not what he is. For through the reverent combination of multiple impressions gathered from nature, he leads us to a unitary idea of the truth, allowing himself to be seen by analogy through the visible things as their creator. Now let’s be clear about this. Now he’s not talking about what a scientist does. He would say that a scientist is still studying nature on a very superficial level, right? The scientist is dealing with maybe the letters and the syllables and trying to make sort of connections between them. He’s talking about a spiritual contemplation of nature. He’s talking about the grace of the Holy Spirit that enables somebody to intuit or to realize or to experience the presence of God in creation. So it’s not something that anybody can do by going outside and walking through the park. It’s much deeper than that. I mean, you can walk out on the park and have a great experience, right? Because that’s God’s creation too. But that’s still superficial. That could be a very human thing, a romantic thing, or what have you, right? A New England transcendentalist kind of thing, right? People like Thoreau or Walden and… It’s not that. It’s not that. It’s something much profound. It’s this. With purified eyes and with a purified heart and with a purified mind, stripped of the veils of the passions, the glory of God that is inherent in the created world now becomes manifest to me. And the image that he uses, the analogy that he uses is that of a book. There’s meaning out there. There’s intelligibility out there. Because it comes from God and God himself, he says, has not only put the words in this book, but has also inscribed himself in those words. Any questions about this or comments or just something I could say that might make it clearer or expressions of I see some doubt or perplexity on some faces or… It’s good to be perplexed sometimes. We were talking about this last night with my brother and he said, my brother said, I didn’t get it all, he said, but I got the idea that our tradition is just so rich and so sophisticated. It’s really beyond anything I ever, so that was lesson enough for me, he said. Please, I don’t pretend to understand all of this either. This is, as I said at the start of all of this, this is by far the most difficult theological material that we have in our tradition, so don’t feel bad if it doesn’t make sense or it’s not immediately clear. But I assure you that it’s actually much simpler than some of the high-flying language might make it sound. I think that, which is why the image of the book is helpful. So, okay. Can we move on? Yes. Oh, I’m sorry. Moses, I didn’t see you. Yeah? Ineffably is the adverb here and it simply means in a manner beyond speech.

Inexpressibly, in a manner beyond. There’s an interesting sort of paradox here because we have the logos of the word kind of shaping creation as letters and syllables and words. And then inscribing himself in those words ineffably, right? So it’s a qualification, it’s a safeguard, it underscores just the inherently… maybe the word mystery or mysterious is overused, but it does express a reality. And there is, if anything is mysterious, it’s the presence of God in creation. So how exactly the world comes into being and how exactly God has, the Logos has inscribed himself in the letters and the syllables and the words of God. This can’t be uttered. We were talking about the incarnation last night. Who can say, St. Maximus says somewhere else, who can say how God becomes man and continues to be God? It’s just beyond, even if you knew the answer, it would be outside of human speech. It’s something outside, it’s not available to human language. We don’t, it’s not, it’s something impossible for us to… does that answer your question? Okay, yes. I see we have one up front though, yeah. The heavens declare the glory of God and so on. Night speaks to night. This verse actually comes up somewhere else, not here. But that would be an orthodox interpretation of that psalm verse. The heavens declare the glory of God. I saw at least two or three questions. Yes. We’ll get to that. That’ll come up explicitly, I think, in the next paragraph. So if you can be a little patient, we’ll go into that. I didn’t want to open it up because it’s coming up later. So, yes. He says, allowing himself to be seen by analogy through visible things as they’re created. Yeah. What does he mean by analogy? There’s a whole book in there. But simply, think back to what we said last night. He allows, analogy here means in the appropriate measure, in the right proportion. So he allows himself to be seen, let’s say, in a drop of water, in a way appropriate to the way the divinity can be manifested through a drop of water, or through a mountain, or do you follow me? So that’s what that means. In a manner that’s in proportion to each being. Because the heavens declare the glory of God in one way, and the mountains maybe in another way, and that’s what that by analogy means. And that’s actually a term that he gets from Dionysius. And it’s italicized here because it’s actually from the Book of Wisdom. I don’t have the citation, but it’s actually a biblical phrase. It was there, yes, of creation, yeah. No, I think the way you described it is perfectly fine and accurate. He’s using a particular metaphor here, that of the book and that of words, and there are other ways to talk about it, but this is the way. And I think when you… metaphors condition concepts and ideas. So when you talk about a book and words and meaning, you’re talking about intelligibility. He’s not talking about life or being or wisdom. The idea here is sort of legibility, readability, that the word can be read. It’s the metaphor of the book that’s sort of central here. Why? Because he’s making the comparison with scripture, right? But it would apply to all the other sorts of notions that you mentioned. That creation is not extrinsic to God or separated from God, but God has somehow infused himself in beings, as Maximus would say, along the lines that we sort of sketched out last night. One more, was there one more hand back there or? No, okay, all right. Okay, let’s creep forward a few inches more. So that was on the one hand. The written law on the other hand. The written law on the other hand. Lost my place. Okay, the written law on the other hand. The knowledge of which is acquired through study. Now let’s not misinterpret the Greek word study here, meleti. This is not academic study. This is not signing up for a course in an introduction to the New Testament. That’s not what he means. This is not intellectual study. We wouldn’t want to exclude that ultimately from the study of this kind. This is spiritual study. This is devotional reading of scripture. This is not academic study of scripture. It’s not an intellectual, critical, deconstruction of, or historical, archaeological reading of scripture. It’s a spiritual reading of scripture. It’s more like prayer or meditation than it is study in the sense that we use it. I just wanted to clarify that. So the written law, by which he means scripture, okay, on the other hand, the knowledge of which is acquired through study is itself like another world, constituted by all that has been wisely uttered within it, having its own heaven. Earth and what comes between them, by which I mean ethical, natural, and theological philosophy. That’s sort of Maximian shorthand. Ethical philosophy means the moral life, the virtual life. Natural philosophy is the contemplation of nature that we just spoke about. And theological philosophy is not theology in an academic sense, but it’s knowledge of God. So it’s the whole gamut of human experience from the practical and the ethical and the moral up through higher virtues and then the mind and knowledge of God. The whole Bible is a world that contains the fullness, in a sense, of human experience. Proclaiming, and here’s Moses’ new word, proclaiming the ineffable power of the one who has spoken through it, showing that by virtue of their reciprocal interchange, the one law is identical to the other. That the law of creation is identical to the law of scripture. So that the written law is potentially identical to the natural law, and the natural law is by its permanent condition identical to the written law. I don’t fully understand that sentence myself,

So I need to keep thinking about that. Both laws simultaneously reveal and conceal the same word. The one through written words and whatever is visible, and the other through ideas and whatever is hidden. For when we say that the words of Holy Scripture are garments, we understand from this that their inner meanings are the fleshes. I mean, you can say that in plural in Greek. It doesn’t sound good in English. But the sarkes, the fleshes of the word. And thus by means of the former we conceal, and by means of the latter we reveal. We’ll suffer through this more and then I’ll explain it. It’s really not that complicated. In the same way we can say that the forms and shapes of created things that appear within our vision are also garments, the fleshes of which are the principles according to which they were created. And likewise, by the former we conceal and by the latter we reveal. For the Word, who created the universe and established the law, the biblical law, is concealed in his manifestation, being invisible according to nature. And he is manifested through concealment, assuring those who are wise that by nature he cannot be apprehended. Now, what is all this about? Revelation, we think when something is revealed, we think, well, okay, the curtain is drawn back, and out comes the object to be revealed, and we see it. Now, he’s complicating that. He’s saying that revelation is actually a concealing of something, and that the concealing… so what does he mean by that? I thought I had a… does anybody have a tissue? A clean one, preferably. If we’re talking about a physical object in the world, if I said to you that I have something that I’m hiding here behind the lectern, and now I reveal it to you, right? So that revelation is pretty obvious. I mean, something that was hidden is now manifest. Something that was unseen is now seen, and you can see it. There’s no more hiding, right? And that’s how we normally think about revelation, right? But that only works, if you think about it, that only works when the thing being revealed is a finite physical object, right? That’s not what God is. God is not a finite physical object. So things are more complicated, right? God, first of all, is invisible. How can the visible be made visible? How can that which is infinite appear within the finite? How can that which is eternal appear within time? How can that which is not bounded by space appear within, let’s say, a spatial moment? How can this happen? So if I said to you, I have something, so I have an invisible reality. Is there an invisible object in my hand? I’m holding it in my hand. You can’t see it because it’s invisible, right? What can I do that will enable you to somehow see what is invisible? Well, that’s where the garments come in, where it says that he clothed himself in human flesh. So if I took a cloth or a garment and I put it over that object, well, the garment would show us the form of that invisible object, wouldn’t it? So what did I do? By concealing that invisible reality, I simultaneously revealed it to you. Because now you can see, now you can know something about it. Now the shape of it, now the form of it, right, is made apparent to you. So that’s how every revealing is a concealing, and how every concealing is a revealing, right? It takes a while to get used to the logic, but it’s actually very basic, and it’s the only thing appropriate to God, who is infinite, eternal, and invisible. Not capable of entering into our field of vision, right? So he goes on about that quite a bit, and if you don’t… I mean, the handkerchief trick helps, right? But it’s actually a modern European philosopher, Martin Heidegger. I don’t know if you ever read Maximus the Confessor, but he knew Aquinas and other writers and actually has a whole understanding of creation as revelation and concealment. It all comes out of the Christian tradition. So there is that paradox. There is that paradox in terms of when the divine reveals itself, it can only do so by somehow misrepresenting itself in a way, by appearing in a form that we are actually able to see. And it shows us something which is true, it’s not a lie, it’s not false, it’s true, but it doesn’t exhaust the reality of the divine that has presented it to itself. It’s what we’re able to see. I’m sorry, who’s speaking? I can’t see you. Oh, I’m sorry, yes, go ahead. Well, that’s true in some circumstances, but if we think about the body of Christ as the veil that somehow covers his divinity, and that body is the thing that gives God a human face in Christ. I mean, just think about that, right? It’s that veil of the flesh, in a sense, the garment of the flesh that enables us to see the face of God, but that’s his body. That’s nobody else’s flesh. That’s nobody else’s body. So it’s not… What was the word that you used? I’m sorry, by saying what it’s not. No. He is not. God is not the body. God is not flesh. But that is his body. So it’s true and it’s real and it’s his. It doesn’t misrepresent him, I mean, in any kind of fundamental way. So any comments on this or questions? Yes? Is the garment then? Well, he said, everything in the world is a garment. All the physical forms in the world, these are garments beneath which, right, and through which the divine discloses itself to us. The words of scripture are garments, right, that clothe these spiritual or intelligible ideas. The body of Christ is that garment. We were talking about this the other day. In the iconography of the Annunciation, what is the Virgin doing at the moment of the Archangel’s arrival? Not according to the Gospel of Luke, but according to the icon. Anybody know? I’m sure you do. She’s doing what you’re doing, actually. She has a spool of thread. She’s knitting.

She’s actually got a clump of wool, and she’s pulling out a strand. She’s producing thread. What is she producing the thread for? The curtain, what curtain? The veil of the temple. She’s spinning thread for the veil of the temple. This comes from an apocryphal gospel, but the Mishnah actually calls for a series of maidens, young maidens, which means virgins, to periodically produce the coverings and the cloths and the fabrics and the textiles for the temple. So if the Theotokos is spinning that thread to produce that curtain, what happens to that curtain? What happens to it? It’s torn in two. When? At the same moment that the body is rent, right? Ripped open by, right? And where does all this come from? Ultimately, the letter to the Hebrews, where it talks about Christ as the great high priest going through the outer curtain, which is, it says, his flesh. So if the letter to the Hebrews allegorizes the temple curtain as the flesh of Christ, now how does that work? Because, again, the God of Israel is invisible. You can’t see him. But if we put this big curtain up there, we all know that he’s behind there. So that curtain, the veil of the temple, both conceals and reveals. And that’s a type of the incarnation. Because he is, she weaves a veil of flesh for him through her body, through her tissue. And modern science, by the way, continues to talk about the production of DNA on a mitotic spindle. The histology, which is the study of tissue, histos is the word for the loom and for spinning and weaving. We still have those fibers and threads and so on. We still have that language in our scientific literature. So at the moment of conception, she begins to weave and spin this veil of flesh to create a garment for the invisible divinity so that God can enter into our space and time and world. So it’s all there in that little tiny piece of thread that she’s holding in the icon of the Annunciation. Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Father Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 6. The Theology of St. Maximus Part 2. The Ambigua. All right, and now we get to the apophatic negation. This is paragraph 5. We’re almost done, so it’s not so bad. Let us then make manifest what is hidden by means of an apophatic negation. So that means that I can make God manifest to you in a certain sense by describing God as light, right? Light is a physical image. I mean, it’s a symbol. It’s something in our created world. And I can say something real and true and positive about God by describing him to you as light. And indeed, Christ himself says, I am the light of the world. But God isn’t physical light. God isn’t a collection of photons. I mean, God isn’t the sun in the sky. He’s something beyond physical light. So the light, in a sense, reveals to us something about God, just as if I said God is Life, or God is the door, or Christ is divine, right? These are veils, in a sense, that are verbal veils, that reveal something about Christ. He is the door, he is the vine, he is the way, he is the road, he is the resurrection, he is the life, he is the light, he is all those things.

They reveal him or they reveal aspects of Christ’s being to us, but they also conceal in a sense because he’s not a door, he’s not a vine, he’s not a road. So let us make manifest what is hidden by means of an apophatic negation. That’s just a way of saying that there is the symbol, there is the garment, and it does convey something positive and true and real, but it’s not the whole story. And for some people it could become a surface manifestation devoid of any kind of depth. So that has to be negated, that we can’t get stuck on the forms and the words and the syllables and all that sort of thing. They’re there, we need them, they don’t go away. But they’re not opaque, they’re not intended to be dead ends or limits. And this whole idea of passing through from the one level to the other, from flesh to the spirit, from letter to the spirit. You don’t get stuck on the letter. So let us not get stuck and let us reveal what is hidden by negating it, by transcending it in our mind. Yes, the image of Christ as the divine is one of the many beautiful images of Christ in the New Testament. Earlier there was talk about agriculture and growing. That’s a very beautiful and a very powerful image. But that is not the limit of the divine reality. That’s not an exhaustive description or expression or characterization of the divine reality. So that has to be transcended. It says something true about Christ, but it doesn’t say everything about him, because we are finite, he is infinite, and so on. We need these forms and symbols and letters and so forth as a way to keep moving towards him. So, leaving aside every capacity to picture the truth as part of the negation, let us leave aside every capacity to picture the truth by means of figures and signs, being lifted up in silence, I suspect the ineffability, being lifted up in silence by the power of the Spirit from written words and visible things to the word himself. And he’s talking about a moment of mystical contemplation here. Or let us conceal what has been manifested by giving it positive names and attributes. Let us conceal it by naming it. Let us call it light, let us call it road, let us call it door. We can do one or the other; we can negate, we can remove the veil or put the veil on. We can focus on the word or focus on the spirit. And one is a revealing and one is a concealing.

We might not need to read the rest of this because otherwise this will be like the Greeks or the Jews, both of whom are incapable of understanding this because the Greeks can only see the superficial, beautiful appearances of things because they’re all about beauty and form and loveliness and all of that. And the Jews are just sort of fixated on the actual letter, and are incapable of seeing the spirit. That might sound anti-Semitic, but it’s Pauline again. It’s the idea of the letter killing, but the spirit giving life. And toward the end of that paragraph,

where it says, for like Greeks and Jews, it’s a little more than halfway down, paragraph 5. For like Greeks and Jews, we will have failed to discern the word, who for our sake became like us and came to us through the body, and likewise grew thick in syllables and letters, in both cases because of the senses, because of our senses, because we are sense-perceptible creatures, and we need the letters and the words and the forms and the figures and everything else,

because of the senses, which had all but absorbed our capacity for higher intellection. This is why the divine apostle says, the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. For when the letter is desired only for itself, or when the surface is desired for itself, or whatever it might be, it tends to kill the indwelling word in those who are subject to such desire. Just as the beauty of creatures, creations, when not beheld for the glory of their creator, inevitably deprives the beholders of their rational devotion to the word. So if you get fixated on the surface, if you get stuck on the words and can’t see the spirit behind the letter, if you get fixated on surface appearances and can’t see the depth of things, you will, he says, actually kill the indwelling word that is within you.

Deprive yourself because rational devotion, that’s from scripture, this logiki means spiritual really devotion to, because you’re all about appearances. And we have a little bit left and then we’re done, so we’ll just read six and I think that’ll be enough for today. So therefore it seems to me that as rational beings we must necessarily take thought for the body of Holy Scripture which is far superior to the garments, the garments of the words, the bodies, the meaning, by which I mean its inner meanings, which are divine and exalted, as well as for the inward aspects of creation, and so hasten by means of reason to the divine reason. For he himself says that the soul is more than food, and the body is more than clothing. Clever, huh?

Otherwise, there may come a time when we are caught having nothing, since in our urge to possess these things we failed to take hold of the Word who exists and brings all things into existence, and so find ourselves like that Egyptian woman who grasped only the garments of Joseph, completely failing to attain intercourse with the object of her desire. So how clever to bring in the body is more than clothing. So it’s not the clothing or the garments, it’s the body. Not the outer, it’s the inner. Otherwise we’ll be like the woman in the Old Testament who grabbed onto the garments and lost the body.

It’s an ingenious kind of gathering of these scriptural loci. So to recapitulate, we have this extraordinary doctrine in which creation and scripture are sort of two… What’s the word I want? Two equal in a sense, right? Orders, or really worlds in a way, both of which are manifestations of Christ, of the Word, for those who have the eyes to see, for those who are able to, through ascetic practice, through struggle, through purification, with God’s grace, who can look past appearances, see beyond appearances, and to know the presence of God that… dwells within scripture and that dwells… think about an icon for you. What is an icon? Right? Icons are not depictions of the physical surfaces of human beings. They’re not attempts to reproduce what the physical eye sees. Photography was invented in the mid-19th century. We now have photographs of individuals that have been canonized as saints. It’s a photograph of Saint Nectarios, a photograph of Saint Silouan, etc. We do not use those in church. We don’t put them on the icon screen, right? Because even though these are photographs of saints, they are still photographs of their mortal, corruptible bodies. And that’s the surface. That’s the surface appearance. That’s the garment in a sense. And what the church gives us in the icon is not the surface, but the depth. It gives us a spiritual vision. It gives us the image of that person transformed by the Holy Spirit. So it doesn’t give us the garment, it gives us the body, it doesn’t give us the letter, it gives us the spirit. It doesn’t give us the fallen outward physiognomy, it gives us the spiritual character of the person. So the church in its wisdom knows, okay, not everybody is sharp enough to see these things, right? Because we’re busy, we’re distracted, we’re sinful, we’re filled with passions. But look, you walk into the church, why is everything different in the church? Why is everything different in the church? The language that we use, the music that we use, the architecture is different, the iconography is different, the music is different. We don’t have secular tunes or secular architecture or secular, none of that stuff. Everything has been transformed. Everything, as if the church is saying, this is what the world looks like if you had the spiritual eyes to see it.

We don’t, in the same way that we don’t offer, we don’t pluck grapes off the trees and put them on the… even the grapes are transformed into wine. We don’t take sheaves of wheat and drop them on the altar table. Those are transformed, everything is transformed. And the logic of the transformation is to spiritualize whatever is being transformed. And so the simplest example for this is if you go to the Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople. You have these massive marble columns on the main floor of the church with these huge capitals on top of them. They must weigh a couple of tons. I mean, they’re granite or marble or whatever they are. But the carver’s art has transformed these huge blocks of stone by drilling deeply into them and putting floral patterns on them. And you look at the thing, and it looks like a basket of lace, right? It doesn’t look like a heavy, dense, inert block of stone anymore. It looks like you could bounce it on your hand, right? And the whole aesthetic of that church, by the way, is designed to create this impression. I’ll give you one more example. Go back to the board here. It’s one of these magic blackboards. You write on it at night and you close the doors and you open them in the morning. But having tried to make a joke, I find myself without a magic marker. Oh, there’s one here too. So just one more example because maybe it helps concretize some of this, no pun intended. On the lower level of, on the first level of the Church of St. Sophia, you have, for example, kind of an arcade with a row of, these are actually columns with the capitals, with all the carving on them. Now if you look at older Roman and Greek architecture, you rarely had a second level, but when you did, the second level of columns just went right on top of the lower level because of the stress and the weight and the structural mechanics and everything else. Rather ungainly looking to have column on top of column on top of column. But if you look, this is not what they did in St. Sophia. I should actually make this better for us to see. We’ll just do it like this so it’s simpler. They put the second row of columns right here. In other words, where the eye would expect this to be the weakest part of the structure, they put the second row of columns. And this is the way it goes all the way up. So it creates this impression. I mean, it doesn’t make sense in a way. It’s illogical to place these columns on top of these spaces. And it’s all done through architectural, I don’t want to say trickery. But there are counterweights and piers and, right, the real support, these are not, these columns are not actually resting on those surfaces. They have counter, there are piers that actually hold them up. But when you look at the thing, it doesn’t look like the building goes from the ground up, it looks like it’s sort of dropped down from above. Anyway, the whole aesthetic of the art of the Orthodox Church is precisely this attempt, the iconographer or the artist or the carver, attempts to discern the spiritual potential within matter and through his or her art to make that manifest, to bring that out.

That’s a simple, maybe artistic way of thinking about the logoi of creation. Anyway, I think we ended a little early, so there’s time for questions, but are we okay? Yes. No, no. It’s a kind of a crude analogy, but it’s a helpful one. There’s an architect, and he’s going to build a house. And before he starts to build, he has an idea of the house in his mind. There’s an image of the house in his mind. Anybody who’s an artist who has to draw or paint usually starts with some idea in their mind. And then the struggle is to somehow actualize or reproduce on paper or with paints the idea that you had in your mind, and of course matter is difficult, it doesn’t yield quite so easily to your thoughts, right? The pencil point breaks, the paper tears, the paint spills, things happen, it doesn’t quite correspond to it. But the architect has this idea of the house in his mind, and that idea, in a sense, that would be the little logos, the logoi, sort of like the blueprint of the thing. It’s the idea of you in a sense. It’s the ground of your being in God. It’s also the cause of your existence in God. It has a causal relationship to you, the effect of that cause in a sense. In the same way the blueprint is on one level the cause of the house. Sort of the formal cause they would call it. So the resurrected body, the body of the house is separate now. The house collapsed. The house got old over time, started sagging here and there, and the roof fell in and they got knocked down. The resurrected house now will be rebuilt, right? And scripture talks about the body as the tent, it’s the dwelling, it is the house in a sense. It will be rebuilt, refashioned, transfigured. The very molecular elements will be completely transformed. It’ll still be you, it’ll be your body, the matter that makes up you, right? I’m sorry? No, the same blueprint. But now it’ll be utterly perfect. Because the logos is our way of talking about the Logos, it’s like saying, would it be the same logos, right? You wouldn’t ask that question. Because the Logoi are the Logos sort of self-multiplied in a way. It’s the one made many so that there can be many. But within the Logos himself, there’s no differentiation. All of those Logoi, we would say, are present in him uniformly, in a singular, simple way. There’s no difference or composition or complexity in God. But when seen from the point of view of creatures, like those rays of the sun that I spoke about last night that give light to everyone and warmth and so on. So,

Yes, Herman. That’s a really good question. Earlier we heard a lot about individuality, right? Which is something highly prized in American culture. Don’t you dare try to take it away from me, right? Even though we all wear the same Gap t-shirts and we all pretend we’re all so different, but we’re all the same in such horrible kinds of ways, right? Where the same thoughts are impressed in our minds by the same two or three channels that are owned by the same corporations. All of our tastes are dictated by the fashion industry and what individuality? God help you if you’re different, right? So there’s a lot of deception going on here. You go to a lot of foreign countries, you see real characters in these places because their culture is not subject to the kind of culture machine. If you’re a kid in high school, you’ve got to wear these kinds of clothes, you’ve got to have these kinds of sneakers, you’ve got to have this kind of a haircut, you’ve got to listen to this kind of music. What individuality? The kid who might like classical music because he’s a real individual, he’s going to get beat up in the schoolyard or something. But you’re asking a really good question. Because if we say that there is a logos for humanity, that there’s sort of a single idea of humanity, and that if all human nature is one, we all share the same nature, there’s this tremendous interconnection, this tremendous unity between us, where do the differences come in? I don’t have a perfect answer for you, but I will say that many of the things that differentiate us have to do with our sinfulness. I’m fatter than you are because I like to eat, right? That makes me different than you, but it’s not a good thing, right? So if you think about a lot of the things that distinguish us, it has to do with our corruption, our sinfulness, our weaknesses, which sometimes we try to turn into virtues. Which is why, again, you look at the icons of the saints, and people say, oh, they all look the same, right? Of course, there’s a theological reason for that, because they are all inspired and illumined and directed and guided by one and the same Holy Spirit. There’s a unity there. So, where do the differences come in? I mean, St. Paul talks about different charisms and different graces. We all have different vocations. And I mean, there are differences, but the things that immediately and superficially present themselves to us as differences are either totally superficial or the result of some sin or some weakness or some passion, right? And a lot of people like, everybody wants to be special. Everybody wants to distinguish themselves. Everybody wants to stand out. And they end up being very affectatious or doing things that are not even natural in a way, right? And that’s prideful. That’s egotistical. That wouldn’t be a proper difference. That would be a sinful difference. So you must know the faith. Let’s hold your thought. From one of the discourses of Dorotheus of Gaza, it’s a very well-known sort of metaphor, and it’s as if God is the center point of a circle, and we’re all on the perimeter of the circle, or the diameter, whatever they call it, or the perimeter, circumference, thank you. And the closer everybody moves to God, they also move closer to each other. From one point of view, human difference would increase to the extent that we move away from God. We have all this politics of identity now, in which every little subgroup and subculture is screaming and yelling to be recognized for what? Because you dress like this, or you wear your hair like that? That would be like me taking the traditions and practices of my family and trying to impose them on the United States. I mean, it’s ridiculous, right? Those things separate us. Too much multi-whatever is gonna come at the cost of… Too much individual liberty comes at the cost of community life. You’re all part of this community because you make sacrifices to be here. You give up certain rights voluntarily, freely, to live here, to be here. But if on the other hand, I don’t want to give up my rights, I don’t want to give up my liberties, I want to be an individual, I want to do my thing, well, community breaks down at that point. So the closer we move to God, you cannot move closer to God without at the same time moving closer to everybody else. A person who thinks they’re praying to God and they love God and they have lousy relations with the people around them, there’s a problem there.

So, Well, that’s a good question. It’s related to what Herman just said because again, so much of what we take for personality really has to do with our psychological and emotional life, and a lot of that is just our passions. Right? So we often mistake, we misidentify ourselves with our sinfulness. I have this habit, I have this tendency, I have this personality quirk, I have this character, that’s me. Is it? Is that how God intended you to be? Is that how you’re supposed to be? Maybe you’re confused. Maybe that’s not you at all. Maybe you don’t even know who you are, right? You’ve been led to think that this is what you are because this is what society said or your mother told you this or who knows what, right? It seemed like the right thing. What did I know? I was just a kid. So there’s a depth to us or a sort of spiritual height that we either fail to attain or fail to reach, and we end up in this kind of world of thoughts and negative images and moods. Daydreams and fantasies, and you go to the psychologist, that’s what they talk about, all that stuff. But is that really us? Again, go back to Paul in Galatians: it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me. And that’s terrifying because, oh, what’s going to happen to me? But that me is not you in the first place. I mean, God doesn’t come to destroy your identity. He comes to fulfill it. In other words, what’s the image of the grafting of the wild olive onto the cultivated olive? God doesn’t take oranges and try to graft them onto banana trees. I mean, the process is much more natural than that. So, again, a lot of what we take for personality is, again, sinfulness or pride. This is my personality. What is that? So, I had another thought though about Paul, not I who live but Christ who lives in me. I think that well, it has to do with what we said earlier about the activity of the Holy Spirit coming into the disciples, and there it is again. We saw that. They’re able to see God, so God actually is there to make us who we are, not to… Oh, I remember what it was. It’s from one of the catecheses of St. Simeon the New Theologian. And he’s saying something similar, and he was the abbot of a monastery, and he was speaking to his monks, and he was talking about the necessity to die, a spiritual death. Take up your cross, deny yourself. These are evangelical commandments, gospel commandments. To deny yourself… These are very difficult things. This is a form of death. I like these things. I’m attached to those things. I have these habits. I have to die to that stuff. Part of me has to die. And he hears people grumbling in the congregation. He says, what? You don’t want to die? You don’t want to die? He goes, that means you’re dead already. So often the life that we take to be our life is not a life. It’s a death. It’s a fallen life. It’s a life of passions, it’s a life of addictions, it’s a life of destructive behaviors. That’s not our life. That’s a deformation of our life. There’s not much you can do to fix that, as much as you can to sort of let it go and discover yourself, I mean, your real life in God.

Another image, when I went to the Holy Mountain, I was intrigued by it. Of course, this is going to be so obvious to all of you who live here with these great mountains. But I noticed there were always clouds, or a cloud on top of the mountain peak. How odd is that? What’s sort of causing that? And of course then, somebody told me it was very simple, that the warm water comes across the Aegean, hits the base of the mountain, it’s got nowhere to go, it goes up, and it forms these clouds on top of the mountain. So the mountain is kind of a weather maker. And the lesson from that is that the clouds in a sense are the thoughts in your mind. The negative thoughts, the dark thoughts. The accusatory voices, the insecurities, the fears, the paranoid thoughts, people are talking about me or whatever, all that stuff, those are the clouds. That’s the bad weather. And the problem we make is that we identify, we think the clouds are us, and we don’t realize that we’re the mountain. And over time what happens is those thoughts come, they come again, and we fixate on them. And we do that so often and so long that it all sort of hardens up there. I develop a way of thinking now. I get angry because I’m an angry person, because I have thoughts of anger and I act on them, right? What was initially a thought passing through my mind ends up becoming my personality in a way. He’s an angry guy, just stay away, right? But that was never me. That was never me. It’s what I either mistakenly became. It’s what I fought, it’s what I chose in my ignorance. I thought that I had to defend myself. Somebody insulted me, I had to strike back, whatever. That became a pattern, and now I’m a really angry guy, right? That’s not what I was meant to be. That’s what no human is meant. The church fathers say you have been given the capacity, the ability to be angry, never to be used against other human beings, but against the demons. You should be angry against sin and angry against the evil things that happen, but anger is never to be used against any other human being. And we know the destructive results of that sort of thing, right? So when you ask questions about personality and character, they’re very complicated because we’ve been taught to think otherwise about all of this. And psychology and all these things that are very confusing. I think that the higher life of the mind, the noose, the intellect, or the deeper life of the heart, this is lost to sociologists and psychologists and other kinds of theorists and your self-help gurus and your Oprah Winfrey types, and they’re all on the level of the emotions as far as I’m concerned. Just one big roiling lake of feelings. And that we dig, oh so how did that make you feel? When I came back to the seminary people, oh what does it feel like to be back here? But I’m like, I just haven’t thought about that, actually. I was called back here to do some work, and here I am. What do you mean, what does it feel like, right? I can tell you what I think about it, but am I supposed to have some sort of… In other words, I’m not saying, the other side of this is not to be insensitive. I’m not advocating a total sort of void of feeling. But neither are we to be swept away by feelings or swept away by emotions or blinded by this passion, blinded by love, blinded by whatever it is. That’s not a human life. That’s a God-given mind that is being led around by the stomach, let’s say. That’s a total inversion of the order.

Well, it’s a part of who we are. Why wouldn’t it be? Why wouldn’t it be? They’re part of our character, they’re part of our… a spiritual strength, that’s a gift from God to us. It’s probably built on either our success or even our failure that God has given us. Okay, that’s part of us now. It’s something God gives us as a gift. We didn’t invent it or create it, but… The other thing, since you mentioned that, this is another important topic, spiritual, we were talking about this last night with some folks sort of privately, I work with students and they get frustrated because they want to make progress. They get excited about New Testament Greek and, oh, I want to learn that. And they don’t realize that it takes years to learn that. So they sit down, they get a couple of books and they expect to see results right away. And after a few weeks or a month, they realize that they’re not making progress, they get disappointed, they give up. Or they go into the church and they hear the beautiful chanting, Oh, I want to, it’s partly prideful, I want to get up there and be a singer too. But it takes several years to learn the characters and the notes and the tones, and most of them give up. They have these dreams, but they don’t realize what it takes. And the spiritual life is like that too. It’s long, hard work. It takes a very long time, and the nature of real growth, even organic growth, biological growth, is such that it’s generally imperceptible. And the elder used to talk about this, he would say that one day you look in the mirror and you say, oh my gosh, when did my hair turn gray? Right? Or you look in the mirror and you say, oh my goodness, when did I get so fat? Right? You didn’t see it happening. So it’s even in human, natural, biological growth. It’s largely imperceptible to us. You don’t see yourself age. Where did these wrinkles come from? First they weren’t there, and now they’re all over the place, right? How did that happen? And I think real, genuine spiritual growth is imperceptible to us, both because that’s the nature of real growth, and also, and more importantly, I think God hides it from us. Because if I, assuming I had any virtues, if I could see them, that’s going to make me prideful, wouldn’t it? And then God’s gift to me would end up becoming a cause for sin. So I think God hides that stuff from us. I look at some of my students and some people, I just see the most beautiful ones. They think they’re all miserable and suffering. You kids are great, I say. It’s beautiful people and they don’t see that. They’re stuck on, again, they’re in the cloud somewhere, right? They’re stuck on some negative voice in their head telling them they’re not handsome enough or they’re not smart enough or they’re not likable or worthy of love. I don’t know what internalized all of this. I don’t see that. You’re very lovable, you’re very whatever smart, you’re very right. So there is that part of… so you just kind of do the work without expecting a reward in a way. You shouldn’t be looking for results in a way, right? As long as you know you’re in your community, you’re on the right track, that’s all you need to know, right? Let other people, let God judge, let others… so we We shouldn’t be looking to measure or to gauge. When you were a kid, you put the marks on the wall. You can’t do that with the life of virtue. And the other thing we said last night was that the more virtuous a person becomes, the more he or she recognizes what? His sinfulness. If I’m living in relative darkness, I can’t see the imperfections on my face. I can’t see the blemishes on my face. I can’t see what I really look like. I can have this idea that, hey, I look pretty good actually, don’t I? Look at me. But I step into the light now, and the closer I get to the light, the more now the imperfections become apparent. Well, I can think I’m a pretty holy guy, right? But now that I start to move close to the source of holiness, I realize, wait a minute now, right? What’s that great moment in the gospel where Jesus first encounters Peter with the catcher? He goes, go out and cast your nets again. Peter’s like, look, you’re a carpenter, we’re fishing, what are you telling us? But they go and they do it, right? So they go out, they throw the net over there, and it’s filled with fish. Peter realizes that he’s in the presence of not just anybody. And what is his response? What is his reaction? What does he say? It’s extraordinary. Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man. So that revelation of Christ’s divinity, of his grace, didn’t make Peter jump up and say, Hey, wow, everything’s so great. God is wonderful. No, oh my goodness now. So any true, real revelation of God is going to… Any true revelation of God’s holiness is going to include a revelation of the unholiness of the recipient of the revelation. You see with all the prophets. Woe is me, I’m a man of unclean lips, etc, etc. So real spiritual progress. I don’t mean it to sound dismal or depressing. Who would want to do that then, right? Who would want to get on the path that would only expose more blemishes and reveal more weaknesses. It doesn’t sound very tempting, does it? But with that… recognition of our inability, with the recognition of our weakness, also comes God’s grace. And we live no longer for ourselves. And we live the life of Christ that has been given to us. And that’s so much more wonderful and so much more beautiful and so much more, there’s no words for it, right? Than anything I could have done or I could have had. Even if my life was a good one, this is still so much, so infinitely superior to that. So it’s real humility, it’s real humility. And that’s the humble to whom God goes, right? He who humbles himself will be exalted, but the one who puts himself up, down he goes.

Sorry, that was a bit of an extended kind of commentary on a question, but I think these are, I mean, I work with a lot of younger people, 20s and that sort of thing, and… Everyone just seems so confused about their inner life, about their thoughts, about their emotions, and we have this incredible technological culture, and we don’t have a language really to talk about our emotional life, our inner life, our personal life, and everyone’s afraid to reveal things, and you tell somebody that you hear voices in your head and they’re going to call the psychiatrist, right? So people don’t want to talk about dark thoughts or negative thoughts. I taught a class once about this sort of thing. This was in Cambridge. And one of the students said something, she goes, I was so happy. It was a text, it was a patristic text about thoughts and the whole problem of thoughts. She said, I was so relieved to read this because it was the first time that I had read anything that talked about this in a kind of a way that put me at ease. She goes, I walk to school every day and every day I cross a road that has a bridge on it. And for the last few weeks, every time I’ve crossed that bridge, this voice comes into my mind and it says, jump off. I thought, am I going crazy? I’ve never had any suicidal feeling. What was that? And this text told me all about that, what that was. I have another story about that, actually, even a little better. So that’s not the kind of thing you share with people. And I’m not saying we should. That’s the kind of thought you reveal to your spiritual father. You can talk about that over coffee with your friends. But if you don’t have an outlet, if all of those things build up inside of you, then you could have a problem. I remember the first time I went to the Holy Mountain, it was in, I think, 1980. I was still a student, and I knew someone that had, it was a young man who was becoming a monk, not in a big monastery, but in a little, like a cell, they call it, or a kathism, a little house, where there was a very holy old elder who had been on the Holy Mountain, I think since he was like 14 years old. He was now sort of 80, 85. So it was the old man, the disciple, the new disciple, and me. I was sort of the fly on the wall observing things and it was really just interesting for me to be in this situation. So we had to go to a neighboring monastery for something, I forget what, and we were on this trail. It was this incredible trail. It’s just sort of a ribbon of a path that was sort of skirting the outside edge of this cliff. And the path is probably just a foot and a half wide or something. And on one side was just the cliff face going up and then down a thousand feet into the Aegean. So it was pretty dangerous if you weren’t careful. And the old man, right, here I am now tiptoeing, holding the wall and the other guy. The old man’s like a mountain goat, just hopping over rocks and hoisting himself up. Because he grew up living in these mountains. So he went, and on the way back, the old man is first, the disciple is behind him, and I’m in the back. And at one point, nobody’s talking, we’re just walking. And at one point, the disciple says to the elder, he says, elder, he says, I just had a thought. that I would like to share with you and I thought I had read about this sort of thing oh yeah I’ve heard about the monks and they practice what they call the revelation of thoughts the sort of externalization of thoughts if you live in a small monastic house or community you simply the thoughts that go through your mind the dark thoughts the negative thoughts the silly thoughts the banal thoughts you just disclose them So I thought, oh wow, this is going to be great because I’ve read about this and here I am now seeing it for real. What’s he going to say? So he says, my child, he says, tell me, tell me what you’ve got to say. He says, the thought just came into my mind to throw you down the cliff. And you know what my reaction was? I didn’t say anything, but inside myself I was like, oh my God, don’t say that. Right? You see the impulse? Cover up. Don’t reveal. Right? Be dishonest. Right? Suppress. Those two ended up living together for many, many years. If every time he had that thought, he had to, right? That builds up. You can go nuts. So it was a, oh, the old man just kind of, the old man just laughed. He just chuckled. So he goes, that’s the devil, he said, telling you that because he knows he, because he wants to destroy you. And he’ll start to do that by making you destroy me. And if you kill me, he goes, you’re going to have a lot of serious problems after that. That was the end of it. Now, of course, you can’t do this in your place of work. Why is that so funny? I mean, you can live like that. That’s why there are monasteries. That’s why there are sort of spiritual relationships like that. There is a real freedom there. There’s no condemnation. There’s no judgment because they’re just thoughts, right? So this is not how we are. These things you share with your spiritual father or your confessor or you go to a monastery, you don’t share this with really anybody. You don’t reveal the secrets of your soul like that because it’ll create more problems than… then it’ll solve. Because what do you do? If I tell you the thoughts that I’ve had about you, I now plant thoughts in your mind. It doesn’t bring anything to it, and it just breathes. It just expands the problem. But this is why we have confession, and even short of sacramental confession, you can go to the priest and say, I’ve been troubled by these thoughts. That’s all. It’s not necessarily a sin. It doesn’t need absolution. You just get it off your chest. In the monastery, we have a rule. Everybody can’t go to the abbot ten times a day just to confess their thoughts, so we don’t really have that practice in the monastery. But the rule is this. They say, listen, if something is troubling you for two days, and if on the third day that thought is still there, he goes, go tell somebody. Find one of the priests or, right? But if it’s just for an hour or a day or two days, struggle with it. Try to put it out of your mind, right? It’s like a fire. Don’t throw yourself into it. Try to… Focus the spotlight of your attention somewhere else, not on the negative thought. But if it’s eating at you for three days, well then there’s a problem. Then you’ve got to go and expose it, open it up to the light.

It’s 3:30. We can end now. I’m happy to take more questions. I don’t want to tire you, but it’s entirely up to you. Yes. Okay. Well, maybe we need to define. Maybe when I say the word personality, I have certain things in mind, and maybe you have something very different in mind. So, when you hear or say the word personality, what does that mean? What does that express? What reality is that expressing? Okay, nothing more? I mean, right away we’re into quirks, you see? You still recognize your friend and me, that that person is different than another person, but you look through their faults and you just see who that person is. And I think that that’s what we want you to say, that God thinks of us, that He created us unique and has that vision for us. And that’s a little different than everybody else. We’re not just all the same, parts of the same. I think that’s a very good way of putting it. And again, I think the icons here are helpful because you look at the faces of the saints and they’re dispassionate. They’re not twisted by, they’re not jeering or howling or the mouths aren’t open. There’s a real repose there. There’s no agitation. There’s a kind of a deep inner spiritual tranquility. The whole body is sort of brought under the control of the spirit. There’s a real gentleness there, which is also a tremendous spiritual power. Okay, that’s the way the saints look in their icons. But if you look at icons of, let’s say, martyrs being tortured, their torturers look the same way. The church doesn’t depict the bad guys with hideous faces and right, they look more or less like the saints. Why? Because the church does this because it’s trying to teach us how to look at people. Like you said, I like that phrase to look past the passions. If we wanted to depict those torturers as in their passions, they would be like animals. They’d be fierce and growling and angry and bloodthirsty and so on. Those are the passions. Those are erased because these are God’s creatures. These are God’s creations. They are images of God. And the church looks and saints are people who can be with the most sinful of individuals and not even see any of that. That’s not easy to do, though. God looks at us and he sees past the passions, there’s no question of that. But when I look at myself, can I see myself, can I see you through that cloud? We’re our own worst enemies, right? If we would just get out of the way sometimes of ourselves, right? Absolutely. If you really love a friend or you love your spouse, you look past their feelings and you see that. But that person, I don’t look at everybody the same way because I know Annie and I know Tana, and I see them as individuals even though, and I take away, if I really truly love them, I pass all that. But I think what they were worried about is that. You’re saying that we’re all the same, we’re all the same, it’s just… Well, we’re all human beings, okay, and… But we still have a youthful… Absolutely, we share a common nature, we don’t share a common soul. Okay. And again, despite all of the differences that we emphasize, I mean, is French pain different from Peruvian pain? Right. I mean, so much of human experience is really deeply shared. We have a tremendous amount in common. Is each and every human being unique? Well, just the fingerprints tell us that, right? So absolutely, yes. But where exactly that uniqueness lies? I think that’s part of the mystery of what it means to be human. There’s an aspect to every human life that’s somehow inaccessible to us. You can live with someone for your whole life, and there’s still a mystery to you, right? Because as the image of God, there’s a mysterious depth to them too. And I think we very easily misidentify and mistake, attach ourselves to the wrong kinds of things, never knowing who we really are. I heard the name C.S. Lewis mentioned several times over the last couple of days. I’ve read a few things, I like them, but the most impressive for me, what’s this book called? Till We Have Faces. You know that one? That’s just such a great book. And it’s got a great title too. And it’s all about a quest for truth in a sense, and a quest to know the divine. And it’s set kind of in a kind of a mythical past. And the main character asks these questions and she says, well, if there are gods, why don’t they reveal themselves to us? If there are gods, why don’t they answer us when we put questions to them? And when they do reveal themselves to us, why is it so ambiguous? Why isn’t it clearer? This becomes a source of anger for her and it’s a difficulty. There’s almost a rejection of the notion of God. And at the very end of the novel, after much suffering and growth, she figures out the answer to her own question. She says, how could God answer me when I didn’t even know what to ask him? When the question that I was putting to him was false. When I hadn’t figured out who I am, how can I present myself to God and ask, when I don’t even know who I am? And how could God show his face to me? When I don’t even have my face yet. That’s why, till we have faces, right? So yes, there is something unique about us, but it’s hard to know what that is, right? I had a colleague a couple of years ago who I knew very well. It was family. I’d go over for dinner at the house, and I knew his kids, and we worked together. He was a really great guy. He died horribly of cancer. And the moment I heard that he died… I saw him about two days before he died, he was in the hospice. I went back a couple of days later, the room was empty, it was just so traumatic. But the moment that I found out that he died, it’s like that’s when I knew who he was. It’s almost like you’re watching a movie and it’s one frame after another and until you get to the end of this story you really don’t know what it’s ultimately all about. So as long as a life is still in progress, which way is it gonna go? I mean what form will it ultimately take? Good, bad, indifferent, up, down? I mean it’s unclear. But when it’s all over, when a period is put there, then you can see the life in its totality. And I realized what a remarkable… I mean some things about him just became so clear to me. I said how did I not know? How did I not see that? And I realized that I never knew him in that way, that there were important aspects of his personality that had just evaded me. So I don’t mean to minimize, certainly not to say there is no personality, but to stress that we often identify the wrong things as our personality, and it’s just very difficult. I mean, we can’t know ourselves apart from God anyway. So it’s only in coming to know God that we come to know who we are, and that’s a mystery and we’re a mystery. So there is a knowledge there, but it’s more a knowledge of experience in that relationship of…

Patristic Nectar Publications presents The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor by Father Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 7: The Theology of St. Maximus, Questions of Thalassios, Part 1. Welcome back, and welcome to those who might be here for the first time. Just so you know, there are two handouts tonight. We put some out on the seats, but not knowing how many people would be here, there might be some spaces where there are no handouts. So I think, Father, there are two. There’s a one-page double-sided handout, and there’s another one of multiple pages. They’re being distributed or circulated, so if you don’t have one, perhaps raise your hand. It’ll be a couple of minutes before we get to them, so I think we’ll be okay. Well, today is Sunday. That’s a blessed day. It’s the day that the Lord has made, and we should all rejoice in it. And it was truly a beautiful and wonderful experience to be able to worship with you. This morning the liturgy was vibrant and beautiful and alive and meaningful, and all worship, of course, is a beautiful thing, but especially the celebration of the Eucharist in which the Lord gives himself to us totally. The word Eucharist means thanksgiving, and it’s the only thing at the end that we can actually say to the Lord: thank you. Well, what else can be said? So, we want to be Eucharistic people, which means we want to live lives not of resentment, but of gratitude. There are a lot of things that might get us down or make us resentful, but we don’t want to become people of resentment. We want to become people of gratitude and of thanksgiving. It’s been a real blessing to spend these days with you, and for all of us, I think, to spend these days with St. Maximus. Despite his difficulties and the other sort of challenge that his language and thought presents us, the rewards, I think, are equally great. And, of course, this is just the beginning. We’ve only scratched the surface. And those who have the desire for more now, I think, hopefully have a sense of the direction in which to move. And tonight, alas, we are here to kind of conclude our seminar and to bid farewell, if only temporarily, to St. Maximus the Confessor. Yesterday we spoke about the Word of God, the Logos, as embodied in both creation and scripture. And last night the emphasis was on creation. The emphasis was on the presence of the Logos in creation, and I tried to stress the idea that according to St. Maximus and in Orthodox theology more generally, creation is a theophany. Creation is not something separate from God. It is a manifestation of God. It is the self-expression of God. It is the self-disclosure of God in and through the elements of the material world. And one of the intriguing images from the text that we read yesterday, and maybe some of you will reread that on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration, was this intriguing image of the world as a text, of the world as a text. And that the physical forms and the elements and the objects and the creatures and the beings in the world are the letters and the syllables and the words of this text that is the world. And it’s a striking thing, I mean, to look out the window and to think that the elements of creation, there’s a language out there, and that the meaning of the language is ultimately the Logos himself, right? Coming to us. manifesting himself through the diversity of the created order. So that was last night, and to a certain extent the night before that. Tonight we turn our attention to Scripture, to the presence of the Logos in

Scripture. And this brings us to the second major work by St. Maximus the Confessor, namely the Questions to Thalassius. We mentioned that on our second night when we went over the works, we had a close look at the Ambigua, this very difficult and complicated work, dealing more with cosmology and creation. The Questions to Thalassius now is a work that deals primarily with scripture. And Thalassius, as I mentioned a couple of nights ago, was the abbot of a monastery in North Africa where St. Maximus had settled. And sometimes Thalassius is called Thalassius the Libyan because the region that his monastery was in is in sort of modern-day Libya. And Thalassius and Saint Maximus were very good friends. They became very close during Maximus’ time in North Africa. And they corresponded because we know that we have letters between the two of them. And there was a lot of mutual respect. And Thalassius was older. So Maximus sort of looked up to him as the abbot and the priest and so on. But I think Thalassius recognized that St. Maximus was really the intellect and the philosopher, and this becomes clear in the correspondence. So at one point Thalassius writes to St. Maximus the Confessor and he sends him a list of 65 difficult passages from scripture. 65 difficult or obscure or ambiguous text or excerpts or passages from scripture, and he asks Maximus for two things. The first thing he asks for is for what Thalassius calls, big word coming, an anagogical interpretation. We’ll talk more about that in a minute, but what that essentially means, an anagogical interpretation is not a literal interpretation. Not a historical interpretation, but what we would call a spiritual interpretation. Something like allegory, we’ll say more about that in a moment too, but he asks for a spiritual interpretation. Anagogy, by the way, it’s actually an English word, believe it or not, if you look in certain dictionaries, I mean, it is there. Anago, ana and ago are the elements of it. It really means it’s an elevating interpretation. So he’s asking for an interpretation of scripture that will take him from the letter to the spirit. Something that will raise him up from the lower physical material level of things to the kind of higher spiritual level. That’s the first thing he asks for. The second thing he asks for, he’s asking a lot actually, but the second thing he asks for is that while you’re interpreting, clarifying and explaining these difficult passages in an elevating manner, I’d like you to focus on the spiritual life with special attention to the passions. So he’s asking for two things, but they turn out to be very closely interrelated, as we’ll see. So let’s just spend maybe a minute or two talking about each of these two things in turn. Scripture and its interpretation, and then the passions. Very, very quickly, just to frame because we want to get to the text as soon as we can.

So a couple of words about scripture. Scripture in a way is one of these problematic things because how does it relate to tradition, and the Protestants have their view and the Catholics have their view. Goodness, what is the Orthodox view? And it’s a bit of a stumbling block. It doesn’t need to be, doesn’t have to be, but we do have questions about it. We come from different traditions, we have different ideas and thoughts about it. And I’ll share with you, maybe you know this, but I’ll share with you something that I read about scripture once that really just dramatically changed my thinking about it. And it’s from St. John Chrysostom, who of course is recognized as the most beloved and the greatest interpreter of sacred scripture in the church. And if you want to find it, it’s available in English. It’s in the prologue, the opening homily to his homilies on Matthew, right? And if you know a little bit about St. John Chrysostom, you know that he was devoted to the Bible. He was more on the literal historical side of things and kind of a biblicist, not quite a fundamentalist, but he was much more inclined to the literal, plain sense of scripture. And that was my expectation. So you can imagine how surprised I was when I opened up the first page of these. It’s a commentary on Matthew, but there are sermons. Opened up the first sermon, and what does he say? What does he say? Totally took me by surprise. He says, it would be a good thing had we no need of the written scriptures. I’m like, what? Right? It would be a good thing had we no need of the written scriptures, but instead had the Holy Spirit living and active in our hearts. Because if you have the author of scripture living and active in your heart, you don’t need the written, right? So it would be a good thing if we had no need of the written scripture, but if we had instead the Holy Spirit living and active in our hearts. But because we lost the grace of the Holy Spirit, Because we fail to cultivate the grace of the Holy Spirit, God, in his love and mercy, gave us the Holy Scriptures. And then in a classic Chrysostomic twist, he says, and how bad are you if having lost the Holy Spirit and received the Holy Scriptures, you don’t even read the Holy Scriptures? That’s Chrysostom the preacher scolding the congregation. So that to me was very, very helpful and very, very enlightening. Scripture is this tremendous gift from God. It’s this tremendous divine intervention into language and thought and truth and everything else. But when you hear someone like St. John Chrysostom say that, there’s something still higher. The living presence of the Holy Spirit within the Christian, within the church. Then it puts it in, I think, in a much healthier, not healthier, but in a much more open and expansive kind of perspective. We’re not simply stuck reading a book of any kind. It’s a book now that’s in relation to the Holy Spirit himself. And that’s where spiritual interpretation comes in. Because if the written scripture is authored by the spirit, is the expression of the spirit, ultimately the expression of the logos? Well then how can you avoid the act of interpretation? It’s not just the letters on the page. There’s that level of meaning which we spoke about the other night and this gets us into the whole question of this kind of elevating or spiritual exegesis. The older word for this was allegory. But allegory is one of these words that’s fallen on very hard times. It used to be a popular word, people knew what it meant, and now when you say allegory, people become very suspicious. Oh, allegory, isn’t that, that’s how, that’s what people sort of, like an allegorical flight of fancy. You’re not really interpreting the text as much as you are using the text as a pretext, as a point of departure for some other idea that has nothing to do with scripture. That’s how most of us have been taught to think about allegory, but that’s not how the ancients thought about allegory. So that’s why I say the word has fallen on hard times. And I’ll try not to use it, but at the same time I want to somehow recuperate it, because it is part of the ecclesiastical lexicon and vocabulary, and we should be concerned that we’ve lost it and not requiring anybody to use it, but it’ll be nice to try to somehow rescue it. And how to do that, though? Not necessarily so easy. And many years ago I read a book by sort of an odd thing, by a A Jungian psychologist, he was actually a student of Jung, by the name of James Hillman, who died a couple of years ago. He wrote a book with the odd title called Suicide and the Soul. And the title was enough to intrigue me, and I read the book, it’s a short thing. And as a clinical psychologist, he specialized in people with suicidal ideation, and he worked with hundreds of people who had thoughts of suicide or who had attempted suicide. And the book is the result of that work. And he says that the people that have come to me in despair and in depression and with thoughts of taking their life or who have attempted to take their life, these are people, almost all of them are people who have recognized that they have come to a kind of dead end in their life. They are people who realize that the way they’re living their life now just cannot go on anymore. Whatever has happened, whatever the causes were, whatever the steps were that led them to this place, they have come to the realization that this must end. And he says, you know something? Most times, they’re right. Most times, they’re right. Most times they’re right. But the problem, he says, is that we live in what he calls a non-allegorical culture. We live in a literal culture. Now, whether that’s because of the influence of Protestantism, whether it’s because of the influence of the positive sciences, whether it’s the result of secularism, which tells us that the only things that are real are the things that you can see and hear and touch and measure and weigh and so on, and beyond that there’s nothing, right? That’s all part of that non-allegorical, non-spiritual, literal kind of world. So if you’ve reached the point in your life where you recognize that your life has to end because the life that you’re living is unlivable, and you live in a non-allegorical culture, the only option that’s available to you is to do what? Is to kill the body. Now we would say in an allegorical culture, in a culture that knows that there’s more than the body and more than the letter and more than the literal, that there’s a spiritual level. There are symbolic ways of dying. There are symbolic, allegorical ways, if you will, liturgical ways of putting to death the thing within you that needs to die. So I used to introduce this to some of my students in courses on Scripture because I thought it was a very dramatic and a very helpful way to make the point that there is such a thing as an allegorical world, and look at the consequences when you separate or reduce experience simply to the corporeal or the physical or the sense perceptible or the literal or whatever else sort of belongs in that category. So that’s one way to sort of rethink the idea of the allegorical or the spiritual. But we don’t need to go to James Hillman or Jung or anybody else because the idea of a spiritual exegesis or spiritual, I’ve been sensitized to that word, a spiritual interpretation of scripture comes from St. Paul.

All of the church fathers, all of the great interpreters of scripture who engage in a spiritualizing reading of scripture are the disciples of St. Paul. They have learned to interpret scripture spiritually from St. Paul. We don’t have the time to go through all of these sort of places in St. Paul to prove the point, but just a few and I’m sure you know the rest, that St. Paul says that Adam is a type of Christ. Adam was not just a historical figure who lived and died and that’s the end of it. No. Adam is a foreshadowing, a prefiguration, a type of another Adam. That is a spiritual interpretation of Genesis, isn’t it? It’s a spiritual interpretation of creation and recreation. Adam and the new Adam, the first and the second Adam. Paul talks about the spiritual nature of Abraham’s circumcision, To take something as crass as circumcision, sorry to even bring it up. But to take something like that and to make it a spiritual metaphor for the circumcision of the heart and all of the other things that Paul does with that image, that is a spiritual reading or a spiritual interpretation of the Levitical laws about that practice. You could call it an allegory, if you will, of circumcision. Abraham’s two children, Galatians 4, 22-31, that famous passage, here’s where Paul says that these things I won’t repeat the story, I assume that we all know it, but when talking about the spiritual or symbolic significance of Abraham’s two children, Paul says these things have been said allegorically. There’s the word. So we have no business rejecting a word that St. Paul himself was comfortable using. So there’s the word, allegory, Galatians 4, I think, 22 forward. Paul says that the law was spiritual. In other words, it talks about the spiritual nature of the law. And you can’t read the epistle to the Hebrews, for example, and fail to see that the entire sacrificial cult of the Old Testament is interpreted in a spiritual way. That is a spiritual interpretation of scripture. Call it an allegory or not, if you don’t like that word. That is also an elevating, an anagogical interpretation of Scripture, going from, let’s say, the sacrifice of cattle and other animals, to talking about the sacrifice of the Son of God. Look at what Paul does with the Exodus narrative. The entire Exodus narrative. Christ, our Pascha, has been sacrificed for us. And all of our fathers drank from the rock, and the rock was Christ. That is a spiritual reading of Scripture. That is, again, an allegorical reading of Scripture. Maybe I’m more bothered by the word allegory than some of you, and maybe I’m harping on it, but there it is. And I could give you many more examples, but the fathers of the church who interpreted the books of the Bible were the disciples of St. Paul. St. Paul was the first one to interpret the Old Testament spiritually, in the light of Christ, and that was the pattern that was followed by the church fathers. So that’s just a word about Scripture and its spiritual interpretation. Now we have to spend a couple of more minutes talking about the spiritual life and the passions. So that’s the second thing that Thalassius asked Maximus to do. I want a spiritual interpretation of Scripture, and I would like you to focus on the spiritual life with special attention to the passions.

I had it in mind to produce an outline, but I didn’t get around to doing that today. It wasn’t part of my original thinking for this, but I thought it would be helpful. So just a couple of minutes to go through. Because the passions, it’s a word that we use if we read spiritual books or the writings of the church fathers. The word does come up, and it’s not always clear what it means, and we’re going to be encountering it in the texts. So before we enter into the works of St. Maximus, it’ll be good to say a couple of words. So the word passion means different things in English, doesn’t it? I have a passion for tennis, right? That’s not very helpful here. It’s a different meaning altogether. Or a passionate romance or something. Most of the English uses of the word passion are not quite to the mark when it comes to the ecclesiastical. So the Greek word is pathos in the singular, pathi in the plural. From whence we have words like pathology. Right? And pathetic, which means something, right? Or even though there’s a word pathos, by the way, which is, again, they all move in different directions, but they have their root in this pathos. Pathology actually is really the closest to it. And on the one hand, passion means suffering, physical suffering, but also spiritual suffering, which is why we speak of the passion of Christ. Talk about the passion of Christ, Passion Week. We mean the suffering of Jesus Christ during the final days of his life on earth. That meaning is known to Orthodox Christians. We also speak of the passions of the martyrs. That might not be quite so familiar to you, but we have saints’ lives, but we have passions of martyrs. We don’t have the life of the martyr. We usually just have the last few days of theirs. So it’s not a life. It’s called the passion because it’s their suffering, right? So there’s that sense of passion, pathos, pathology, suffering, okay? But there’s another. The Greek has two meanings, at least two meanings, but these are the two major meanings. And the second one is just as important and very important for the other meaning of passions we’ll talk about now. It also means passivity. And if a person has a passion in the spiritual sense, if someone is suffering from a passion, that’s something that becomes a passive experience for them. What do I mean by that? Let’s say one day, in a moment of weakness, I do something I shouldn’t. I make a bad call, a bad judgment. I’m tempted and I do something that I shouldn’t. I’ve never done it before. I was surprised that I did it, but having done it now, something’s changed. I have this experience now that I didn’t have before. And I’m a weak-willed person. I’m not a strong Christian. Maybe I don’t have a very deep faith. And something about that peccadillo or that misdeed or that little sin that I committed now begins to play on my mind. And maybe I do it a second time. And at this point I’m still, or a third time, at this point I’m still free to not do it ever again. Because I’ve only done it once or twice. But if this becomes a habit, If I become habituated into this bad habit or this self-destructive behavior, one glass of wine became a bottle of wine, became a case of wine, or an ice cream cone became a pint of ice cream, became a gallon of ice cream, if I become habituated into that practice or that activity, I end up slowly but surely losing my will, I increasingly weaken my willpower with respect to that. In the beginning, I could have, if I wanted to, struggled against it. But the more deeply I go into it, and the further, the more time I spend with it, and the more I think about it, and the more I do it, the more difficult it becomes to stop. Until I get to the point where, when the temptation comes, I’m actually powerless to resist. I know I shouldn’t do this thing. I lost my job because of this. My marriage failed because of this. I damaged relations with my loved ones because of this. But I just can’t stop, right? Which is why Aristotle says habit is second nature. It wasn’t my nature to do that, but it became my second nature because of the activity and the repetition and the habituation. Right? That’s why the passion, so now I have a passion for alcohol or food or whatever it might be, right? It could be all kinds of things. For shopping, I mean, who knows, right? To give in to anger, that’s another kind of a passion. So that’s why passion and passivity are, I mean, that’s why pathos, passion, means passivity. Because now it’s not something that I do actively. It’s something that I befall. I’m sorry, that’s not the right way to use that word. It’s something that befalls me. There’s maybe one little illustration. There’s the story from the sayings of the Desert Fathers about the young monk who goes to the elder and he asks him a question about the passions. And the elder says, okay, this story, by the way, involves damage to trees. No real trees were damaged. He says, do you see that little sapling out there? Go out and pull it out of the ground. So the young monk goes out and he pushes the tree this way and that, and after a few minutes he’s able to yank it out of the ground. Then the elder says, good. He says, now do you see that larger tree over there? He means that bigger. He goes, go and pull that out of the ground now. So he goes out there and of course he’s going to roll up his sleeves and he’s pushing and pulling and takes him all day and night, manages finally to uproot it a little bit and by early the next morning he’s able to knock the thing out of the ground. Then the elder says, okay, there’s another tree up on the hill. Do you see that one? Three times the size now of the… And in some versions of the story, the monk goes and gets friends to help him pull the tree out. In others it doesn’t happen, he just can’t do it. It’s just impossible. It’s beyond my strength now. He says, well, that’s what the passions are like, right? When they’re small, as they begin to take root, they can be plucked out. And when they grow and maybe occupy more of our psychic or spiritual space, with effort they can be removed. But if we go too far and stay too long and this becomes habitual, as I’ve said. It becomes like a second nature. Then we are impassioned, right? Then we have a passion. And try as we might, I mean, it’ll get the best of us, right? We might have a few good days, a few good weeks, a few good months, but it’s always going to be there. It’s like you’re on a leash, and as long as you stay within the comfort zone, you’re fine, but after a certain point, right? Now, I’m not saying that passions are incurable. They’re incurable by us, right? As the fathers of the church say, when you’re bound hand and foot, which is what that experience is like. Powerless to disengage to stop this self-destructive behavior, these bad habits, these bad thoughts. When you’re bound hand and foot, you can’t untie yourself. You need someone else to come and untie you. And that someone else is Christ. That someone else is the grace of God. Only God’s grace can free us, can liberate us from the grip, the terrible grip that the passions have over us. So, passion, suffering, passivity, right? Now, there are actually two kinds of passions.

Two kinds of passions. There are the so-called blameless passions, and then there are the blameworthy passions. The blameless passions are passive things that we experience, things that happen to us passively that we have no control over, right? Such as growing hungry. Nobody wills to grow hungry, right? It’s a passive experience. The body does that to you. Thirst. Nobody wills to be thirsty. You can try it, but your body’s not going to follow, right? Your body’s not going to listen. It’s something that happens to us, right? Growing weary while walking on the road, right? That’s fatigue and needing sleep, right? And even things like desire and the biological desire to procreate. That’s something that’s natural to the organism. Which is why these are all… So these blameless passions now are part of this passive condition or these passive conditions that are part of human existence. We have free will. We are agents and actors and we can make choices and do things, but there are other aspects of our biological and human existence over which we have no control. And there are even involuntary muscles like the heart, and you go to sleep and that thing is still taken away. Same thing with hunger and thirst and many other things. Now, the Church Fathers, and especially St. Maximus, it was really his contribution to the spiritual tradition to kind of articulate Almost a science of the spiritual life and a science of the passions. He says that the blameless passions, which Christ himself had, by the way, when he became human, because he was hungry and grew thirsty and got tired and so on. The blameless passions become the starting point or the ground or the cause of the blameworthy passions. Yes, I have a natural biological need to eat, like it or not. I try not to eat for one day, two days, three days, and I’m going to have to eat at some point. But if that gets out of control, if I find that I like the taste and the texture of certain kinds of foods and the way they feel in my mouth, and I’m stuffed up to here with my dinner, and I’m still eating ice cream because I like the way it tastes, Right? I am on my way to developing the passion of gluttony. Hunger is natural. Hunger is appropriate to us, right? And eating is necessary. But it’s not necessary to be a glutton. Same thing with thirst. I need to drink. And I can even have a cup of wine. We talked about it the other night. And I can share the wine. But if I develop a fondness for the way the wine makes me feel, I start on the road to… A passionate relationship to… Okay, I think this is clear. Maybe you haven’t thought about these things in quite this way, but there’s nothing complicated about this. The best way to think about it is to think about your own physical experiences and how we’ve grown over time and what we do and where we have difficulties, where we struggle with our bodies and objects in the world. Okay, so there’s that.

Passion, passivity, blameless, blameworthy. And now another nuance here, another idea to add, and that’s the difference between things, real things, realities, objects in the world, and the mental representations of those or images of those objects in our mind. And St. Maximus in the chapters on love, by the way, many thanks to Father Thomas for the sermon and for the concluding citation or quotation from, it was very heartwarming to hear, it was a beautiful gesture to St. Maximus. It’s in this same work, though, that you shared with us, the chapters on love, where Maximus talks a lot about the difference between things or objects and their mental representation. Things are good. The things in the world that God put there, water, food, other people, right? Those are all good. There’s nothing bad or evil or wrong about them, right? It’s the mental representations of them in our mind. That’s the problem. So gold, for example, I’ve got gold down there. Gold is just a mineral in the earth, right? It’s put there by God, made by God. It’s part of the earth. Nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing bad about it. It’s certainly not evil, right? By itself, it’s a neutral thing, I guess, right? But once I begin to learn that if I have gold, I can buy things that I like, and the more gold that I have, the more things I can acquire, and I begin to develop this image of gold in my mind, right? And it becomes more than gold now. And it becomes more than an image, by the way. It’s not simply a picture in my mind. It’s an image or an idea or a representation that becomes charged with what? Psychic energy. It’s sort of a thought feeling. Or there are, I want to pick an example, but I don’t want to pick something that’s going to get me in trouble. There’s nothing inherently evil about a man or a woman. There’s nothing inherently bad about a man or a woman, right? But if I begin to develop certain ideas about certain men or certain women, right? If I develop a mental representation about a person that could be good or bad or lustful or what have you, right? It’s not the person that’s to blame. They’re not the source of that. It’s my mind. It’s my thought process. And again, it’s not just an idea. It’s not a neutral thing. It’s a very powerful thing. It’s a thought, feeling. Or maybe a better example, a little more neutral, might be somebody said something to me that hurt my feelings. And because I’m a little prideful, I’m brooding over that now. And I turn it over and over and over and over. And the mind has a way of magnifying things. And if I continue to do this, I plot revenge. I plan my vendetta. I call up other people to get them on my side and I turn it into this big thing. So the things become the ground for us to develop these images. And the images become impassioned. The images become impassioned. The embathis is the embathi noimata. So the power of passion is contained and condensed and congealed in this thing now that’s almost assumed a life of its own in my mind. Because I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to have lustful thoughts. I don’t want to eat a gallon of ice cream. But darn it, right? There’s this thing in there that almost compels me to do it.

All right, one last point, and then I didn’t have room on the board, and then we can turn to the text. This has to do with the relationship between the passions, these thoughts, and the demons. Now, we were talking about this the other night with a couple of the folks here. I think if you reflect on your thought processes, you’ll probably realize at one point that some thoughts are surely your own. I’m having negative thoughts about this person or that person because I just don’t like them, and I always have negative thoughts about them. No surprise there. Or I’m anxious to see this person or do this thing because that’s what I’m into, okay? So if the thought to do that comes into my mind, there’s no need to blame the devil for that. That’s just your own weaknesses and your own passions and your own desires generating these thoughts in your mind, okay? But there are other thoughts that come to us that seem strange, bizarre, dark, evil, twisted, perverted. Things you never imagined in your whole life. Where on earth did that come from? And often they will arise in your mind at the most inappropriate moments: standing in church, being online to receive Communion. And then, Saint John of Damascus in one of the Communion prayers says, “Even now, standing before the gates of the Holy… I do not put away from my wicked thoughts.” Nobody going to receive Communion wants to have dark, evil, twisted, perverted thoughts. So that’s not you. That is not you. So these things feel like they come to us from some objective reality outside of us. They almost feel like an assault. And these are said to be demonic thoughts. Demonic thoughts. We had a conversation with a student a couple of years ago in a class. We were reading a work about this sort of thing. And she was so relieved to hear this said. She said, because I walk to school every day and I have to cross a road with a bridge on it. And for the last month, every time I crossed that bridge, a voice comes into my head and it says, “jump off.” She goes, I’m not depressed, I’m not suicidal, it’s really weird. I said, well, I could tell more stories about this, but we have to move on. So the passions and the thoughts that they breed, and it’s a reciprocal kind of a relationship, are closely aligned with the demonic, which is why… not closely aligned and often identified. So we have seven deadly sins like gluttony and avarice and so on. There are demons too that have those sins. It’s the demon of gluttony. And if you read some of the spiritual literature of the church, someone who feels overtaken by, let’s say, the spirit of lust. It’s a spirit right there. Or if a lustful thought enters into my mind, that’s the demon of lust putting it there. Now whether it is or whether it isn’t, you can’t always be sure, but it is demonic. Because any thought that’s going to reduce someone else to an object and make them to be something exploited for your own pleasure, that’s demonic. That’s demonic, no matter where it came from. So there’s this very dense and almost inextricable relationship between the passions, and the thoughts, and the demons, and this passivity that we experience. And as we’ll see later in a couple of minutes, St. Maximus argues that the demons try to exploit our blameless passions to make them blameworthy.

All right. So having come to the end of these introductory comments, we can now turn to… The first handout is the one-page handout that’s double-sided. It says, St. Maximus the Confessor, the questions to Thalassius. I’m going to try to read this fairly quickly. We’re not going to talk about it much. I really just want you to see this, because this is remarkable. By the way, this text has never been made available in an English translation. I finished my work on the Ambigua. I’m working on a translation of this book now. You are the first people to see this in English. So we don’t want to spend too much time on this. I want to read it with some rapidity. I just want you to see this because it’s really remarkable. And these are the questions about the passions that Thalassius put to Maximus. And I want you to think about how comprehensive this is, how systematic it is. We’re talking about a science of the spiritual life in a sense. It’s highly nuanced, highly differentiated. Penetrating insightful understanding of what? Of human pathology. of how the self and the blameless passions can become blameworthy. So I’ll read through it and I’m sure you’ll find it as amazing as I do. So this is from the introduction to the work. You had asked me first to say something about the passions that trouble us, namely, how many are they and what exactly are they? What is their origin and to what end does each one lead us based on its particular characteristics? In what faculty of the soul or part of the body are they rooted, enabling them to impose their forms invisibly on the intellect and to bring changes to the body, using our thoughts to stain, as it were, the whole of the wretched soul with the color of sin? What is the meaning of each of their names? And what are their respective activities? At what times and in what forms are they manifested? And how do the foul demons use them in their cunning schemes against us? What are their, and here’s the demons now, what are their unseen machinations and subterfuges? How do some of them imperceptibly project themselves through others? And how do others persuasively beguile some by means of still others? How are they subtle and small, yet vast and imposing? What makes them either slacken or increase? What prompts their attacks, raids, and retreats? What is the meaning of their persistence and duration, of their speed and delays? What, you asked, are the accusations they bring against the soul as if in a tribunal? What are the verdicts they pronounce in the mind and their seeming defeats and victories? This is all the dark thoughts and accusatory voices that we often hear in our minds. What is the particular propensity of each and why are they able to assault the soul through many passions, both through themselves and through others? How do they instantly usher in with themselves their own proper raw materials, as it were, we might want to say, by means of which they deviously mount their bitter war against us, and doggedly torment us with things that have no existence, as if they were present, making us either spring impulsively into action by the material of the passions, or avoid them altogether, the former from our love of pleasure, the latter in fear of pain. What is their mode of existence within us and the nature of the fantasies they provoke in our dreams when we are sleeping? Are they confined to only one part of the soul or body? Or do they pervade the entire soul and the entire body? If, on the one hand, they are within us, do they persuade the soul by means of its natural passions? There they are, the blameless passions. Do they persuade the soul by means of its natural passions to take into itself exterior realities through the intermediary of the body, deceiving the soul so that it might be completely subjected to sensation and abandon what is proper to itself? Or if, on the other hand, they are external to us, is it through the body’s contact with external realities that they configure the invisible soul according to material objects, giving it a composite shape by applying to it the form of the matter received through the imagination? Does there exist among them an order and a sequence, nefariously contrived so that certain demons first test the soul after which others wage war on it? And which ones lead the way for others? And by which ones are they accompanied and followed? Or do they happen to be utterly confused and disordered, troubling the soul through random passions? Is it apart from divine providence that the soul is permitted to suffer such things by them? Or does this happen according to divine providence? If the latter, what is the reason why divine providence abandons the soul to various forms of passions? And in what manner can the passions we have enumerated be removed from the soul? And by means of what works or words or thoughts is the soul freed from them and removes their stains from its consciousness? What specific virtue does the soul need to place in opposition to each passion in order to triumph over it, putting the wicked demon to flight and making it completely vanish along with the movements of the passion. Having been freed from the passions, how is the soul able to examine what is proper to itself? I won’t read anymore. You have it to take home and to read. But this is quite a profound line of questioning. Only people living in deserts and in relative isolation and free of distractions can even see all of this going on inside themselves. When you live in the world, you have to go to work and you’re watching TV. You can’t even observe these phenomena, right? So it’s a great gift that these individuals went out and did this work on themselves and threw all of this light, as it were, on the nature of the soul and the dynamics of what can go wrong with it. This is the kind of opening prologue that I wanted to share with you. Now we can turn to the…

Do we need a break? You don’t seem too restless. Okay. All right. We’ll go into this a bit and maybe we’ll take a break. All right. So now what we have are… There are 65 questions, by the way. I said there were 65 biblical passages. Some of them, as you can see, get very short answers. Some of them run to… many dozens of pages, so it’s a very large work altogether. In the interest of time, we’re not gonna look at question five, but you have it there to study on your own. Let’s start with question six. By the way, the work is called The Questions to Thalassius. That’s a bit of a misnomer. It should be called The Answers to Thalassius. But the name stuck and it’s become conventional and that’s what it’s called. But it’s really The Answers to. So question six, here’s the sixth. Yes, Father. Well, yeah, that’s the generous way to, right? But the questions are really the biblical texts. Exactly, yeah. The questions about the passions are there in the prologue, but Maximus does not answer them all now one by one. He answers them by way of interpreting these biblical texts, which is what Thalassius wanted. So it’s a very complicated kind of typically Maximian sort of project. But the questions themselves are now these difficult biblical texts. So question six, if according to St. John, quote, he who is born of God does not sin because God’s seed is in him and he cannot sin. And if he who is born of water and spirit is himself born of God, then how are we who are born of God through baptism still able to sin? So this is a classic dilemma. You find two passages in scripture that seem to contradict each other. These, by the way, are both from the Johannine writings, from the Gospel of John and from the First Letter of John. So how is it possible that the same author seems to be saying two contradictory things? How can he say in 1 John 3, 9, He who is born of God does not sin, does not sin because God… and he cannot sin. But then he said, and this is a reference to baptism, but then he who is born of water and spirit is himself born of God, right? So then, how are we who are born of God through baptism still able to sin? That’s a good question. That’s a good question, right? And we’ll read through the answer. I don’t think it’ll require a whole lot of comment. I might stop in a couple of places, but tonight we’ll be just hearing more of the words of St. Maximus as much as we can. And it’s not a very long answer. It says, the Answer. The mode of our birth from God is twofold. The first bestows the entire grace of adoption on those born of God, but only in potential. The second ushers in this grace as entirely present in actuality. What was only in potential is now fully actualized, right? Transforming voluntarily the entire free choice of the one being born so that it conforms to God who gives birth. The first possesses the grace of adoption present in potential through faith alone. But the second, in addition to faith, produces through knowledge the actual divine likeness of the God who is known in the one who knows him. In those whom the first mode of birth is observed, it happens that, because the disposition of their will has not yet been fully extracted from its passionate fixation with the flesh, and because they have not been completely imbued by the spirit with the active participation in the divine mysteries that have taken place, their inclination to sin is never very far away, for the simple reason that they continue to will it. There’s a horribly long subordinate clause in there that’s a good example of Maximian diction. We’ll go over this again just to make sure we’ve got it. We’ll leave out the material between the dashes, so we’ll get the core idea, and then we’ll fill in the blanks. In those whom the first mode of birth is observed, it happens that their inclination to sin is never very far away for the simple reason that they continue to will it. And then he says, why does that happen? Because their will has not yet been fully removed or separated from its passionate fixation with the flesh and the things of the world. And because they have not yet been completely imbued or filled by the spirit with the active participation in the divine mysteries. He means baptism. They’ve participated in the sacrament, but they have not been completely imbued with all of the operations and the activities that are available and potential. Okay. In an actual way. So continuing. For the spirit does not give birth to a disposition of the will without the consent of that will. But to the extent that the will is willing, he transforms and divinizes it. Whoever has shared in this deification through experience and knowledge. And here’s the really powerful thing here. Whoever has shared in this experience now is incapable of reverting from what he once truly and precisely became cognizant of in actual deed to something else besides this, which merely pretends to be the same thing. No more than the eye, once it has seen the sun, could ever mistake it for the moon or any of the other stars in the heavens. In those, on the other hand, undergoing the second mode of birth, this is the one where the potential is actualized now, the Holy Spirit takes the whole of their free choice and transposes it completely from earth to heaven and, through true knowledge realized in actual deed, refashions the intellect, the mind, with the blessed beams of light of God the Father so that it is deemed another God experiencing saying through a state obtained by grace, that which God does not experience, but simply is according to his essence. This is Maximus’ way of talking about becoming a son of God by grace and not by nature. In them, their free choice clearly becomes sinless in conformity with their state of virtue and knowledge, and thus they are unable to negate what they have become cognizant of through actual experience. So even if we should possess the spirit of adoption, who is a life-giving seed that bestows the likeness of the sower upon those who are born of it, but do not offer him a disposition of the will pure of any propensity or inclination towards something else, we will, as a result, willingly sin even after being born through water and the spirit. But if, to the contrary, we were to prepare the disposition of our will to receive in knowledge the operations of the water and spirit, then, through our sort of practical asceticism, the mystical water would cleanse our conscience and the life-creating spirit would actualize in us the unchanging perfection of the good through knowledge acquired in experience. What is lacking, therefore, in each of us who is still able to sin, is the unequivocal desire to surrender our whole selves in the disposition of our will to the Spirit. That’s just two paragraphs, right? You could sit and think about that for days, right? And I was surprised when I first read this because the New Testament translation that I had in English didn’t have the word seed. It said he has God’s nature in him, which struck me as odd. But the Greek word is not even sporos, like spor, it’s sperma. It’s seed, which only makes sense because the context is one of giving birth and being born. What else could it be? It’s a seed. And the image of the seed is so powerful. You can take a seed. The seed contains, let’s say, the whole oak tree, right? But the oak tree is not going to come out of the seed unless the conditions are right. I could take a seed, an oak seed or something else. Let’s up the ante. A sequoia seed, okay? And I could put it on the surface of the lectern here, and I could leave it there how long? A day, two days, a month, a year, five years, ten years? Is it going to sprout? Is it going to germinate? Never. That could be the seed of the Holy Spirit. The grace, the gift of the Holy Spirit that was given to me in my baptism has been lying dormant within me my whole life. It’s not going to go against, it’s not going to override my free will. It’s not going to transform a will that is unwilling. It’s waiting for me to cultivate it. It’s waiting for me to turn to it. There are these great stories about ancient seeds that have been discovered in Egyptian tombs, and more grossly, from cantaloupes eaten by Chinese women that were mummified thousands of years ago. Scientists love to do this sort of thing. Those seeds that are thousands of years old, that have been lying in the dark and the dust and among the graves. Scientists have actually been able to germinate them. So the seed never dies. That gift never goes away. Even if you actively try to remove it from yourself. But it won’t do anything without our consent or our free will or our desire. So it’s that simple. It’s that simple and it’s that difficult.

By Father Maximus Simonopetridis. Lecture 8. The Theology of St. Maximus. Questions of Thalassios, Part 2. I’m very blessed because I spend most of my time reading things like this. My area of specialization is the Church Fathers, and this is what I do. This is what I spend my time reading, and they said that the study of the Church Fathers is the one discipline or the one line of work that a person can go into from which they will never regret. They might regret becoming a mathematician or a dentist, but never a student of the church fathers. And frankly, I read things like this and I find it hard to imagine how an ordinary human being could have actually done this. Where does this intelligence come from? Where does this insight come from? Where does this clarity come from? It’s deeply human on the one hand, but at the same time, it just seems so beyond, right? So when we talked about the church fathers on the first night, one of the things I stressed was that not only did the church fathers have, especially someone like St. Maximus, he had this prodigious education, one of the most, almost unusually educated in his own era. Not only that, but then he had the grace of God, he had holiness. So… His mind was illumined by God’s grace, and he was able to make use of the language and the concepts. So most of the time I just sit back and I marvel at it. I mean, you have to say glory to God that, what is the phrase that we use on the feast day, right? Thav mastoso theos, and visai Yisuf. God is wondrous in his saints, right? Anyway, okay. I really like question five, which we skipped. I think question 11 is a really good one too, because it’s this somewhat obscure passage in Jude that talks about the demons. But again, in the interest of time, you have it. It’s not complicated. You can read it on your own. I’d like to go to question 15. And again, I’m not going to read this. I’ll paraphrase it. But it’s a very important question because it talks about the activity of the Holy Spirit outside the church. And this is a sort of a disputed question these days, because there are some people who call themselves theologians, even orthodox ones, who want to argue that, well, God is everywhere, and the Holy Spirit is active everywhere, including outside of the church, and who are we to say that the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Muslims and whatever else is out there are, right? And it’s a very liberal kind of argument, and I don’t see any ground to make this… kind of argument based on Orthodox theology. And one of these individuals said St. Maximus the Confessor teaches this. And I thought, really? I mean, where does he say that? And they said, oh, question 15. And I was, without having read it at that point, I was absolutely convinced that this person was mistaken. And sure enough, they were. Because, we won’t go through this, but it’s a simple text, you can read it on your own. But we’ll look at the question, because that’s important. The question is, what does scripture mean when it says, Your incorruptible spirit is present in all things. Present in all things, right? And for this reason, you progressively correct those who trespass. But if it says this about the Holy Spirit, how can this be reconciled with, quote, wisdom will not enter into a foolish heart and will not dwell in a body enslaved by sins? I have noted this, Thalassius says, because the first passage says the Spirit is unconditionally present in all things, right? Well, Maximus goes on to say basically that the Holy Spirit is active outside the church, actively working to bring people into the church, right? The Holy Spirit is not working in the Hindus or the Buddhists to confirm them in their Hinduism or their Buddhism. What would be the point in that? He outlines three sort of categories, and he says those people who are totally outside of God’s work in history, people who don’t know Christ, he says these people have the spirit through the natural law. He’s following Paul here, Romans chapter 1, and he talks about how the spirit works through these people. He talks about some of the results. Then the second category are the people of Israel, because the Holy Spirit is present in them, but in another way, because they have scripture, they have revelation. So the Holy Spirit has a different activity, a different operation in them. And then he talks about the baptized, just like we saw a moment ago. And here again, he distinguishes two categories of people. People who have received the grace of the Holy Spirit and who do nothing with it, and those who have received. And so, it’s a great text and it’s an important text. And much of what we heard from the other speakers over the last couple of days touched on it in different ways. And I was happy to see that it’s very much in line with what we have here. So you have this. And we’ll move on now because the last one, 21, is quite an extraordinary piece.

It’s two pages, but… It contains so much and it is so rich and we want to go through it a little carefully. And I’m going to erase this, so last chance for anybody to… Now here’s where we need to recall what I said earlier about passions and passivity and blameless passions and blameworthy passions because they all come up here. We need to add one more item though to our kind of vocabulary here. And there is a play on two Greek words that are closely related. The one is YENESIS, which is the Septuagint word for the book of Genesis. YENESIS, Genesis. And then there’s a closely related Greek word Yenesis, notice it has two N’s, or knees, and an ETA, something like this, right? Genesis and Yenesis and Yenesis, they sound almost alike. Now Genesis really means sort of origin, beginning, creative origin, that’s how it gets used in this text. This means biological birth, right? So there are… This is kind of coming into being, coming into being, or an origin of something in a more general sense. This is coming to being in a biological sense, right? Birth, procreation, reproduction, right? This is, I mean, creation comes into being. Creation isn’t literally birthed out of a womb, right? It’s brought into being out of, it’s given existence, it’s brought into being out of nothing. This is biological birth. One body giving birth to another, giving birth to another, and so on, okay? So that’s just the distinction we need to know before we enter into the text. So the problematic passages from Colossians. What is the meaning of he stripped off the principalities and authorities? And how was he able to put them on when he was begotten without sin? Now, I might have to say a little more about this verse from Colossians because some of us might not know it or it might not be familiar. And this is a very enigmatic verse from Colossians where I had my New Testament here, it’s in my bag, where Christ is described as stripping the principalities and the authorities which seem to be demonic forces. These are the same names for angels, but here they’re clearly fallen angels. So Colossians says Christ stripped them. made a spectacle of them on the cross. This is the same passage where it talks about and he nailed, and it’s a difficult word to translate, the bond of our indebtedness. The Greek word is hierographon, chirograph. It means a handwritten document. Right? So, it says that Christ took this bond, this contract that was somehow against us, this bond of indebtedness that we had, and he nailed it to the cross. This same verse, by the way, this same idea occurs in ecclesiastical literature, in the Akathist hymn, and he tore the bond of sins, and we sing Alleluia. It’s at the end of one of the stanzas. So, what on earth is that? What is this bond of indebtedness that Christ nails to the cross, and what are these powers and principalities that he has stripped? And then it says, how could he have put them on when he was begotten without sin? Now, I guess it’s time. There’s actually a lot of rabbinical and early Christian… Sure, sure. And why don’t you read it? Because that’s the deacon’s job, isn’t it? No good deed will go unholy. Which verse is this? It’s 15, let me see. Okay. Yeah, okay. You have a nice voice now. And you, being dead in your sins, in the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses. blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it. Okay. The Greek is, what did it say about spoiling the principalities? Spoiling. The Greek is apekevisas, it means to strip them. As if removing a garment from them. I think I wouldn’t want to leave the Bible like that, but here, I’ll just take it and put it here. So it’s a very odd, a very obscure, a very kind of enigmatic text, and it’s kind of an exegetical challenge. And there’s a lot we could say about it, but maybe to give it a little bit more context, I’ll share with you some very interesting rabbinical and early Christian traditions about this bond, this chirograph. These go back to these sort of apocryphal works known as the life of Adam and Eve. There are different versions of them. There’s actually a text known as the life of Adam and Eve, like a saint’s life, tells their story. And, of course, after Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden, they’re outside the gates of paradise, the doors are locked, they’re outside, they realize now, boy, we made a big mistake. And then things start to get worse because the sky starts to get dark. And they have never seen that before. Imagine how terrifying this was for them to watch the sun setting. As the sun is going down, the devil appears, kind of in the guise of the city slicker or the carpetbagger. And he says, why are you so cast down? He says, well, we just got kicked out of paradise. That was bad enough. And now the lights are going out. Oh, I can take care of that. Right. Pulls out and makes a deal with Adam. The devil promises to return, bring the light back after a few hours if Adam signs this contract. And the contract is to place all of his descendants under the authority of this figure, the devil. Adam doesn’t know it’s the devil. Until such time as the unbegotten is begotten and the undead dies. The devil thinks that’s a sure proof kind of a clause, right? The unbegotten will never be begotten, and the undead will never die, but of course that’s all, that’s Christ. The devil has no idea that he’s included in the very contract its own undoing. There’s a further tradition that they’ve got no paper, so the devil pulls out his pen, they’ve got no ink, and he tells Adam to put his hand out, and the devil runs the pen across the palm, and that’s where the lines on our hands come from. We all kind of bear the marks of… they’re actually monasteries in Moldavia in Romania where this story is illustrated with Adam and the devil and the contract and all of that. There’s a lot more to this story. These are, by the way, I should be very clear, this is not the theology of the Orthodox Church. This is not doctrine or dogma. This is more on the level of sort of folklore. These are popular tales but the key, the common element here, is the chirograph, is that bond, that handwritten document, that bond of indebtedness. So, whatever Paul is referencing here seems to be related to these Jewish and Christian traditions about Adam and Eve. What else could this bond be that Christ has taken and nailing to the cross. I’ll leave that up there. So a little bit of background. Let’s get to the text now.

So what does all this mean? The divine word, clothing himself in human nature without altering his divinity, and becoming perfect man in every way like us but without sin, possessed the first Adam in himself. And here it gets a little tricky, but we’ll explain it. He possessed the first Adam in himself both through the manner of his creaturely origin, that’s the Genesis, creaturely origin, right? He possessed Adam in himself both through the manner of his creaturely origin and through the manner of his birth. I mean this in the sense that the first man, Adam, having received his being from God, was, with respect to the manner of his creaturely origin, that’s the Genesis again, free from corruption and sin, for neither corruption nor sin were created together with him. Alright, let’s, we can’t go on until we unpack this a little bit. So, Maximus is saying that Christ has Adam in him. Christ clothes himself in human nature and has Adam in him, but in a special way, because he assumes Adam’s… I’m sorry, we’ll go to the second sentence. So, because Adam was created by God, Adam was brought into being by God, that’s his creaturely origin. Adam’s origin as a creature is to have been brought into existence, generated, genesis by God. And he was free from corruption and free from sin, because God did not create Adam to be sinful. And God did not create Adam with corruption. So Adam’s genesis, Adam’s creaturely origin. Adam’s coming into being, his original coming into being, was without corruption and without sin. So, let’s just go read it again. He possessed the first Adam in himself, both through the manner of his creaturely origin and through the manner of his birth. I mean this in the sense that the first man, having received his being from God, was, with respect to the manner of his creaturely origin, free from corruption and sin. For neither corruption nor sin were created together with him. But when he sinned, this is Adam now, but when he sinned by breaking God’s commandment, he, Adam, was condemned to a manner of birth sustained by passion and sin, so that henceforth sin originates in the passibility, there’s that passivity, it’s the same word, in the passivity or passability associated with birth, as if by a kind of law, with respect to which no one is sinless. for all are subject by nature to the law of birth, introduced after man’s creaturely origin in consequence of his sin. So Adam comes into being. Adam is not born. Adam is created out of nothing. It’s his creaturely origin, and he is incorruptible, and he is sinless. But then Adam falls, and it’s after the fall that we see biological reproduction and procreation. Before the fall, there is no… biological reproduction or procreation. That’s something that arises after the fall. So Maximus distinguishes these two moments. There’s this coming into being of Adam, but then there’s this thing that comes after called birth. Adam came into existence according to one sort of mode, but after Adam we all come into existence through a very different kind of mode now. We don’t have a creaturely origin out of nothing. We have an origin that is a biological, physical, reproductive one, right? Adam didn’t have a belly button, we do. Yeah, this is what some church fathers say. It’s not in this text and it would be a little too complicated to get into that now. Gregory of Nyssa and even Maximus and others do say that. They say, had there not been a fall, there was actually some other way that humanity was going to multiply. That’s very speculative. They say that, though. But what he’s saying now, he’s simply reflecting on the text of Scripture, where we have Adam coming into being from the hands of God, sinless and incorruptible, not through biological birth. And then after the fall we have the rise or the appearance of biological birth. And we draw attention to a couple of things in this first paragraph. But when he sinned, Adam, when Adam sinned by breaking God’s commandment, he was condemned to a manner of birth sustained by passion and sin. Again, because that biological desire, there it is. And with that desire is pleasure. And the pleasure can lead to sin. And we’re all adults here, we know that. A lot of things get connected to, again, the desire for, the need for food becomes gluttony, and the need to physically reproduce becomes something else. It’s just that simple, right? So the passivity is part of it now, and this new biological mode of birth is conditioned, in a sense, by passion and sin. So that henceforth, sin originates in the passibility associated with birth. I spoke about that earlier, that the blameless passions become the foundation for, or can be exploited in a sense, to become these blameworthy passions. And as if by a kind of law, with respect to which no one is sinless, for all are subject by nature to the law of birth, introduced after man’s creaturely origin in consequence of his sin. Is that clear enough at least? I won’t ask you if it’s clear, but okay. It gets a little clearer. Since, therefore, sin appeared through the transgression and because of sin the passability or the passivity associated with birth entered human nature so that through sin the original transgression continued to thrive together with the passability associated with birth there was no hope of freedom since human nature was bound in the disposition of its will by an indissoluble bond of evil the passivity and the sin had been introduced into human nature, human life, and the longer we lived and the more life went on, I mean, the greater power those things gained over us. The past, the blameless passions became more and more blameworthy, and it was a vicious cycle, right? We’re born into a world, you know, we’re born into a world that’s corrupted, and the mind now is somehow weakened, the will is weakened and bound in this situation. And to continue. The more human nature hastened to sustain itself through the process of birth, the more tightly it bound itself to the law of sin. Insofar as nature’s very passability or passivity reactivated the transgression within it. For in possessing, by virtue of its natural condition, the increase of sin within its very passability, human, so in other words, human nature, by being passive or being passable, contained within itself the possibility for sin. Because that was the case, because we now acquired these passive, passable, sin-prone sort of features, because we had that in our nature now, human nature came to possess the activities of all the opposing powers, i.e. the demons. All the opposing powers, principalities, and authorities. Those are the folks from Colossians 2.15. Why? On account of the universal sin inherent in human passability. And these principalities and authorities are operating through unnatural passions concealed under the guise of natural passions. It’s basically a more complex way of describing what I laid out on the board for you earlier. Because we’re subject to passivity and these blameless passions, hunger, thirst, desire, etc. This becomes the place where the demons work on us. And under the guise, well, it’s just a little food, right? I just need a little, right? It’s only that, right? Under the guise of these natural blameless passions, we are led into blameworthy states of serious passion. Father? Yeah? Fecis. Fecis. Yeah. From whence physiology and physics and physiotherapy and so on, okay, metaphysics. All right, so operating through unnatural passions concealed under the guise of the natural passions. Through the unnatural passions and by exploiting nature’s passability, every evil power is actively at work, driving the inclination of the will by means of the natural passions into the corruption of unnatural passions. It’s good to know that those natural passions can get us into trouble. That’s where we have to exercise vigilance, right? Now, that’s the human situation. That’s the human situation. There was the coming into being of Adam from the hand of God, which was incorruptible and sinless. Then there was the biological mode of birth, which had passivity and sin involved in it. That’s where we were at. That was the human condition. Now, 21.4.

In order to rescue human nature from this evil state of helplessness, the only begotten Son and Word of God in his love for mankind assumed the sinlessness but not the incorruption of Adam’s constitution according to his creaturely origin. Do you get it? Adam came into the world sinless and incorruptible. Christ took that. He took the sinless part of that. But not the incorruptible part. Because why do I say not the incorruptible part? Because he was able to die. If you’re incorruptible, you’re a beast. You can’t be destroyed. God didn’t create Adam to be destroyed. Adam was incorruptible, which means incapable of being destroyed and sinless. So Christ takes the sinlessness of that original Adam, but not the gift of Adam’s incorruptibility, because Christ was susceptible to the natural passions, first of all, but then even death itself. It’s a brilliant thing if you think about it, yes. That’s quite a way, quite a ways to go back, but go ahead. It refers to the incarnation, but it doesn’t mean that he possessed the actual historical figure of Adam inside his own body. It means the qualities or the conditions or the life of Adam. Right? Is the new Adam. Right? Okay. So, are we reasonably clear? I mean, it’s difficult, but if you think about it, actually, this is one of the few texts that goes so deeply into the theology of the Incarnation, and what the human predicament was, and what the Savior needed to be to extract us from that predicament. And it’s all very biblically based despite the complexity of Maximus’ expression. Was there a hand raised back there? People do try to draw comparisons between Maximus and Augustine, but he’s not actually saying that sin is passed on through seed. We’re almost certain that he didn’t know Augustine, so it’s not as if he’s correcting Augustine. But it’s not that the father somehow passes on sin to his children through the seed. It’s this condition of passivity and the sin that it gives rise to that is part of the universal human condition that is more responsible for not the classic Augustinian. I see a couple of other hands are up, but we don’t have a whole lot of time. We want to get through this. Please hold the questions until the end. All right. So he assumed the sinlessness, but not the incorruption of Adam’s constitution according to his creaturely origin. He also assumed the passability, the passivity, but not the sin from the birth that was subsequently introduced into human nature. So the creaturely origin, he took the sinlessness. From the biological birth, he took human passivity, but not the sin. Because he’s born without sin, Hebrews says that, and many other sources. So it’s a brilliant bringing together of these different moments and this figure of Adam and Christ and so on. All right, now. As I said a moment ago, Maximus says, it was in the passability, the passivity of Adam, that the wicked demons possessed their activities, concealed under the law of contingent human nature. Thus, it was only reasonable, this is probably better translated as it was only to be expected that on account of the flesh, on account of the fact that the word took human flesh, the demons saw in God the Savior the features of Adam’s passable nature. They thought he was like another Adam and thought that in this contingent state, he was necessarily a mere man subject to the law of nature and not moved by the decision of his will. They therefore assailed him. The demons saw Christ in flesh looking like Adam and they therefore assailed him. They attacked him, hoping that they might prevail even upon him through his natural passability. To form an image in his mind of an unnatural passion and act on it as they would. That’s what I said earlier about the things and the mental representations. They were trying to pressure Christ on the basis of his natural human passivity to generate an impassioned thought in his mind. I don’t want to get ahead of Maximus himself, because he explains it as we go on. But in his first experience of temptations by pleasures, this is Jesus being tempted in the desert now. In his first experience of temptations by pleasures, he allowed the demons to be mocked by their own tricks, and he stripped off their powers by expelling them from human nature. At the same time, he remained inaccessible and beyond their grasp, clearly winning victory over them, not for his sake, but for ours, because it was for us that he became man, and in his goodness offered to us the whole of what he accomplished. That’s such a great line. For he himself had no need to be tested by experience, since he is God and master and by nature free from all passions. Instead, by means of our temptations, the wicked power drew him into a fight. Thwarting it by his own attack, the wicked power that is, by his own attack, and putting to death the very power that expected to thwart him, just as it had thwarted Adam in the beginning. This then is how, in his initial experience of temptation, he put off the principalities and the powers that assailed him, removing them from human nature, healing the passion of pleasure. And I guess it’s because the devil is saying, he’s hungry, eat. He’s hungry in the desert. Okay, you can turn this bread into stone to satisfy the natural passion of… If you think back to the temptations, it’s all there. This is how he put them off, removed them from human nature, healed the passion of pleasure, and in himself, cancelling the bond of Adam’s voluntary ascent to the passions of pleasure. For it is by this bond, there it is again that bond, that man’s power of choice inclines toward wicked pleasure to his own disadvantage. For by his actions he tacitly proclaims his condition of domination, which on account of his fear of death prevents him from freeing himself from his subjugation to pleasure. Clear enough on the level of difficulty that we have here. Now, Christ has more work to do, having overcome and vanquished the powers, principalities, and authorities through this initial temptation by pleasure, the Lord allowed them to launch a second attack against him and to place before him the one remaining temptation. Probably trial or test is a better rendering there than my temptation here. One remaining test, namely that of pain and suffering. He dealt with the problem of pleasure in the desert. Now it’s the problem of pain to be dealt with, pain and suffering. His aim was to completely pour out through himself the corrupting poison of their wickedness, consuming it like fire and totally obliterating it from human nature. And he did this by utterly stripping off the principalities and authorities at the time of his death on the cross, not simply remaining impervious to his sufferings, but rather striking fear in the heart of death, thereby extracting from our nature the passions associated with pain. For because of man’s cowardice, the inclination of his will draws back from pain, and against his will he is constantly tyrannized by the fear of death, and so in his desire to live he clings to his slavery. It’s a pleasure. If you think back to that first text we read, Maximus believes that people do most things out of a desire for pleasure or out of a way to avoid pain. And this dialectic of pleasure and pain is the vicious cycle because we want pleasure, we want pleasant things, we pursue pleasure, we have pleasure, and then the pleasure always results in some kind of pain. I want to eat a lot of food, it looks really good. Big Thanksgiving dinner, I’m going to gorge myself, oh what pleasure then. Pepto-Bismol time or whatever. That’s a simple way to put it. Those of you who are familiar with the funeral service and the hymns by St. John of Damascus, what pleasure is there in this life? Piatu viutrifi via meni lipis ametokos. What pleasure or delight in this life does not partake in sorrow or pain in some way? Everything, everything, nothing lasts, nothing, think about your experiences and… There’s even the proverb, be careful what you wish for because you might get it and so on. So pleasure and pain, that’s the dialectic here. The pleasure is defeated, overcome in the temptations in the desert, and the fear of pain and death and suffering is overcome by Christ’s voluntary accepting the cross and suffering. And it gets even better still. Are we up to 21.7? So, the Lord stripped off the principalities and authorities at the time of his first experience of temptations in the desert, thereby healing the whole of human nature of the passion connected with pleasure. He despoiled them yet again at the time of his death. Likewise, removing from our nature the passion connected with pain, considering this accomplishment something that he, in his love of humanity, was accountable for. In other words, as if he was responsible for sin, he sort of took on our dilemma and as if it were his responsibility, as if he were accountable for it, or rather, in his goodness, he reckoned to us the glory of the accomplishment, of his accomplishment. Inasmuch as he assumed the passable, passive condition of our nature, like ours but without sin, by means of which every evil power and destructive force carried out its particular wickedness, he stripped them at the moment of his death. This is interesting. That is, when at the hour of his death the demons came to examine his soul as it was departing from his body, he triumphed over them and made a spectacle of them while on his cross. Because the evil powers could find nothing at all in the natural possibility of his human nature