神父马克西姆访谈：认信者圣马克西姆的当代意义

[Jonathan Pageau] Hello everybody. I am delighted to be here with Father Maximos Constas. Father Maximos is one of the world’s most renowned scholars on St. Maximus the Confessor, whom I talk about a lot on this channel. Hopefully, even non-Orthodox people by now will know who that is and how important he is. He has translated many of St. Maximus’ works. He has also written his own book, in particular, The Art of Seeing, which is a powerful look at icons. He has this interest in patristics and scholarly work, but also in art, which is why it seems like our stars were meant to align at some point and we get to this discussion. He is currently a professor of patristics and Orthodox spirituality at Holy Cross Seminary. He was a professor at Harvard, and he was a monk for many years at Simonopetra on the Holy Mountain. He is the director of the Pappas Patristic Institute right now. As you see, he is someone who is not only a scholar but also a monk and a spiritual practitioner. I am really excited to be able to talk about St. Maximus and also about art, and about how these two things come together to help us understand the world today. This is Jonathan Pageau. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Father Maximos, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Sure, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[Jonathan Pageau] My first question is: You have become one of the world’s most renowned scholars on St. Maximus. Of course, you come at it as an academic, but you also made these discoveries as a priest and a monk. I would like to hear a little bit about your journey and how the work of St. Maximus informed your academic career, but also your own spiritual path and discoveries.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I should say that there are many people in North America, Western Europe, and other places who have distinguished themselves as really great scholars of St. Maximus the Confessor. I may or may not be one of them, but there are many people who deserve that kind of praise. He is a complex thinker and writer, as you know, and it takes a group of people to approach him from different perspectives to really begin to get at all of the issues there. One person can’t do it alone. Hopefully, scholars work together as a team, as part of a community, and we do what we do.

My doctoral work was in patristics, so there was a natural fit there. My initial studies were on the classical Christological controversy of the fifth century, and it wasn’t until some years later that I became a monk and received the name of Maximus after Maximus the Confessor that I became increasingly curious about my new patron saint. I began to read his works because, years ago, there was very little available in English. I never had a course on Maximus the Confessor, so he was, for me anyway, somewhat uncharted or unknown territory. Then I received an invitation from Dumbarton Oaks, which had just launched a new text and translation series known as the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. If your viewers are interested in patristic and Byzantine texts, there is a growing number of volumes there that they would find of interest. I had an opportunity to contribute something to the series, and I decided I would choose a work by St. Maximus that wasn’t available in English, and I chose the Ambigua. Of course, I found out afterward that the Greek text needed to be edited, so I’m not going to get into those details right now. But the book was completed and finished in 2014, and it is in two volumes in that series. If I can toot my own horn a little bit, they tell me that it has consistently been the number one bestseller in the Byzantine series at Dumbarton. It has sold an incredible number of units. In case anybody is jealous or envious, I don’t get any royalties.

The other thing worth mentioning is that this was a project I began and completed at the monastery. It will forever be a part of that experience for me because I think undertaking and trying to complete a project like that outside the monastery, for me anyway, would have been much more challenging and maybe even impossible. The monastery provides you not only with stability and routine without significant disruptions and interruptions, but you also have a particular focus, clarity, or quality of mind that is hard to find outside of that environment. You forget what that quality of mind is, and then you need to remember—you forget to even remember. You have to remember to remember what it is that you are or who you are. I think it was really a gift of the monastery that enabled me to engage all of the complexities of his language and concepts. I often look back on that project and sometimes wonder how I was able to do it. I live in Boston now and I teach, and it is just a different world. Your energy and attention are just a very different thing.

[Jonathan Pageau] Because if I understand correctly, when you started translating the Ambigua, you had never fully read it before. You really dove in feet first, let’s say.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] It is a lengthy work, and it was available only in Greek, which is very difficult to read. You start at the beginning and just don’t get very far without a translation or a better text. It was a voyage of discovery, definitely. Because I was not familiar with the text, it often felt like there was a revelation on every page. It was all new to me at the time.

[Jonathan Pageau] That’s amazing. And you didn’t mention it, but you did have to do the collating of some of the Greek texts yourself. You had to find these different manuscripts and texts and try to read them to find the best version, or to bring about a good version of the Greek itself.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Yeah, going into it, I thought it was going to be a quite easy translation project. And then I found out that the text was in just terrible shape. The only Greek text that we had published in the standard Greek patrology was just riddled with errors. In places, it was saying the opposite of what St. Maximus had written. So fortunately, I had the training from my doctoral studies, and I had to round up the actual manuscripts and collate them and establish a better edition of the text, which is what you see in the volume. So it was a big project. It took three years, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

[Jonathan Pageau] And so, like I mentioned at the beginning, we both have several things in common. Of course, one is a love of Saint Maximus—me, let’s say, as an amateur—but we also both have a love of liturgical art and icons in particular. There is a deep connection between the two in works like the Mystagogy, where Saint Maximus creates this strict analogical relationship between a human person and the actual architecture of the church building. This is, of course, in line with how Saint Maximus creates this microcosm-macrocosm relationship throughout his writing. Could you help us understand a little more how Saint Maximus does this, how he links the visible to the invisible, the architecture to the body, these types of relationships in his work?

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Yeah, I don’t know if “unfortunately” is the right adverb to begin with, but when you’re dealing with anything in Maximus the Confessor, it always tends toward a thorny complexity. There are always multiple steps you have to negotiate. I think the first thing to say is that there’s definitely what you would call an aesthetic dimension to his writing and to his worldview. He sees creation as a theophany, as a literal manifestation of the divine. So how could this be devoid of something that could be fairly called an aesthetic? But the problem is that this so-called aesthetic is really part of a much larger phenomenon, and it would be reductive to isolate it from that larger phenomenon. It would be like separating the body from the soul, or sensation from the intellectual, and focusing just on one dimension of this larger organic whole. I think something similar happens when people identify Saint Maximus as a philosopher. There’s definitely a philosophical side to him, but to reduce him to that, I think, is to impoverish all the other things that make him who he is. It’s intellectually very respectable to say you’re studying a late ancient philosopher, but it’s not really an accurate representation of who he was or what he did. So again, aesthetics should not be abstracted from this larger metaphysical and cosmological fabric. There’s also a liturgical fabric that’s part of this too, so it really needs to be seen in this larger atmosphere or environment. But the question is really interesting because the relationship between the visible and the invisible is a very old question or problem, and it finds an interesting development or clarification in Maximus. This is important, I think, because many people think that Christianity is some kind of dualistic religion, or that it’s somehow hostile to matter or hostile to the body. That might be true of some Christian traditions, but I think it’s very difficult to level such a charge against Orthodox Christianity or against Maximus in this particular case. It’s true and obvious that the Greek fathers made use of the Platonic tradition, which is why they often get implicated in this charge of dualism, but the Platonic tradition was not nearly as dualistic as most people imagine. First, you have the early Platonic dialogues, which do tend toward a greater degree of dualism, but the later Platonic dialogues, like the Timaeus and so forth, move in the direction of a very different construal of the physical and the spiritual. By the time you get to a writer like Plotinus, the so-called father of Neoplatonism, who’s writing about 300 years or so after Plato, he is so far beyond any kind of Platonic dualism that he consistently avoids Plato’s spatial categories of above and below, for example, where the forms are above and they’re reflected in this lower world. He really avoids that kind of language and replaces it with words and concepts that begin with the Greek prepositional prefix “syn,” like synthesis, synergy, synoptic, or synesthesia. This is a part of speech that unifies things. Plotinus doesn’t like to see things separate. He likes to see them coupled, united, or unified in some form, because he himself sees the unity in all things. This is the way his philosophy unfolds—not as a disjunction of the spiritual and the physical, but they’re on a kind of continuum. Somewhere in the Enneads, he makes this great quote where he says…

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Sensations here—and by here he means in this life, in this world—are dim intellections, but intellections there—he means in the spiritual world—are vivid sensations. So they are on a kind of continuum and are essentially the same thing, but just in different places, and therefore they have different valences.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] This is where we need to locate Maximus, in this later Neoplatonic tradition that is decidedly not dualistic at all, but embraces this kind of formula or model of unity. We see Maximus everywhere interested in the immediacy of things, the mutual presence of things to one another, and even a kind of mutual interiority that things have to each other, rather than their opposition, whether spatially construed or otherwise. This makes sense because he was partly reacting to the Origenist tradition, which was more dualistically Platonic in the sense I just described. In the Gnostic ascent of the mind back toward the One, differences would fall away. Gender would fall away, the body would fall away, individuality would fall away, and there would be a return to a kind of homogeneous collective state in which there was no person or individual. Of course, Maximus is pushing back against this, so he comes down hard on particularity, but within this kind of union.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I think the key here is the Christological teaching of the Council of Chalcedon that many people are familiar with. It is the position that Christ’s two natures are related to one another through four famous adverbs: the two natures are neither confused nor altered, meaning they retain their integrity. One is not elided, confused, or conflated with the other, so they are without confusion and without change. But they also coexist inseparably and indivisibly. It is like wanting it both ways: they are totally one, but at the same time totally distinct. I think this becomes his Christological model for unity without confusion among the constituent elements of whatever it is—the body, the world, the church, you name it.

[Jonathan Pageau] What is interesting, at least to me, in his theory and approach, is that you can really apply it practically at almost all levels of reality. It actually becomes a theory of reality. Even today, people are noticing the problem of unity and multiplicity. St. Maximus offers this capacity for things to exist in a certain manner as one, but also without losing their multiple elements at the level where those elements are real. This does not prevent them from joining together, creating a massive movement where all things can exist at the level they exist, but are united in their different purposes, coming together all the way up into Christ and into God Himself.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I think it is funny because, in our world nowadays, we are trying to sort that question out politically. That may or may not be the best place to do it, but we have our own version of this dilemma—not in terms of metaphysics and the one and the many, but in terms of social identity, cultural politics, and things like that. It is funny how the conceptual structure…

[Jonathan Pageau] …remains in place, but it is construed on a very different level. One of the theories I have about the modern world, or late Christianity and modernism, is that it is a kind of de-incarnation where you start to have idealist forms manifesting themselves, and at the same time you have this kind of gross materialism. Both of them seem to split. At the same time as you have people being all these types of materialists, you have theosophists and all these esotericists going on. St. Maximus, on the other hand, offers this beautiful capacity for synthesis, where the highest spiritual insights are not contradictory to the phenomena in which they are embodied. They actually hold them together in a very similar way to how Plotinus mentioned it, as you quoted Plotinus at the outset.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I think you could see this as an almost Baroque philosophical construction, but you could also see it as a kind of exegesis on some very basic principles in the Gospel. Something as small and minute as a mustard seed can somehow be a symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven, or a human person can be the image of God. This suggests there is some sort of analogical world here that contains symbolic correspondences. In other words, there are particular entities or things in the world, but they are not unconnected or unrelated.

[Jonathan Pageau] What I would like to look at is how we see St. Maximus draw these analogies across different levels of being. He says things like the liturgy we encounter in the church is also happening invisibly in you. Just as Christ manifests himself in the Eucharist, Christ manifests himself in your heart. He does this where he is constantly moving across different levels of being to show…

[Jonathan Pageau] It is not just an interpretation of scripture or an exposition of tradition, but it really ends up being a theory of reality itself. He talks about this liturgical space and then the inner space, so I would like you to talk a little bit about how liturgy and asceticism shape the world we live in. How embodying these practices can help us make sense of things that we do not usually attribute to the sacred or to religion itself.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Sure. You mentioned St. Maximus’ work, the Mystagogy, and that is really where so much of this comes to the fore. I will take advantage of the opportunity to mention that the Patristics Institute I am directing these days will be sponsoring a conference on the Mystagogy in early April. You can find out more about it on our website. We have a great lineup of speakers, with more to be announced, and we are hoping it will be a very exciting and important event. Liturgy and asceticism are two things that most people might not associate because, like so many other things, they get separated. Liturgy is over here, and asceticism is somewhere else, perhaps even in tension with liturgy. In the Mystagogy, Maximus describes a movement across the three spaces or places of the church building, which for him are not the narthex, nave, and sanctuary, but the nave, sanctuary, and altar table. It is not three spaces, but three places around which liturgical activity unfolds. For him, the movement is not simply liturgical, but also ascetic. How does that happen? He takes the convenient number of three liturgical spaces and correlates it to the three classic stages of spiritual life or spiritual progress. Evagrius would have called the first stage practical asceticism, which is basically the keeping of the commandments. It is the entry-level ascetic practice needed to get on the path and start moving forward. That activity takes place in the nave, representing basic asceticism. The sanctuary is the space of contemplation, which you arrive at after ascetic practice has purified consciousness to the point where it is able to see certain things it could not see earlier. Mapped onto the altar table in the Eucharist is the experience of union with God. The liturgical movement now becomes simultaneously an ascetic and contemplative movement. People see this, rightly so, as an attempt to synthesize the Dionysian tradition that Maximus inherits, which is all about hierarchies, liturgies, clerical orders, and religious services—heavily ritualistic and heavily hierarchical. That is the one element he takes. The other element Maximus has inherited is the Evagrian spiritual tradition, which is where the three stages of spiritual progress come from. He basically fuses the two together, mapping the one onto the other. We have this interesting convergence of ecclesiology and church structures with the ascetic, spiritual, and mystical life. Again, things that are often subject to a disjunction are brought together in the church and in the liturgy. Some people might be familiar with the way he mapped this same ascetic and contemplative trilogy onto the clerical orders of the church. He says the deacon is the one who has purified his consciousness through ascetical practice, and the priest is the one who has illumined his mind with the knowledge of creation. That is the vision beyond the surface of creation into the intelligible structures of creation that he calls the logoi. Then the bishop, he says, is the one who has perfected his mind in union with the Trinity. The three architectural spaces of the church and the three clerical orders all coalesce in this contemplative moment. That is the first step of all of this. With Maximus, you are always playing three-dimensional chess.

[Jonathan Pageau] I see something similar in the Life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nyssa, where he creates an ascetic movement up the mountain into the divine darkness. When he reaches the divine darkness, he receives the plan for the tabernacle. It is very fascinating because when he receives the plan for the tabernacle, St. Gregory describes the tabernacle as a church. He says things like the pillars of the tabernacle are actually saints. He has the architectural pattern, but he also has a human pattern where he maps the different participants of the church onto this architectural structure.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] That is a great point. That is definitely something that should be brought into the way the body and the temple correlate with one another in the Mystagogy. On the one hand, this percolates up from Christ in the Gospels identifying his body with the temple. We have a very good precedent for these kinds of analogies. Then you have Paul saying things like your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. The way later writers like Maximus and others developed this connection might seem exotic or unusual, but it does have deep roots in scripture.

[Jonathan Pageau] Because we are the body as a church, we are the body of Christ. Christ says that his body—he alludes to his body being like the temple, and then our bodies are like temples. The analogy is already there in Scripture. Most of the analogies that the Fathers open up for us are already there in the text, but they just help us see them when we don’t tend to see them in the first place.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] My impression is that these writers took Scripture very seriously. Literally too, but not only literally—they began there. They would read things like the Lord saying the mustard seed is an image of the kingdom, and they would say, “We’ll accept that as true. But now the question is, under what sort of conditions might a statement like that be possible? For that to be true, for that to work, what exactly has to be going on? What sort of a world does it need to be so that a mustard seed can somehow have this relationship with this noetic reality called the kingdom?”

[Jonathan Pageau] What you see is that they think that way; their mind is Scripture. It’s amazing that they don’t even explicitly make parallels sometimes, and you almost have to know Scripture yourself to realize that they’re connecting different images together. When I read St. Ephraim, I get that so much. He doesn’t tell you where he’s getting it, but you almost have to know all of Scripture to then see why he’s saying this because of this text in Psalms and this text in Scripture. He’s connecting them without telling me that he’s doing it.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] The other day with some students, we were reading Origen’s prologue to the commentary on the Song of Songs. Origen gives you every impression that he knows the entire Bible by heart and can move between books, chapters, and verses faster than a database could. It’s really extraordinary to see someone with that rare gift, to see what can be done when one has that kind of deep knowledge and awareness of the text. But I wanted to go back to what we started to say about the movement through the temple space, the liturgical movement. If the goal of everything is the vision of God, which is unity with God, then whatever stands in the way of that vision needs to be addressed. This is why so many of the Church Fathers spend their time talking about the passions and other kinds of obstacles to the vision, not because they’re fixated on the negative aspects of human existence, but because they want people to be well so they can have this relationship with God. If you’re saddled with all kinds of things we would call addictions and self-destructive behaviors, you’re not going to get very far down the road toward the vision of God. There’s the beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” So the vision of God presupposes purity of heart. Before we sit around like fools talking about the vision of God, we need to talk about what’s obstructing that vision. How do we attain purity of heart? That seems to be the proximate goal that will get us to the ultimate goal we’ve been called to arrive at. This is a big part of Maximus’s approach. It’s not all beatific visions; there’s a labor that has to take place, a kind of agony of birth that consciousness has to go through. Our disordered desires, he would say, are misinterpreting the world to us. We’re seeing the world through the lenses or filters of our disordered desires, of our passions, as he would call them—these places in life where you’ve gotten stuck or fixated on certain things. The passions are interested in pleasure, not the truth, so they’ll never get us to the truth of what’s out there in the world. There has to be this reformation of consciousness and awareness, which they call purification. The way I think of it is through a helpful phrase: every depth has a surface, but not every surface has a depth. We need to attend to the depth of things and not just the surfaces. This is a particular challenge for us in our day and age, because we are obsessed with and fascinated by surfaces, and we have a very hard time seeing past them. All of reality has somehow been absorbed into these surfaces, and we take the surface of the phenomenon as the ultimate object of desire. But once you’re able to see through, once the surface of creation becomes transparent—and I’m not just seeing what I’m projecting onto it based on what my own libido wants to do—once the world becomes transparent to me, then I’m able to begin to see what Maximus calls these intelligible principles or structures of creation. This is the presence of God in the world, the special way that God makes himself present to that world. Once the saint or the artist grasps or intuits that intelligible structure, he or she is able to begin to transform the world on the basis of that principle of divinity that is informing the form we see.

[Jonathan Pageau] One of the important things is that these patterns or structures are not just the way we think of scientific rules or abstract patterns; they call us. They are modes of being, modes of engaging with the world.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] These are not the laws of nature, and they are not even subatomic elements; they are spiritual principles. He calls them the logi, which is the plural for the logos. It is the particular way that the logos makes itself present to a thing. The logos is not present to a rock in the same way that it is present to a tree, or in the same way that it is present to a human being; it has a particular mode of presence that is analogous to or in proportion to particular beings. To take it a step further, that mode of the logos’ presence to particular things makes them what they are. It is that act of creation in a sense.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] He calls them the logi, and through the created form, one has the possibility to see the logos particularized, the uniform logos made multiform.

[Jonathan Pageau] From the plurality of the world, one can proceed to a more direct or immediate understanding or relationship with the logos itself. Ultimately, one of the secrets is that these logi, if you pierce them enough, are ultimately the logos himself. Behind the multiplicity of the logi, you find the one divine logos, he says.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] It is quite clear that the many logi are the one logos, and the one logos is the many logi.

[Jonathan Pageau] One of the things that surprises a lot of modern Christians that I have noticed is they have this idea that the incarnation is a reaction to the fall. The incarnation is their idea that we sinned, we did all these bad things, and God descended into the world to take our place, and all of that type of language. But in Saint Maximus—and not just him, but definitely in Saint Maximus—it appears very clearly that the incarnation of the God-man is not only a reaction to the fall but is actually the very purpose of creation. How can Christ and the incarnation as the culmination of all things help us make sense of our purpose, our lives, and our ultimate destiny?

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I think that is exactly right. Without reducing it to a caricature, the Western Christian tradition has concentrated on this narrative of redemption—in other words, on the story of the fall and then the redemption of the fall through Christ and through his suffering and crucifixion. That seems to be the major narrative of so much traditional Western Christianity. But from the perspective of a writer like Saint Maximus the Confessor, and more generally from the perspective of the Orthodox theological tradition, that story of fall and redemption is actually a smaller story within a larger story. It is a smaller arc, if you will, that comes under this much larger arc. The larger arc is not fall and redemption, but creation and deification.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] God creates the world and brings beings into existence for no other reason than to ultimately unite them to himself. That is God’s purpose in creation. If you read St. Basil’s Hexaemeron, his commentary on the opening verses of Genesis, he comments on the verse where God saw that it was good.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] He asks, what exactly is God looking at that he thinks is so good? He has this beautiful, romantic passage about whether God is seeing purple mountains of majesty and red sunsets. He says no; that is what we would think might be beautiful, but that is not what God is seeing at all. God is seeing the purpose for which he brought things into being, and that purpose is union with himself in Christ. That is what he sees, and that is what he says is beautiful. The pre-eternal divine plan is for creation and deification. This is interrupted by a parenthesis that opens up the smaller arc, as I am calling it, of transgression and redemption. St. Maximus says that the manner or the mode of God’s plan had to change, but the purpose never changed. The goal always remained the same. God never took his eye off that aim, even though he had to get at it in a slightly different way because of the contingency of the fall. So it was modified by human free choice and sin.

[Jonathan Pageau] But not done away with in its larger form or features. He goes very far in his writings because it is not just us. People might tend to accept that humans are meant to be deified or meant to participate in God, but there is a sense in his writings that it is everything. All of creation, somehow at the level at which that is possible, is meant to be united and be part of the life of God, to participate in the life of God.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] This is a common idea among the Greek fathers: the human person, who was created last in the biblical account, is the summation of the creative effort because it is in the human person that creation attains consciousness, that matter attains consciousness. The human person now becomes the agent within creation that has the ability to recapitulate within itself the whole of the created order.

[Jonathan Pageau] I think this is really important for people today because one of the problems we have is this tendency in scientism to view things and meanings as apart from man. What Saint Maximus offers—and it is actually an interesting solution to the problem of emergence and the problem of all these phenomena—is the notion that man is like a funnel where all of this meaning gathers. There is no way to see the meaning of the world or the purposes of things in creation without going first through man. That can really change a lot of the way in which people think. It brings us back to a more ancient way of thinking. We can understand Aristotle; we can reconnect with some of the things that Aristotle talked about in terms of final causes if we see them as coming into man as this fulcrum which joins the invisible and visible together.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Yes, absolutely. I think we can give this another twist because it is not simply the human person that is the key or the linchpin here—or one of the words used is the workshop. It is perhaps an artisanal or an artistic metaphor, but it is the human person in Christ. We failed to attain the goal that was established for our nature, which is why Christ came and did it for us in a sense, or showed us the way and made that way available to us. So it is not just a human thing; it is a human-divine kind of work.

You hear lots of words today like justice, equality, truth, or righteousness. They are largely detached from any kind of context. Of course, we proclaim them very loudly, and we demand and insist on them. But in the Christian tradition—not just the Orthodox tradition, but the whole Christian tradition—those words do not exist, or make sense, apart from Christ. In other words, the whole tradition is a personalist tradition. There are no abstract categories out there like justice, righteousness, equality, or identity. All of these things have their locus in this redeemed humanity that we find in Christ. So it is his truth, his justice, his righteousness. I think a lot of this kind of language, this fragmentation of language, has crept into many Christian traditions. We adopt it at our own peril because it means forgetting the larger context in which those words were originally defined and made sense.

[Jonathan Pageau] We see it in the modern attempt to demythologize Scripture and abstract these moral principles out of the narrative. We can see where that leads. Looking at the 19th and 20th centuries with the revolutions and all this chaos, we can see that removing it from the narrative, from the ritual, and from this participation leads us into scary places.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Right, because first you abstract the categories or the concepts, then you impose them on societies or communities. As you said, there are more than enough examples just from our own recent history to illustrate what can go wrong.

[Jonathan Pageau] One of the things I mentioned at the outset is that we both have a love for art—liturgical art, but art in general—and culture, and how Christians can connect to culture. I am seeing that many artists, especially Christian artists today, really struggle with how to position themselves in the world. One of the images you bring up in your writing, which I found very beautiful, is when you talk about the gifts—when people bring the gifts into the liturgy for the bread and the wine to become the Eucharist. You mentioned that it is not just about giving up the raw materials, but also bringing up human activity, because these things have already been transformed. You get a sense in which this art is also being brought to then be offered back to us as the body and blood of Christ.

But there is also another important thread in the ascetic tradition of the church, which we see in hesychasm: this suspicion towards imagination. I have seen many artists who approach Orthodoxy become completely bewildered when they read the Philokalia or these ascetic writings. They struggle with what to do because they do not understand the relationship between human making and this suspicion of imagination. One of the things that surprised me was seeing your name in the credits for a recent movie, A Hidden Life. I thought it was interesting that you have some connection with this project, which many people have seen as a powerful example of a Christian story being told. What advice do you have for artists, musicians, architects, writers, filmmakers, and people who want to create culture today? Whether they are creating sacred art or secular art, how can they do this as Christians, or even as secular people who want to act in truth and make beautiful things?

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I think I hear two broad questions there. The first thing you started to talk about was the role of art, or what artists can take from the liturgical experience or the life of the church. You mentioned the gifts, which is why I say this. It is interesting that under pressure from a certain form of scholarship, we insist on this idea that the Eucharist is a meal…

[Fr. Maximos Constas] And anything that detracts from a dinner-like atmosphere is somehow wrong or bad. Obviously, it’s a meal. Historically, it began as a meal, but we always want to avoid reductionism. So if you think about the Eucharist, what happens?

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Maximus describes this liturgical movement through the church that climaxes on the altar table with the consecration of the Eucharist, which he covers in silence, by the way. He doesn’t comment on that particular moment. But we don’t offer wheat and grapes alone. We offer bread and wine, which means that we take the gifts the Creator has given us, and with the power of technology and mind that the Creator has also given us, we transform those gifts into something more than what they were. That rests on the ability for the mind to see what qualities within this wheat and within these grapes can be transformed, or that can bring out something even greater about them. And we offer that back. As you know,

[Fr. Maximos Constas] we offer that and we say, “Thine own, of your own gifts, this is what we offer back to you.” We have nothing else to give God. Everything we have, we’ve received from Him. But we don’t just say we’re re-gifting the same gift you gave us. We express our gratitude by transforming it and offering it back in this truly remarkable way. This liturgical act becomes paradigmatic, or should be paradigmatic, for all human activity. This means that something like work in science or in society should be based on wisdom and reason, and not on another kind of calculus or the organization of the social world. There should be justice and compassion, not expedience or profit. And for me,

[Fr. Maximos Constas] the examples that come readily to mind are how this paradigm inspires human art and human artists to unearth the spiritual potentials, just like what was in the wheat and what was in the grapes. There are spiritual potentials within all matter, within marble, within wood, within pigments, within all kinds of things. To unearth those principles and then to show them forth in the place of the church in monumental art and architecture. That’s the work of the artist, at least as it’s understood within the patristic tradition and the Orthodox tradition. I think it’s Dumitru Stăniloae who talks about this, and he speaks about it very beautifully. He says the art of the artist, the techne of the artist, is that practice which enables the elements of creation to join in the magnificent chant of the liturgy.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] They’re voiceless until we give them that voice. There’s an inner potential that we bring out, and that enters into the space of the church where everything is transformed. There are no raw materials lying around in the church. Everything is polished and

[Jonathan Pageau] carved and worked and drilled and painted. It represents an icon, in a sense, of the whole universe in a state of transformation. There are two images that come to me right away in reading this description of the gifts being brought up. The first thing that comes to me is the parable of the talents, which I never would have connected to this, but it seems to really join into this image of God giving us things and then us having to

[Jonathan Pageau] make it fruitful and then bring it back. The other is the New Jerusalem itself. There’s an amazing little description of the New Jerusalem where it says that the glories of all the nations are gathered into the holy city, into the New Jerusalem. So this idea that all these positive things of human activity are gathered into this final image of the holy city.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Well, the other idea there, though, is that it’s not a return to a garden. There’s a movement from the garden, from the “natural” state, to what? To this urban fabric.

[Jonathan Pageau] Yeah.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] To this magnificent human artifact. The image that’s used is not of a forest or a grove or a garden, but of a built environment. A structure, an architecture.

[Jonathan Pageau] And so how… yes, that’s what I wanted, because that’s the hardest part for artists, is the aesthetic part.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Is the aesthetic part or the aesthetic?

[Jonathan Pageau] Well, the part where you read how… because we know, let’s say I create things, and I know that there’s a buffer, a place between the tradition and the making, which would be something like imagination. I know that I use my imagination to create things, and so it’s hard for us when we read the texts that are so suspicious of imagination to know how to live. How can we join these two things together? Yes.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Right, so that’s a big… there are a lot of people… I’ve heard from others who talked about this the other day. I watched Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev with some of my students.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Anyone who hasn’t seen it is encouraged to run out and do so. It’s largely about how Tarkovsky projected his own artistic struggles into the figure of Andrei Rublev, who, despite the fact that it’s a three-hour movie about an iconographer, never picks up a paintbrush. The problem Rublev is facing, which is the same problem Tarkovsky was facing, is how can one be an artist? How can one create or be creative in a world torn apart by violence, hatred, suffering, and oppression? It’s sort of like that famous statement by Theodor Adorno that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, which Adorno actually retracted at some later point. But there is a question about how one proceeds to be artistic or creative in a world such as ours. I think the precondition for artistic vision or creativity has to begin in a place of asceticism, in a sense. A kind of self-denial. There’s a great passage from one of Tarkovsky’s journals from the 1970s where he says extraordinary things about artistic talent, because he was nothing if not a great artist. He says that talent is not so much a gift from God; it’s really a cross that the artist is doomed to carry. There is a kind of demonism in art. We have all these cliches about great writers and alcoholism, or rock stars and the trouble they get into. There’s something about art that can be dangerous, where you pay for it with your soul, deals with the devil. He says it’s a cross to be carried, which I think is that ascetic moment where whatever we have, as Saint Maximus says, everything needs a cross, because there’s either too much or too little, nothing is quite right, and it needs to be crucified. There’s a great quote from a Buddhist who once said that they like the cross because it crosses out the eye. Iris Murdoch talks about the unselving of the artist that has to take place, using the image of Marsyas, who was flayed by Apollo, which again is the price the artist has to pay or should pay.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Since you mentioned A Hidden Life, one of my favorite scenes in the whole film is where the main character, Franz Jägerstätter, is in his church, the wall paintings of which are being refurbished by an artist. Jägerstätter is the church warden, so they spend time together talking. The artist is a very interesting figure, a voice for somebody or something. He’s almost like Theophan the Greek in Andrei Rublev, because he’s a little cynical or world-weary. He says at one point, talking about the role of the artist, the role of the iconographer, how can I paint these images? How can I paint what I haven’t lived? At the end, it becomes a voiceover. Malick plays the voice over this beautiful landscape with the setting sun, and the last thing he says is, “One day, I hope to paint a true Christ,” which to me was worth the price of admission alone.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I have a friend, a painter and a priest in California, who is a fantastic painter. He actually painted the portrait of me that you see on the inside flap of the Art of Seeing book. I was camera shy at the time, so I had a portrait commissioned, and he did it as a favor, as an expression of his friendship. I once asked him, “What is art?” He said, without even thinking, “Art is the search for an archetype.” This is sort of what the painter in A Hidden Life is saying: one day I hope to paint a true Christ. We have this theology in the church of image and likeness. It’s not just a formalist kind of thing where the image bears a resemblance to the archetype, to the source; the image longs for the source. It yearns for the source. It’s not a visual thing only. It’s a relationship of desire that’s created because the image that emerges from the archetype longs for reunion with its source. That’s why I say that art is this sort of search for an archetype. We still haven’t got to imagination yet, but we’re getting there.

[Jonathan Pageau] Okay. I think what you’re saying is very powerful. On the one hand, I see it. On the other hand, I have these immense contradictions. In my own experience, I’ve found a strange moment where the works I’m making—making icons for churches, making icons for people—which are objectively better sometimes, people will look at them and say crazy things like, “Oh, this is the Holy Spirit doing something.” But I know that when I made that, I was not there; I was in a massive fight with my wife, or I was completely off the road. And then the opposite isn’t necessarily true. Those moments where I’m really rigorous with my daily prayers, doing the Jesus prayer, won’t necessarily produce better icons. I struggle because I can see what you’re saying in the ideal, but in the practice, it seems like there’s a strangeness about our path, which doesn’t necessarily…

[Jonathan Pageau] Sometimes I see it almost as a kind of grace in the sense that, just like a priest can—let’s say the liturgy is efficacious no matter what the priest is going through. And so sometimes I get the feeling that maybe that’s what’s going on because I can’t account for the quality of my work in my spiritual life. That’s a very strong confession I’m making, but it’s true.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Oh, there are different moments. You’re right. I’m talking about the ideal because that’s the point of light that I’m gesturing toward. That’s the goal. That’s the aim. That’s the ideal. Without ideals, without these things, where would we be? But that’s not all there is. That’s the thing. Every day in the life of a married couple over 50 years wasn’t just an ongoing honeymoon. If it was that, by the way, it would mean they never grew in their relationship either. They say, “Oh, it’s not like it was when we first got married.” Well, thank God for that, because you’re not supposed to be standing still. What you’re describing is somewhere else on the map. It gets back to the struggle. It gets back to this burdensome, mixed situation that we’re in that Paul describes in terms of the things that I want to do I don’t do and the things that… well, you know how the rest goes.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] So if St. Maximus describes this as us being in a middle state right now between creation and deification—there’s being, then well-being, and then eternal well-being—we’re in this middle place where we’re trying to be well. We’re trying to live properly. But of course, it’s like the parable of the wheat and the tares. Everything is mixed together in this life. St. Paul says there’s another law at work in his members that is hostile to God and doesn’t want God. That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to you just because you’re having a bad day. It doesn’t mean God can’t work through you. I’ll spare you the injurious analogy of God speaking through the ass in the Old Testament.

[Jonathan Pageau] I’ll take it. That’s okay. I’m fine with that.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] No, I can do better. You’re a nice guy. I’ll do better than that. It says even the high priest spoke prophecy that year, not knowing what he was saying, but because of his office. Who can unfold all of these mysteries of life? They’re just the complexities of what we’re called to try to work through.

[Jonathan Pageau] But what is your advice for the proper use of imagination? This is the hardest one. I saved the hardest for last.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Well, I think there’s a lot of confusion about this word in the first place. When most of us hear and use that word, we’re probably conditioned by the Romantic period and people like Coleridge and what they had to say about the power of the imagination. It’s also coupled with a particularly modern understanding of the artist as an isolated creative genius. So all of those things get mixed up with all of this. And in English, imagination is a nice-sounding word. “Image” is a nice word. Then there’s “imagination,” and we’re always talking about reimagining things, and that’s always a good thing. But it’s innocuous: imagine, image, imagination. In Greek, though, the word for image is “icon,” or “eikona” in the modern version. But imagination in Greek is “phantasia.” “Phantasia” is where we get our English word “fantasy” from. So we’re not even in the same ballpark anymore. “Imagination” sounds good and nice, but “fantasy” is already a different kind of idea or experience.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] I’ve heard many modern-day church artists—whether they’re iconographers, church musicians, or church architects—saying, “Look, we don’t want to be condemned to repeating the prototypes of the past. We are creative artists. We have our talents and gifts, and we want to do our own thing. That’s what people a long time ago did. Where did those prototypes come from? Somebody conjured those things up. So why can’t we do the same?” I’ve heard this many, many times. I’ll come back to this, but before I do, I want to lay out a couple of things that I think are critical in this conversation. I’ll just make two points basically.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Everybody knows the story of Jacob’s dream, where the poor guy goes to sleep with a stone for a pillow and has this dream of the heavenly ladder. Now, when he wakes up, what does Jacob do?

[Jonathan Pageau] He raises the stone and anoints it.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] He builds an altar. He basically builds an altar. So the vision that he had, which is not a product of his fantasy or imagination, or because he was sleeping on a rock or the food he had for dinner was somehow influencing it. No, we understand it to be a revelation that’s given to him. So the divine revelation that he receives somehow spontaneously results in the creation of sacred space.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] That’s the kind of the minor example that I have. The major example that everybody knows is, and it’s the best one, is Moses’s entry into the dark cloud where he sees what? The archetype, you mentioned it earlier, of the celestial tabernacle. This is revealed to him and God gives him specific directions about how to construct it and on what days and what materials to use and an entire plan, a blueprint for reproducing in matter, right, this immaterial reality, right, for this material image of the immaterial and invisible celestial tabernacle. So we have this heavenly archetype or this heavenly form that now becomes reflected in built in the represented in the material world. Now, most people, if they heard that sentence alone, they would say, oh, he must be talking about Plato.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] It sounds like there are forms of there. And then they sort of have their material shadows down in the world where we live, right? Moses lived about, what is it, a thousand years before Plato, right? So this is why you have that great saying by the second century philosopher, Numenius, who gets it from an earlier Alexandrian Hellenistic Jewish thinker, Aristopoulos. And he says, well, he says, don’t get too excited about Plato. He said, after all, what is Plato if not Moses speaking Attic Greek?

[Jonathan Pageau] Yeah.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] That’s a good one.

[Jonathan Pageau] That’s awesome.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] So this is not the Platonic view of the world, this is the priestly view of the world.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] And we deny ourselves this tremendous resource if we dismiss it as so much Platonism. So the idea, I think,

[Fr. Maximos Constas] in other words, any artist who thinks that art is about putting across an idea or propagating a personal thought. or some sort of, I mean, I would ask that person to think about these biblical passages and what they’ve meant to the church, right? And that maybe iconography is not reducible to art in the modern sense. And maybe the making of icons is not simply some private creative thing that I do or that you do to sort of satisfy some creative impulse. Now, having said all of that, I don’t want to deny a place for the imagination.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] it has to be tempered, it has to be disciplined, it has to be educated, it has to be part of this larger liturgical movement that we’ve been talking about here, which is why nearly all, so many iconographers in the church are saints. I mean, Andrei Rublev was recently an icon.

[Jonathan Pageau] No, I think that your insight is right. And the way that I kind of see it is that there’s a hierarchy, to say it that way. That is, there’s a way in which you have, like, you can imagine something like you have, you know, the life of the saint. And then you have the hagiography. And then a little bit lower down on that ladder, you’ll have something like legends about these saints that are,

[Jonathan Pageau] you know, they end up being a little more fantastical, you know. And so. there’s a sense in which we don’t we kind of look at these legends we find them fun and amusing or we find them uh interesting to help us kind of see a bit further but then we also have higher versions of these stories and you see it it almost seems like you see that even in apocryphal literature right where we have scripture and then we have certain apocrypha which are pretty let’s say pretty kosher in a way and then you it kind of comes down into all these more and more fantastical versions.

[Jonathan Pageau] of apocrypha but even in those fantastical ones we might have some little glimpse there’s a little seed that will be carried and will be kind of kept in the tradition um that’s at least the way that i i try to uh to see it um and so it what it does is it leaves a possibility for something like a hidden life which is obviously not a liturgical work it’s not it’s not liturgical art but it it connects through little seeds to something that we can find at the let’s say at higher levels of of participation in the liturgy for example i know if that if that layout makes sense to you yeah there’s definitely to use your word there’s definitely sort of a if you sort of a hierarchy of forms

[Fr. Maximos Constas] let’s say uh everything from you know things revealed in scripture to apocryphal stories some of them have greater value than others and so forth so but i think the thing to also say is that often these very seemingly naive kinds of stories contain tremendous wisdom.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] One of my former colleagues, he’s since reposed, God rest his soul, was an authority on the Gospel of Luke. And Francois Beauvoir, he was a Swiss scholar of the New Testament. And his work was remarkable because, I mean, he knew the Gospel of Luke better than most people. And he was also interested in these apocryphal traditions that were based on the Gospel of Luke. And he saw these not as aberrations, let’s say, or departures from the canonical narrative, but simply different forms of exegesis. Because if you thought about what the story was saying, it wasn’t some hokey kind of, you know, I don’t know, Aesop’s fable, or I don’t know what, I mean, they won’t be such fables, but he said this is really just another way of unfolding.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] uh the the the biblical account by either by expanding it or by right so it doesn’t always work because there are some apocryphal texts that church has you know condemned or dismissed or whatever but others it’s been happy to make use of so yeah we we sometimes don’t think there’s christian would be midrash you know but i think definitely there is which is this interpretation through storytelling.

[Jonathan Pageau] Right. We don’t tell you the meaning we create.

[Jonathan Pageau] We expand parts of the story that are invisible or that are in between other facts. By expanding those, you can actually see the connection that exists between the different aspects of the original story more than you could before. It seems like that’s definitely something which exists in Christianity. There are these amazing legends in Jacques de Voragine’s Golden Legend. You know, this legend of the cross, which describes how the tree in the garden became the rod of Moses, and all these different things until it then becomes the cross of Christ. You think, “Okay, that’s wild and crazy.” But then if you look at how the exegesis—like how the Fathers will interpret the meaning of the cross—you’ll see that no, it’s actually doing in a narrative way what the Fathers would do in a more descriptive way. There is a connection between the rod of Moses, his staff, the cross, and the tree. And so you can do that in a manner that brings it all together in a story. So, yeah.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] Right. Romanos the Melodist, who is a very famous 6th-century liturgical poet, has a poem on the crucifixion. He talks about the cross being planted on Golgotha and the roots of this—because the word for wood in Greek, xylon, is the same word for a tree—so when you say the cross was planted, you’re saying this tree was planted. The wood of the cross, the tree, and the roots of the cross penetrate deep into the earth and puncture the body of death. It’s sort of like the world tree in a way. Now, whether or not Romanos knew about that, I have no idea, but the idea presented itself to his mind, and there it is in that kontakion.

[Jonathan Pageau] That poem is so wonderful. Well, we’ve been going for much longer than I’d planned because this is just a great conversation, but I think we’ve given people quite enough to think about and to explore. I encourage everybody to look into the conference which is happening this spring. If you can go, the people that are going to be there are really the summit. I’ve mentioned many of them on this channel before, and I think it would be a good place for a lot of the people watching these videos to learn more about St. Maximus and how he connects to the world today. And so, Father Maximus, thank you for your time. Thank you for taking this time with me. I really appreciate it.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] It was a lot of fun.

[Jonathan Pageau] And maybe we’ll do it again. I hope so.

[Fr. Maximos Constas] That would be great.

[Jonathan Pageau] Thank you, Father.

[Jonathan Pageau] As you know, The Symbolic World is not just a bunch of videos on YouTube. We are also a podcast, which you can find on your usual podcast platform. But we also have a website with a blog and several very interesting articles by very intelligent people who have been thinking about symbolism on all kinds of subjects. We also have a clips channel, a Facebook group. There are a whole lot of ways that you can get more involved in the exploration and the discussion of symbolism. Don’t forget that my brother Mathieu wrote a book called The Language of Creation, which is a very powerful synthesis of a lot of the ideas that we explore. So please go ahead and explore this world. You can also participate by buying things that I’ve designed, T-shirts with different designs on them. And you can also support this podcast and these videos through PayPal or through Patreon. Everybody who supports me has access to an extra video a month. And there are also all kinds of other goodies and tiers that you can get involved with. So everybody, thank you again. And thank you for your support.