# Cosmic Mystery Jesus Christ (Maximus the Confessor)



## RamistThomist (Feb 7, 2018)

ed. by Paul Blowers. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press.

I’ve read this book six or eight times. It’s probably the most important theological piece ever written on cosmology.

_Ambiguum 7_


All created being is in motion since it aims toward some end.
This combats Origenism. Origen (de Principis I.2) and his disciples said the order of things’ existence was stability (stasis), motion (kinesis), and becoming (genesis). This means a fall before the fall. It raises questions of how one could fall from enjoying the Beautiful. Maximus countered with the following:

(2) Becoming (Genesis), Motion (Kinesis), and Stability (stasis).

(2a) Motion is always directed towards an End.

Passibility (pathos): does not refer to a change or corruption of one’s power. It is that which exists by nature in beings. For that which comes into being is susceptible to movement. 

The Logos of being: participation in god as good and is the principle of being.

*On willing*

(3) When one is firmly attached to a good there is a voluntary transcending of oneself, a willing surrender.

(3a) Gnomic willing is a non-natural volition. 

Maximus then moves away from discussing a fall from Origen’s _henad_.

(4) The One Logos is the Many Logoi (p. 54 = [1077C]).

This statement is the perfection of what all ancient philosophy tried to be. Each thing remains distinct (Gk. _asunchtos_) from everything else. Yet Maximus also wants to say they are the one Logos. How does he do that?

(4*) The logoi are anchored within the Logos (55; Col. 1:15-17; Rom. 11:36)

(4’) The Logos multiplies the logoi after himself (and the logos of a thing precedes its existence).

(5) The Logos recapitulates all things in himself (Eph. 1:10).

Does this mean all things return back to the Logos? In so brilliantly cutting off Origenism has Maximus allowed Origen a return via apocastasis? 

(5’) Since all things participate in God, and they participate proportionally, not all will have the same ending.

(5*) Thus, Maximus doesn’t posit an Origenist apocastasis.

The logos of our being pre-exists in God [1080C]. 

(6) All created things develop and are defined and limited by their logoi.

_Ambiguum 8_

Thesis: Bodily existence is within the realm of flux and chaos and needs the Creator to order it. God changes the _atakton _into the _eutakton_..

Logos/Tropos distinction. The logos is the principle of a thing. The tropos is the mode of existence. The Logos has innovated human nature not in its natural principle (logos phuseos) but in its post-lapsarian existential mode (tropos huparchos).

Is it fair, then, to see Logos/Tropos as akin to the Nature/Person distinction? This would make it:

(7) There is one logos in the trinity but three tropoi huparchoi?

Unfortunately, this creates problems. We would then have two persons of Jesus but only one nature!

(7*) Logos could perhaps stay as nature (or natural principle) but tropos refers not to person, but to the _mode _of the person’s existing.

(7a*) Every Logos has its own telos (1). There is no temporal hiatus (diastema) of any kind within the logos. Nature is already graced because it is intrinsically open to transformation.

_Ad Thalassium 2: On God’s Preservation and Integration of the Universe_

The logos of a thing is already established, but its development is ongoing.. 

(8) God “works” through the latent potentialities within the logoi. 

Christ unites within himself the logoi of universals and particulars. 

_Ad Thalassium 22: At the End of the Ages_

(9) God divided the “ages” between those before he became human and those afterwards
(9a) This is God’s “oikonomia.”

(10) Jesus is the beginning (arche), middle (mesotes), and end (telos) of all ages.

(10*) The end of the ages has come upon his _in potency through faith_.

_Ad Thalassium 60: On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ_

(11) The mystery is the preconceived goal for which everything exists (p. 124).

(11a) The Logos is the goal for which creatures received their beginning existence and to which they move [(1), (10)].

(11b) Time itself is rooted in Christ [=CCSG 22:76]

(12) Christ’s incarnation (economy) was the object of God’s foreknowledge.

EXCURSUS ON GNOMIC WILL

(a) It is discursive [1104A]

(b) It is deliberate [_Ad Thal. 21_).

(c) It is vacillating and sin perpetuates itself not via the natural volitions but through the gnomic will
(d) Earlier in his career Maximus said Jesus had a gnomic fear of death, but he stabilized his gnomic will. Later, he would deny Jesus had a gnomic will (Blowers 112 n7).

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