An Essay in Three Parts on the Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor
“Unified Differentiation” — “A Wheel within a Wheel” — “The Trees of Eden”
I wrote this essay originally in March 2004, but it has long lain in disrepair, hampered by outdated translations and some fixable misconceptions on my part stemming from those inadequate translations. I knew I’d have to revisit it some time, renovating it the best I could, and it fell to this week to do that. My studies from this period in my life form the foundation of my thought, and they covered both Scripture and patristics, each of which was necessary for me to understand the other. I hope readers of this newsletter won’t find access to this document too burdensome. I have plans for other things to write in this space and believe this paper’s importance to those ideas will be evident in time. Already it should shed some light on things I’ve written recently.
– Cormac Jones, January 2023
Briefly, this paper endeavors to describe first the basics of the cosmos and how it functions as created by God, and then with that knowledge the malfunction of Adam’s fall — all as can be found in the thought of St. Maximus the Confessor (d. 662). The purpose of writing is primarily ascetic, to furnish with understanding the mind of one aspiring to follow Christ’s commandments. Accordingly, the essay should not be taken out of that context. The parts are three: “Unified Differentiation,” “A Wheel within a Wheel,” and “The Trees of Eden.”
I. Unified Differentiation
According to His good will, well-considered and with a foreknowledge from all eternity, God created the world, calling it into existence out of non-being: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth (Gen. 1:1). From its inception, then, the world is differentiated into hierarchical levels. Holy Writ begins by relating that differentiation which is empirically manifest, the heaven and the earth, corresponding generally to that which is above the horizon and that which is below. This stratification is a pattern that repeats fractally. For heaven and earth, interpreted symbolically, mark the transcendent differentiation of creation into the sensible (material, empirical, or visible) realm containing “heaven and earth” as we immediately understand it — and the intelligible (spiritual, noetical, or invisible) realm beyond it. The earth, meanwhile, apart from heaven, accommodates a third differentiation, between paradise and that world outside paradise presently inhabited by man, in Greek, the oikoumenē (whence comes the word ‘ecumenical’).1
Now, one might question the nature of this last differentiation, for as anyone who has read lives of saints should know, for example, there have been holy men and women throughout the centuries who have experienced paradise even while living in the inhabited earth. Of the utmost importance, the differentiation of creation as intended by God and described by St. Maximus the Confessor admits of no division between its parts. Though the parts may be different, they are one, being unified in a common created substance, mediated by the experience of the human being which is contained in each part on all layers.
St. Maximus’s most vivid explanation of this principle of unified differentiation comes in his Mystagogy as he plunges the depths of the Christian liturgical tradition. This wisdom is worth quotation at length:
God’s holy Church [is] a figure and image of the entire world composed of visible and invisible essences because like it, it contains both unity and diversity.
For while it is one house in its construction it admits of a certain diversity in the disposition of its plan by being divided into an area exclusively assigned to priests and ministers, which we call a sanctuary, and one accessible to all the faithful, which we call a nave. Still, it is one in its basic reality without being divided into its parts by reason of the differences between them, but rather by their relationship to the unity it frees these parts from the difference arising from their names. It shows to each other that they are both the same thing, and reveals that one is to the other in turn what one is for itself. Thus, the nave is the sanctuary in potency by being consecrated by the relationship of the sacrament [mystagogy] toward its end, and in turn the sanctuary is the nave in act by possessing the principle of its own sacrament, which remains one and the same in its two parts. In this way the entire world of beings produced by God in creation is divided into a spiritual world filled with intelligible and incorporeal essences and into this sensible and bodily world which is ingeniously woven together of many forms and natures. This is like another sort of Church not of human construction which is wisely revealed in this church which is humanly made, and it has for its sanctuary the higher world assigned to the powers above, and for its nave the lower world which is reserved to those who share the life of sense.2
St. Maximus proceeds to reiterate, “There is but one world and it is not divided by its parts.... The whole of one enters into the whole of the other, and both fill the same whole as parts fill a unit.”3
Before the mystery of communion, then, when the royal doors between the sanctuary and nave are closed and the words are sung by the faithful, “One is holy, one is the Lord Jesus Christ,” the exaltation is not of the Uncreated God to the exclusion of creation, St. Maximus explains. First of all, the closing of the doors does not represent the exclusion of those in the nave, as one with a fleshly vision might think. Rather, it signifies “the complete extinction in our senses of deceptive activity”4 and, on an even higher level, the passing away of all created things from the vision of the faithful (including those in the nave) as the uncreated energies of God become the sole occupation of the nous, or spirit.5 Then, St. Maximus concludes, “The profession ‘One is Holy’ ... represents the gathering and union beyond reason and understanding which will take place between those who have been mystically and wisely initiated by God and the mysterious oneness of the divine simplicity in the incorruptible age of the spiritual world.”6
Biblically speaking, this cosmology is epitomized by the event of the Ascension in the Book of Acts. According to St. Maximus, Christ was true to His promise to the thief that together on that day of crucifixion they would be in paradise. Nor did Christ cease from being in paradise when as resurrected He walked among His disciples in the inhabited earth. He had overcome the division between the two and illustrated their unity by bearing one within the other, threading them together. “Then by His ascension into heaven,” St. Maximus continues,
it is obvious that He united heaven and earth, for He entered heaven with His earthly body, which is of the same nature and consubstantial with ours, and showed that, according to its more universal principle, all sensible nature is one, and thus He obscured in Himself the property of division that had cut it in two. Then, in addition to this, having passed with His soul and body, that is, with the whole of our nature, through all the divine and intelligible orders of heaven, He united sensible things with intelligible things, displaying in Himself the fact that the convergence of the entire creation toward unity was absolutely indivisible and beyond all fracture, in accordance with its most primal and most universal principle.7
Importantly, however, St. Maximus describes these unified parts of creation with the Chalcedonian adjective “unconfused”;8 that is, though the division is dissolved, the difference is maintained — a cosmology in tune with dyophysite Christology. In a Christological context St. Maximus writes, “In affirming the union of the divine and human energies by negating their division, the wise teacher was not ignorant of the natural difference between the things that have been united. For the union, by excluding division, does not impair the difference” (emphasis added).9 The divergence between Christology and cosmology is that in Christ the parts divine and human are united only hypostatically and not essentially, whereas in cosmology the parts intelligible and sensible (for example) are united in a common created substance (as well as in any person who enhypostasizes that common substance). Nevertheless, the paradigm of difference without division remains, and the different parts of the cosmos, though unified, always retain the independent natures with which God created them and had always planned to create them. For God created in love, which is to say, He did not create different things so that they could merge and lose their identity — but rather so that they could merge and maintain their identity. To close then, St. Maximus states most explicitly, again using the Chalcedonian adjective “unmixed,” that
Every whole — especially every whole that is formed from the synthesis of various elements — even as it preserves its own individual identity in a consistent way, also continues to bear in itself the unmixed difference of the parts that make it up, including even the essential, authentic character and role of each member in its relation to the others. On the other hand, the parts — for all their undiminished continuity in their own natural role within the synthetic relationship — preserve the unitary identity of the whole, which gives them a hypostatic condition of complete indivisibility.10
II. A Wheel within a Wheel
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.… The hierarchical distinctions within creation between the intelligible and sensible realms, between heaven and earth, and so forth, are modeled after the pre-primordial distinction between the Divine and His creation. The purpose of the hierarchy is to teach creatures looking at the creation to seek their Creator. In comparison to the ground — to take a naturalist, rather than theological perspective — the sky appears vast and unbounded. The earth-bound mind, therefore, looking at the sky will have introduced to it the idea that something greater exists.11 Then, seeing that the apparent infinity of the sky is yet bounded by a horizon, this mind may look yet farther than the sensible realm and encounter the greatness of the intelligible realm. Then perhaps, if possessing such a thorough spirit, this seeker will discover that the eternity of the intelligible realm, too, is bound in coming-to-be.12 Then let the grace of the Almighty Creator enlighten such a one as to who is beyond all creation and is alone without beginning, true, and everlasting.13
Now, how exactly does this work? In the light of the unknowable sublimity of the Holy Trinity, all of creation is united, in St. Maximus’s words, “according to one, unique, simple, undefined, and unchangeable idea: that it comes from nothing. Accordingly, all creation admits of one and the same, absolutely undifferentiated principle: that its existence is preceded by nonexistence.”14 All of creation is created and is not uncreated. For according to God’s good will, well-considered and with a foreknowledge from all eternity, He created the world, calling it into existence out of non-being. This world, St. Maximus writes, “is a place that is definitively bounded, and a state that is circumscribed.”15 The finitude of the world stands in direct contradistinction to God, who alone is truly infinite and everlasting.16 The world is a circumscribed state because it came into being; anything that comes into being always contains the potential to exit out of being. In other words, it always has non-being as an opposite. St. Maximus writes,
Only the divine essence has no opposite, since it is eternal and infinite and bestows eternity on other things. The being of created things, on the other hand, has non-being as its opposite. Whether or not it exists eternally depends on the power of Him who alone exists in a substantive sense. But since ‘the gifts of God are irrevocable’ (Rom. 11:29),17 the being of created things always is and always will be sustained by His almighty power, even though it has, as we said, an opposite; for it has been brought into being from non-being, and whether or not it exists depends on the will of God.18
The layers of differentiation reflect, within their realm of created being, this substantial otherness between Creator and creation. The relationship between time and eternity (corresponding to the sensible and intelligible realms) typifies this principle, and St. Maximus speaks most eloquently of it in the tenth of his Ambigua. A key passage uses Moses and Elijah on Mt. Tabor as symbols of time and eternity. “The type of time is Moses,” St. Maximus conveys,
not only as the teacher of time and of number in accordance with time (for he was the first to count time from the creation of the world), or as one who instituted temporal worship, but also as not entering bodily into rest with those whom he had instructed before the divine promise. For such is time, not overtaking or accompanying in movement those whom it is accustomed to escort to the divine life of the age to come. For it has Jesus as the universal successor of time and eternity.19
That is, even as Israel is led into the Promised Land only after Moses dies and is succeeded by Joshua the son of Nun, so are God’s elect led into the divine life only beyond this temporal existence, being led there by Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua) the Son of God.
Meaningfully, however, St. Maximus proceeds from this point to note that even if the body of Moses does not accompany Israel into the Promised Land, the Law of Moses — that is, the form of worship that he instituted — does accompany Israel into the Promised Land. By this detail St. Maximus understands that time, although it ends, somehow does not lose its existence, for as he cited before, the gifts of God are irrevocable (Rom. 11:29). The principles (or logoi) of time, according to which God created time, pre-exist in God from before creation and will unchangingly persist in God, who, having once called time into existence, forever calls time into existence.20 One might — though this remark is speculative, and not found in St. Maximus — refer to this continuity of the perishable as God’s memory, a counterpart to His foreknowledge.21 To try once more, in different words, God’s intentions for time are not obliterated even if time shows itself to be a circumscribed state, a finitude that accords with God’s intentions for time from its inception. Psalm 120:8 (LXX) discloses, The Lord shall keep thy coming in and thy going out, from henceforth and for evermore.
Aside from these attempts, further illustration of these concepts can be found in St. Maximus. Expanding his meditation on the types of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, the Confessor compares them respectively to the sensible and intelligible realms, since the story of Moses’s birth and death are present in Scripture, while the story of Elijah’s are not. He explains,
Of these [two realms] Moses offers the meaning of the sensible, since he is subject to change and corruption, as his story clearly shows, declaring his origination and death. For the sensible creation is such as to have a recognizable beginning in coming to be, and to look for an end determined by destruction. Elijah [offers the meaning] of the intelligible, his story neither declaring his coming to be (or if he had been born at all), nor defining him as looking for corruption through death (or whether or not he died). For the intelligible creation is such that it is manifest to humans neither that it has a beginning of its coming to be (whether or not it comes to be and commences and passes from non-being to being), nor that it awaits an end of its being defined by corruption. For it is naturally imperishable, having received this from God who willed to create it such.22
What does it mean that from the human perspective can be seen a beginning in coming-to-be for the sensible realm, yet it is beyond us to detect any such beginning in coming-to-be for the intelligible realm? First off, they both come to be; this is the common trait of all God’s creation. By saying, however, that within this created realm (limited by its opposite, non-being), the spiritual has no manifest beginning — as if coextensive with the circle of creation — and the material has a manifest beginning — and an end, as if it is a smaller circle within the circle of being — is to signify two layers of ontology, one circumscribing the other. Even as God is everlasting and alone uncircumscribable, and creation to the contrary comes to be from non-being, so (within coming-to-be) the intelligible has no beginning, and the material has a beginning. As the allusion to circumscription suggests, the effect is as a wheel within a wheel. “For the whole spiritual world,” St. Maximus writes elsewhere,
seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms, for those who are capable of seeing this, and conversely the whole sensible world is spiritually explained in the mind in the principles which it contains. In the spiritual world it is in principles; in the sensible world it is in figures. And their function was like a wheel within a wheel, as says the marvelous seer of extraordinary things, Ezekiel, in speaking, I think, of the two worlds.23
This layering of circumscription repeats in the other differentiations.24 In the material realm the earth is circumscribed by the heavens like a wheel within a wheel. Though paradise seems to be a location circumscribed by the rest of earth (the oikoumenē), in its greater connection to the spiritual realm, and therefore in its blessedness and its permanence, paradise could definitely be said to circumscribe the lesser being of the rest of the world — the distinction is more moral than physical or conceptual. Even in the lives of saints, paradise though earth-bound does appear to be somehow above the carnal earth as commonly known.25
Importantly, however, although some things may be more limited in their ontology, this circumscription does not imply that corruption is inherent to creation. All circumscribed realms, all the wheels and everything in them are contained in and sustained by the still larger wheels, bearing their imprint and their power — all according to the unity of a differentiation that does not divide. For God did not bring anything into being in order to destroy it. Although something may have a beginning and end in coming-to-be, it still comes to be, and by the grace and will of God, according to His pre-existing intentions, its being along with its coming in and going out is sustained for evermore. The “end” of such things, then, should not be thought of as a cessation of being, but rather a fulfillment of being, and thus a beginning of an extension of life beyond being, known to creation within the embrace of the God who preserves.
The principle of this unity, furthermore, is none other than humanity, the crown of creation, created last among all things, made both spirit and flesh. “Through this potential, consistent with the purpose behind the origination of divided beings,” St. Maximus writes,
man was called to achieve within himself the mode of their completion, and so bring to light the great mystery of the divine plan, realizing in God the union of the extremes which exist among beings, by harmoniously advancing in an ascending sequence from the proximate to the remote and from the inferior to the superior.
This is why man was introduced last among beings — like a kind of natural bond [syndesmos] mediating between the universal extremes through his parts, and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance.26
Man thereby recapitulates all creation by his very nature, but of his own he could not achieve the final mediation between the created and the Uncreated. For this reason the pre-eternal Word became incarnate, realizing the entire purpose of creation as designed by God from the beginning. In this way, humans, being taught by the differentiation of creation, may look toward their Creator, and in the Hypostasis of Christ who binds both human and divine natures together in a manner unknowable (unknowable because after and within this union they remain eternally disparate), these men will not be disappointed, their purpose fulfilled, their nature deified. “We are amazed,” St. Maximus wonders, “at how [human] finitude and [divine] infinity — things mutually exclusive, which cannot be combined — can be identified in Him and can mutually reveal each other. The unlimited is circumscribed by limits in an ineffable way, while the limited unfolds, beyond its own nature, to meet the measure of infinity” — that is, the created (and through man, all creation) becomes uncreated.27 Thankfully, The Lord shall keep thy coming in and thy going out, from henceforth and for evermore. Concerning the existence of perishable, circumscribed things, therefore, all such beings have, within the folds of the Ascension, been gathered up and placed in the imperishable and uncircumscribable bosom of God.
III. The Trees of Eden
It is not within man’s power to bridge the gulf between created and Uncreated, but he even fails to do that which is in his power, namely to unite the disparate parts of creation. He failed historically because he forsook the grace of God, from whom alone comes humankind’s natural powers of recapitulation. “To be sure, it was because our forefather Adam,” St. Maximus grieves, “failed to focus the eye of his soul on the divine light, that he found himself lost like a blind man in the darkness of ignorance, and, groping willfully with both hands through the confusion of matter, surrendered his whole being to the power of sensation.”28
In the discussion to follow, three themes concerning the fall of man emerge from the thought of St. Maximus. First, man suspends the intellect’s discernment between the eternal and the changeable, circumscribing this intellective function with the lesser distinction made by the senses between pleasure and pain (a distinction Adam was instructed not to make in the first place). Secondly, then, man takes that which is united, pleasure and pain, and divides it, pursuing one and fleeing from the other, effectively bringing division and corruption into the world. Thirdly, created things — such that are relative — are valued as if absolute, as if God alone were not the Absolute, and the only One worthy of such worship. The Confessor explains the fall more technically, in terms of a shift in movement, writing,
But moving naturally, as he was created to do, around the unmoved, as his own beginning (by which I mean God), was not what man did. Instead, contrary to nature, he willingly and foolishly moved around the things below him, which God had commanded him to have dominion over [Gen. 1:26, 28]. In this way he misused his natural, God-given capacity to unite what is divided, and, to the contrary, divided what was united, and thus was in great danger of lamentably returning to non-being.29
According to God’s original design for creation, things may have varying levels of ontology, some things beginning and “ending” within others, but this circumscription is not yet corruption because everything remains united, with indivisible bonds, to that which is higher — ultimately to God, incarnate and ascended. The “end” of things in this view, again, is not an existential terminus, but a fulfillment of being and a beginning of ever-being. Such is deified creation. The fall, however, brings division into the world when man, by nature the syndesmos of all creation, takes that which is higher and subjects it, not to that which is higher still, but to that which is lower. Man’s intellect is subjected to his senses. Death, the separation of body and soul, the inversion and therefore corruption of the concentric wheels, immediately follows. As Scripture teaches, the historical event of this fall hinges on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In conformity to his usual exegetical methods, St. Maximus allows for multiple interpretations of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The more mystical meanings he leaves in silence, and not even the anagogical version “suitable for everyone”30 can be fully covered here.31 An elementary rendering, to be analyzed presently, allegorizes the trees such that the tree of life is the intellect and the tree of knowledge is the senses. These two faculties are the powers by which man unifies the layers of circumscription in creation. St. Maximus explains,
For mighty indeed is the relationship of intelligible beings to the objects of intellection [i.e., the intelligible realm] as is that of sensible beings to the objects of sense [i.e., the sensible realm], and thus man, fashioned of soul and sensible body, through his proper, natural relation of reciprocity to each of these parts of creation, is both circumscribed within these divisions and circumscribes them: the former by his potential, for being himself extended into these two divided realms, he is able by virtue of his own double nature to draw them together into a unity, for he is circumscribed within the intelligible and sensible, insofar as he is himself a soul and a body, yet he has the potential to circumscribe both of these realms within himself, insofar as he possesses both intellect and sensation.32
The two trees can thereby be seen to symbolize the paradigm of circumscription that conditions the created order of unified differentiation. Indeed, elsewhere St. Maximus takes the two trees to signify the intelligible realm and the sensible realm, besides the intellect and the senses.33 The misuse of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, moreover, illustrates the breakdown of the created order at the hands of man.
The Confessor begins, returning to the first interpretation of the trees,
Since, then, man was brought into existence composed of intellective soul and sensible body, let us grant that, according to one interpretation, the Tree of Life is the soul’s intellect, in which the reality of wisdom resides, while the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is the body’s sensation, in which irrational motion clearly resides, and, though man received the divine commandment not to touch it or have actual experience of it, he failed to keep the commandment.34
In identifying the tree of knowledge with the senses, St. Maximus does not altogether demonize visible creation, but dutifully assigns to it also the positive role God originally intended it to have within a unified creation. The tree is nonetheless called both good and evil because its nature is to be malleable for use to either end. The value of the tree, then, is relative to how it is used. St. Maximus writes,
For those who ponder the Creator through the beauty of created things, and ascend through these things to their Cause, it is a knowledge of good; but for those who are content with sense alone, who deceive themselves with the outward appearance of sensible things, and who orient their soul’s whole desire toward matter, it is a knowledge of evil.35
A positive role can therefore be ascribed to the tree of knowledge — given that it is circumscribed by the sustaining power of the tree of life. (Here one encounters a higher interpretation of the trees according to which the tree of knowledge can be seen as all creation and the tree of life depicts the Uncreated God, the Lord Christ, or His Cross, as is traditionally held by the Fathers and the hymnology of the Church.36) Regardless of what one feels through the tree of knowledge, be it pleasure or pain, it can all be to the glory of God if related back to Him and the tree of life. Hence the Apostle testifies, I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need (Phil. 4:11–12). To effect this harmony, participation in the knowledge of good and evil is restricted until the mind is firmly established in its movement around the tree of life. In consensus with the Fathers, St. Maximus teaches,
God temporarily forbade man to partake of it [the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], rightly delaying for a while his participation in it, so that, through participation in grace, man might first know the Cause of his own being, and afterwards, by partaking of grace, add impassibility and immutability to the immortality given to him by grace. Having in this way already become God through divinization, man might have been able without fear of harm to examine with God the creations of God, and to acquire knowledge of them, not as man but as God, having by grace the very same wise and informed knowledge of beings that God has, on account of the divinizing transformation of his intellect and powers of perception.37
Again, St. Maximus shows that if Adam had “nourished himself from the Tree of Life, he would have not lost immortality … [but] he would have maintained it by a continual communion with life.”38 The two trees (returning to the more basic interpretation of them) therefore offer to man a training ground for instruction in his role, via the powers of intellection and sensation, as the principle of unified differentiation between the realms of creation layered by circumscription.
The first man, as is well known, did not fare well in his training. The anatomy of his demise, at last, is as follows: “Both of these trees, that is, intellect and sensation,” St. Maximus formulates,
have respective powers of discrimination. For example, the intellect has the power to discriminate between intelligible and sensible things, between the temporary and the eternal — or rather, insofar as the intellect is a discriminating power of the soul, it persuades the soul to adhere to the former while passing beyond the latter. Sensation, on the other hand, has the power to discriminate between bodily pleasure and pain — or rather, insofar as sensation is a power of animate and sense-perceptive bodies, it persuades sensation to embrace pleasure while rejecting pain. If man, then, having transgressed the divine commandment, confines himself solely to discriminating between pleasure and pain, then he “eats” from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that is, <he succumbs to> the irrationality of sensation, having the ability only to discriminate with respect to what sustains bodies, which embraces pleasure as something good, and rejects what is painful as evil. But if, on the other hand, man, having kept the divine commandment, adheres exclusively to the intellective discrimination that discriminates the eternal from the temporary, “eats” from the Tree of Life, by which I mean to say <he partakes of> the wisdom that is constituted on the level of the intellect, which embraces the glory of eternal realities as good, and rejects the corruption of temporary things as evil.39
The reader may take notice, then, that the sin of Adam is repeated whenever anyone, in ignorance of God, takes thought to seek pleasure or avoid pain. Thus for the offspring of the old Adam, the subjection of the mind to the senses consists primarily of the suspension of discernment between intelligible truths and physical sensations, between the eternal and the fleeting,40 in favor of an irrational attempt to separate the intertwining sensations of pleasure and pain. One with such a mindset does not know how, like the Apostle (in whom lives the New Adam), to be both full and hungry, but madly tries to be one and not the other. The cosmic effect of this fall in the direction of the mind from things higher to things lower is the breakdown of a unified differentiation without division — for here man, the syndesmos of creation, perverts his powers to unify that which is divided and instead divides that which is united. St. Maximus explains further how,
Because it is the nature of every evil to be destroyed together with the activities that brought it into being, [man] discovered by experience that every pleasure is inevitably succeeded by pain, and subsequently directed his whole effort toward pleasure, while doing all he could to avoid pain, fighting for the former with all his might and contending against the latter with all his zeal. He did this believing in something that was impossible, namely, that by such a strategy he could separate the one from the other, possessing self-love solely in conjunction with pleasure, without in any way experiencing pain. It seems that, being under the influence of the passions, he was ignorant of the fact that it is impossible for pleasure to exist without pain. For the sensation of pain has been mixed with pleasure even if this fact escapes the notice of those who experience it.… Pursuing pleasure out of self-love, and for the same reason being anxious to avoid pain, we contrive the birth of untold numbers of destructive passions.41
In respect to St. Maximus’s description of the tree of knowledge as relative and capable of use for good or evil, this present circumstance exemplifies the use for evil. The “good and evil,” then, on this level of existence, is the pleasure and pain that fallen man only falsely defines as good and evil by way of subjecting the intellect to the senses. Wrongly does man value the difference between pleasure and pain, which are relative to each other and interdependent, as though this difference were an absolute division, like that between good and evil. The third theme of the fall, however, concerning the inversion of relative and absolute, requires further attention.
To begin, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in that it can be used for either good or evil, has no absolute value but bears the stamp of relativity — such is the character of the senses and the sensible realm. St. Maximus is not afraid to call the world relative. “Ages, times, and places,” he contends, “belong in the category of the relative; nothing that is conceptualized together with these exists without them.”42 The tree of life representing the intellectual capacity of man offers a type of absolute to which the tree of knowledge qua sense-perception can be related, for unlike perishable matter the intelligible is eternal, insofar as it has no observable beginning of its coming-to-be.
The real absolute, however, and the real Eternity, is none other than God the Creator. In the symbolism of the trees, therefore, one may recognize the paradigm of circumscribing realms of creation that ultimately refers back to creation’s foundation in coming-to-be by the will of an everlasting, uncircumscribable God. On this higher level, the tree of life depicts the Uncreated God, the Lord Christ, or His Cross, as mentioned parenthetically above. The tree of knowledge, on the other hand, signifies all perishable creation, through which the saints ascend to its everlasting Cause. As God transcends both being and non-being and has no opposite, and creation comes to be and has the opposite of non-being — circumscribing its state and placing its continued existence forever contingent on His will — so in the relations between the two trees, the tree of life is permanent and absolute and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is that which is at best relative — relative, that is, to the absolute. Indeed, what could be said to be absolute but Christ God? All of creation is relative to Him.
Speaking further on the relativity of the tree of knowledge, St. Maximus counsels, “You, being truly wise through grace, should know that what is simply said to be evil is not absolutely evil, but is evil in relation to something else, just as what is simply said to be good is not absolutely good, but is good in relation to something else.”43 When the Apostle knows then how to be abased and how to abound (cf. Phil. 4:12), then his good is good, and his evil is not evil, but good (that is, the evil that he suffers, not the evil that he does); for all things work together for good to them that love God (Rom. 8:28). When man, however, stoops his mind to the senses, values as absolute that which is relative, and divides the concomitants pleasure and pain into the opposites good and evil, then his evil may be evil, but his good is decidedly not good — but evil. In this way the hierarchy of unified differentiation has been reversed, for in wickedness man has circumscribed the higher discerning power of the mind with the senses’ lesser distinction between pleasure and pain.44
In striving, moreover, to divide that which is united (pleasure and pain), man values two things that are relative as though they were absolute, no longer valuing God alone as absolute. Again, this fall is present in anyone who at the expense of truth pursues pleasure and avoids pain, and those in whom this movement is sanctioned by the will actively reproduce the fall and are guilty of Adam’s transgression. The effort, though, to make absolute the distinction between pleasure and pain is futile. St. Maximus affirms, “Insofar as the entire nature of physical bodies is corruptible and subject to dissolution, whatever a person does to keep it in a condition of stability, he succeeds only in hastening the body’s corruptibility.” The more one strives to separate pleasure and pain, that is, the more evident will be their interdependence and cooperation. “For out of fear,” St. Maximus continues, saying of fallen human experience,
[a man] does not always wish for the object of his desire, but instead, contrary to all sense and his own free will, he pursues what is not desirable through what is desirable, having become dependent on things that by nature can never be stable. He is consequently subject to change together with those things that break up and scatter the disposition of the soul, which is ceaselessly tossed about like a ship on a sea of perpetual flux and change, while he himself fails to perceive his own destruction, for the simple reason that his soul is completely blind to the truth.45
When, however, that which is transitory, that which is mutable, is related back to its permanent principle among the original, pre-existing intentions of God, the divisions of creation wrought by the madness of men are healed, the comings-in and goings-out preserved, and the harmony of unified differentiation recovered. With an uncircumscribable love beyond all description, Christ has made sure to reclaim for man and for the world this path to deification.
The godly St. Maximus summarizes,
The ability to search and inquire into divine realities was implanted essentially within human nature by the Creator at the very moment it was brought into being. Revelations of divine realities, on the other hand, are given to us according to grace through the intervening power of the Holy Spirit. From the beginning, however, the Evil One, through sin, bound those abilities to the nature of visible realities, so that there was “no one taking notice or searching for God” [Ps. 13:2, 52:2], because all those with a share in human nature had their power of intellect and reason narrowed to the surface appearances of sensible objects, and had no conception of any reality beyond what could be perceived through the senses. Thus it was only natural that the grace of the All-Holy Spirit should visit those who had not by their own inclination deliberately fallen into deception, and, releasing them from their attachments to material things, re-establish within them their inherent natural power. Having recovered this power purified by grace, they first searched and inquired, after which they researched and investigated [cf. 1 Pet. 1:10–11] by means of the same grace, that is, of the Holy Spirit.46
Indeed, the spiritual might of the saints to seek God in the most adverse circumstances — even in this fallen existence — when pondered by the ascetic, sets fire to the heart and makes one also burn with desire for the Incarnate Logos, for the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the mind of the Father. “For the sake of love the saints all resist sin continually, finding no meaning in this present life, and enduring many forms of death, that they may be gathered to themselves from this world to God, and unite in themselves the torn fragments of nature,” says St. Maximus.47 Though this essay’s scope has been limited, attempt has been made to show succinctly the basics of St. Maximus’s cosmology, as well as to present a (very) partial account of his rendition of the fall. The intent has been to instruct and inspire the ascetic in regard to that God-given life in Christ to which all who love truth aspire. May the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whose unbounded love has saved and inspired us all, remember us in His everlasting kingdom. Amen.
See St. Maximus the Confessor’s Ambiguum 41, where he lays out these layers of differentiation. See On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. II, edited and translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 102–03.
Mystagogy, from Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, translated by George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 188.
Ibid., pp. 188–89.
Ibid., p. 201.
Several quotations could be cited concerning this stage of prayer. For one, St. Maximus says in Ad Thalassium 64.17:
The intellect that has without qualification been extended to the Cause of beings will be absolutely ignorant of these rational principles, contemplating no principle in the reality of God, who by essence transcends every principle as far as all causality is concerned. Such an intellect, being contracted toward God and away from all beings, knows none of the principles of the beings from which it has withdrawn, but beholds solely the One to whom it has drawn near by grace and in a manner beyond interpretation.
On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, translated by Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), p. 501. Scholion 22 on this text (a note possibly by St. Maximus) clarifies, “The intellect running back to God in ecstasy leaves behind equally the principles of corporeal and incorporeal realities, since it is not natural for anything sequent to God to be seen together with God” (ibid., p. 517 — cf. “Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice,” V.4, The Philokalia, Volume II, translated by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware [London: Faber and Faber, 1981], pp. 261–62, where these two quotations are presented together as one).
Mystagogy, Berthold, p. 203.
Ambiguum 41, Constas, vol. II, p. 113.
Mystagogy, Berthold, p. 189.
Ambiguum 5, Constas, vol. I, p. 51. For consistency, I have twice changed ‘distinction’ to ‘difference’ as a translation of diaphora.
Epistle 13 [PG 91, 521C], quoted in Hans Urs von Balthazar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, translated by Brian E. Daley (San Francisco: A Communio Book, Ignatius Press, 2003), pp. 67–68.
Readers of War and Peace will be reminded here of Tolstoy’s motif of soldiers downed in battle who see the infinity of the sky and think of God. In an early scene the fallen Nikolay Rostov whispers to himself, “Good God, Thou who art in that sky, save and forgive, and protect me” (Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Part Two, chapter VIII, translated by Constance Garnett [New York: The Modern Library, 1994], p. 160). More climactically, the fallen hero Prince Andrey utters, “How quietly, peacefully, and triumphantly, and not like us running, shouting, and fighting, … how differently are those clouds creeping over that lofty, limitless sky.... Yes! all is vanity, all is a cheat, except that infinite sky.... And thank God!” (ibid., Part Three, chapter XVI, p. 313).
Now it should be said that if one were performing natural contemplation proper to the teaching of St. Maximus, and not the naturalist philosophy found in the likes of Tolstoy, there are other mediations that must take place before the ones listed here. Not to be disregarded are, first of all, the mediation between male and female, a process of properly orienting all material polarities, and then after that, the mediation between the world and paradise, a process consisting of the habitual acquisition of the virtues. These first steps are necessary if one wishes the succeeding steps of recapitulating the universe within oneself to proceed efficaciously and without deformity. See Ambiguum 41.
Actually, to fill in that last Tolstoy quotation from two footnotes ago, Prince Andrey proceeds from the sky to the other steps of mediation. After extolling the sky, “All is a cheat, except that infinite sky,” he exclaims, “There is nothing, nothing but that. But even that is not, there is nothing but peace and stillness” — the eternity of the intelligible realm — “And thank God!” — that is, the One pre-existing beyond all intelligible and sensible creation (Tolstoy, p. 313). Importantly, this example may also demonstrate that without the opening steps of mediation — that is, without resolving material polarities and entering paradise by following the commandments of Christ (see previous note) — actual sanctification is hardly approached.
Ambiguum 41, Constas, vol. II, p. 115.
Ad Thalassium 65.23, Constas, p. 537.
“If the substance of all beings — and by ‘all’ I mean the vast multitude of beings — cannot be infinite,” St. Maximus argues,
(for it has as a limit the numerical quantity of the many beings that circumscribes both its principle and mode of being, since the substance of all beings is not limitless), then neither can the subsistence of particular things be without circumscription, for each is limited by all the others, owing to the laws of number and substance.… If, then, no being is without beginning or limitation (as the argument has demonstrated, consistent with the nature of beings), then there was certainly a time when it was not.
Ambiguum 10.39, Constas, vol. I, pp. 295, 297.
The full verse from Romans reads (in the RSV), For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable. In St. Maximus’s terms of being, well-being/ill-being, and ever-well-being/ever-ill-being, the “gifts” mentioned by the Apostle are that which God bestows on all humans — that is, being and ever-being — and the “call” is that which depends on the wills of his creatures, whether they be well or ill. In St. Maximus’s use of the verse, rightly does he say only “gifts” because in this context he refers only to being and ever-being.
Four Hundred Chapters on Love III.28, in the Philokalia, pp. 87–88. Cf. Berthold, p. 65.
Ambiguum 10.31a, from Maximus the Confessor, translated by Andrew Louth (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 130. Cf. Constas, vol. I, p. 263.
To cite St. Maximus, he follows the previous quotation with the observation,
And if the logoi of time abide differently in God, then there is manifest in a hidden way the entry of the law given through Moses in the desert to those who receive the land of possession. For time is eternity, when movement is stilled, and eternity is time, when it is measured by movement, since, by definition, eternity is time deprived of movement, and time is eternity measured by movement.
Ambiguum 10.31a, Louth, pp. 130–31; cf. Constas, vol. I, p. 263.
This thought must be tempered with the statement that God not only remembers creation but continues to will it into existence. For if memory is to be teamed with foreknowledge as a way of denoting God’s relationship with creation apart from His having created it, then obviously it cannot be identified with the willing into existence of created things. God’s foreknowledge is pre-existent, but his act of creation is no more pre-existent than creation itself. Conceivably, then, God could remember created things through their logoi even if He ceased to will their creation — but such a state of events is not what I’m attempting to describe by suggesting the term ‘memory.’
Ambiguum 10.31a; cf. Louth, p. 131, and Constas, vol. I, pp. 265, 267. The Greek here is tough, and both these translations have advantages and disadvantages. Using Louth as a base and Constas as a reference, I’ve altered the wording throughout.
Mystagogy, Berthold, p. 189.
An interesting illustration, worth pondering, of this concept of circumscription is offered by St. Maximus in the following (a quotation of Nemesius of Emesa, On Human Nature 43): “Some things are thought of in a more circumscribed way, as when we think of two cubits, others in a more general way, as when we think of a heap. For you can take away two measures from a heap, and will be left with a heap” (Ambiguum 10.34, Louth, p. 136). Compare that saying with this one: “For time, which is measured motion, is circumscribed by number, whereas eternity, possessing the category of ‘when’, as conceptualized together with its existence, undergoes distension, since it presupposes a first principle of being. And if time and eternity are not without first principle, all the more the things contained within them” (St. Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology, translated by Luis Joshua Salés [Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015], pp. 45, 47).
One might question here whether Ambiguum 41’s final differentiation, between male and female, fits this paradigm — and if so, how? At any rate St. Maximus treats the material polarity represented by sexual differentiation as operating differently from the layers above it.
Ambiguum 41, Constas, vol. II, p. 105.
Epistle 21 [PG 91, 604BC], quoted in von Balthazar, p. 260. The bracketed interpolations are my own inferences.
Ambiguum 10.28, Constas, vol. I, p. 247.
Ambiguum 41, Constas, vol. II, p. 109.
In his Introduction to Ad Thalassium, St. Maximus writes, “Whereas this anagogical interpretation concerning the tree [of knowledge] is suitable for everyone, it should be understood that the more mystical and superior sense is reserved for the understanding of mystics, and is honored by us through silence” (Constas, p. 88).
The prime sources of this exegesis are the Introduction to Ad Thalassium, question 43 of that work, and some earlier considerations in Questions and Doubts 44. Sound expositions of the teaching, moreover, are provided by Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, Second Edition (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), pp. 162–68; and by Paul M. Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 189–91.
Ambiguum 10.26, Constas, vol. I, p. 243. I have here changed the verb ‘contain’ to ‘circumscribe’, a more literal translation, and more consistent with the rest of my text.
St. Maximus: “The ‘tree of life’ is interpreted as the principle of intelligible things. The ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ is interpreted as the principle of sensible things, for it is this principle that contains the knowledge of good and evil” (Questions and Doubts 44 [II.22 CCSG], Blowers, p. 231).
Ad Thalassium 43.4, Constas, p. 247. See also Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality (South Canaan, Penn.: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002), p. 87.
Questions and Doubts 44 [II.22 CCSG], Blowers, p. 231.
Thunberg writes,
There is an early typological interpretation of the tree of life as prefiguring Christ, e.g. in Ambrose [cf. Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri, p. 16], or the Cross of Christ, e.g. in Irenaeus [cf. ibid., p. 34], but there is also an antithetic parallelism between the tree of disobedience, which was the beginning of sin, and the tree of the Cross, which put an end to sin, in Cyril of Jerusalem [cf. ibid., p. 31].
Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, p. 162.
Introduction to Ad Thalassium, Constas, p. 87. See also von Balthazar, p. 181.
Epistle 10, quoted in John Boojamra, “Original Sin According to St. Maximus the Confessor,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Volume 20 (1976), Numbers 1–2, p. 27.
Ad Thalassium 43.5, Constas, pp. 247–48. See also von Balthazar, p. 183, and Staniloae, p. 87.
St. Maximus writes moreover on discernment, that
Inasmuch as the ability to make distinctions is the characteristic mark of the one who ‘gropes after God’ [Acts 17:27], it follows that the one who examines the symbols of the law with knowledge, and who contemplates the visible nature of beings with true understanding of its cause, makes distinctions within Scripture, nature, and himself. In Scripture, he distinguishes between the letter and the spirit [cf. 2 Cor. 3:6]; in nature, between its inner logos and its outward manifestation; and in himself, between intellect and sensation. And by having chosen the spirit of Scripture, the logos of nature, and his intellect, and by uniting them indissolubly to each other, he found God — in the sense that he came to know God, as much as this was necessary and possible — in the intellect, in the logos, and in the spirit, for he is utterly removed from all that deceives and seduces the mind into countless erroneous opinions, by which I mean the letter, the outward appearance, and sensation, in which there exist differences of quantity, which is the antithesis of the Monad. But if someone mixes up the letter of the law with the superficial manifestation of visible things and his own power of sensation, and so confuses them all together, he is ‘blind and short sighted’ [2 Pet. 1:9], being sick through ignorance of the Cause of beings.
Ad Thalassium 32.3, Constas, p. 205. Intellect (Mind), Logos, and Spirit are names of the three persons of the Trinity.
Introduction to Ad Thalassium, Constas, pp. 84–85. See also Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: The Nature of the Human Person, translated by Norman Russell (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), pp. 71–72. At this point in the text, St. Maximus elaborates,
For example, if through pleasure we give heed to self-love, we give birth to gluttony, pride, vainglory, grandiosity, avarice, greediness, tyranny, haughtiness, arrogance, folly, rage, conceit, pomposity, contempt, insolence, effeminate behavior, frivolous speech, profligacy, licentiousness, ostentation, distraction, stupidity, indifference, derision, excessive speech, untimely speech, and everything else that belongs to their offspring. If, on the other hand, our condition of self-love is distressed by pain, then we give birth to anger, envy, hate, enmity, remembrance of past injuries, reproach, slander, oppression, sorrow, hopelessness, despair, the denial of providence, torpor, negligence, despondency, discouragement, faint-heartedness, grief out of season, weeping and wailing, dejection, lamentation, envy, jealousy, spite, and whatever else is produced by our inner disposition when it is deprived of occasions of pleasure. When, as the result of certain other factors, pleasure and pain are mixed together in depravity — for this is what some call the combination of the opposite elements of vice — we give birth to hypocrisy, sarcasm, deception, dissimulation, flattery, favoritism, and all the other inventions of this mixed deceitfulness.
Introduction to Ad Thalassium, Constas, p. 85. Cf. Lars Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), pp. 58–59.
“But God does not fit in the category of the relative,” St. Maximus continues, “since he is not something with which anything else at all can be conceptualized.” Two Hundred Chapters on Theology I.68, Salés, p. 83. I have changed ‘relation’ to the ‘the relative’ after Berthold, p. 140, and Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, p. 127. The Greek term is literally “that which is toward something,” an Aristotelian category.
Ad Thalassium 43.6, Constas, p. 248. See also Blowers, p. 190.
St. Maximus writes much else on this theme of pleasure and pain, which unfortunately cannot be covered here. For example though, even as fallen man wickedly takes the spiritual distinction between good and evil and subjects it to the material distinction between pleasure and pain, so is the loving Confessor willing to take the distinction between pleasure and pain and transfigure it by using the words to describe the spiritual discernment between good and evil. Material pain, that is, experienced in this world, translates into spiritual pleasure in the next.
Introduction to Ad Thalassium, Constas, p. 89.
Ad Thalassium 59.2, Constas, pp. 412–13.
Epistle 2, Louth, p. 91. A fine example of such a holy one is the great Serbian bishop St. Nikolai Velimirovich (d. 1956), who poetically describes the freedom of his soul and his lack of worry for the limited ontology of his body in a collection of inspired reflections originally published in 1922. He writes,
My soul has become accustomed to leaving my body every day and every night, and to stretch herself out to the limits of the universe. When she has sprouted in this way, my soul feels as though suns and moons are swimming over her even as the swans swim over my lake. She shines through suns and supports life on earthly planets. She supports mountains and seas; she controls thunder and winds. She completely fills Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. And she returns to shelter in a cramped and dilapidated habitation on one of those earthly planets. She returns to the body that she still, for another minute or two, calls her own, and which sways like her shadow among mounds of graves, among lairs of beasts, among howls of false hopes.
I do not complain about death, O Living God, it does not seem to me to be anything sad. It is a terror that man has created for himself. More strongly than anything on earth, death is pushing me to meet you.
Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, translated by Archimandrite Todor Mika and Stevan Scott (Grayslake, Ill.: The Free Serbian Orthodox Diocese of the United States of America and Canada), p. 37.
This is profoundly beautiful. Have already sent it to several of my students. Looking forward to reading more!