E. Brown Dewhurst

Maximus the Confessor believed that human nature was originally genderless and sexless and that humans would have this sexless nature restored to them in the resurrection. This paper contextualises Maximus’ theology within a landscape of ascetic, gender ambiguity, and considers what relevance his thought could have for today, given his rising importance in theological ethics. In particular, I focus on teasing out the contemporary ethical implications of sex and gender belonging to tropos – a malleable mode of human expression and movement toward the divine, rather than a fixity of nature.

There has been much attention devoted in the last decade and especially in the last few years to Maximus the Confessor?s beliefs concerning sexual difference and its removal. The most important text on this topic is Ambiguum 41. There has been mixed reception of this text, with some scholars advocating that Maximus believes that sexual difference was absent from original human nature and will return to such a state in the eschaton; and other scholars believing that this should be read as a metaphorical absence. This article re-evaluates the text in question and argues that the former position should be maintained. It goes some way to bring together current scholarship on the text and to answers questions that arise from the opposing reading.

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a “virtue” in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos and the logoi. In particular, Vladimir Cvetković’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilized. It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St. Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Andrew Louth and Paul M. Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics.

This chapter compares the topic of knowledge in the works of Maximus the Confessor and Proclus, and considers the way in which their differences should serve as a cautionary tale when comparing Christian and Neoplatonic traditions. Drawing from the work of Demetrios Bathrellos, Brown Dewhurst begins by considering the similarities between these approaches to knowledge, then by indicating the ways they depart from one another in terms of nature, providence, and will, and the role of apophaticism. Of most importance is the place that knowledge occupies within Christian thought as divine disclosure to creation, a disclosure most complete in theōsis, despite remaining an apophatic mystery. Comparatively, in Neoplatonic strata, the gap between knowledge of creatures and knowledge of the divine is one enforced by natural difference and thus one never overcome in the way Christians describe. Ultimately Christ’s hypostatic union of divine and human natures transfigures Christian understandings of knowledge in ways that are irreconcilable to Neoplatonic notions.

In On the Soul and the Resurrection, St Macrina and St Gregory of Nyssa consider what the soul is, and its relationship to our body and identity. Gregory notes the way that our bodies are always changing, and asks which is most truly our ‘real’ body if we are always in a state of growth, decay and transience? What physical body will be with us at the resurrection? If our body is as important to our identity as our soul, then who am I when my body changes? Macrina answers that our identity is bodily, but that the sufferings and passages of time that alter our bodies mean that we are an imperfect version of ourselves in this life. The person that we will be at the resurrection will be free from the influence of evil and the ravages of impermanence. Modern-day science fiction wrestles with Gregory’s problem—where is my identity located? If my body is altered beyond recognition, or my mind transferred to a new body, am I still me? These cyberpunk and transhumanist worries call to mind the ancient topic of mind/body dualism, and Macrina and Gregory have some surprisingly relevant insights to offer to our contemporary technological dilemmas.

In this article I deal with a problem concerning the ‘divisions of nature’ in Maximus the Confessor’s Ambiguum 41. These ‘divisions’ are five categories that describe how creatures differ from one another and God in natural, physical ways. Later, Maximus discusses the way that the human person may follow Christ to mediate between these divisions. This becomes problematic however as the ascetic practice associated with this mediating power occurs within a sphere we usually define as ‘ethical’. In conflating these physical and ethical dimensions it becomes unclear how our actions can overcome and unite the physical differences described in Maximus’ divisions of nature’. In this article I demonstrate how this problem may be overcome by using Maximus’ own logic of division and unity within this very Ambiguum. It is shown that Maximus does not see these two spheres of ‘physical’ and ‘ethical’ as separate. The ethical is part of the natural trajectory of the physical. Maximus is simply talking about the natural world and the way in which it moves towards its Creator. I build upon Tollefsen’s work on universals and Cvetković’s on circle and radii analogy in order to support this position. Finally, I suggest that we ought to think of Maximus’ ‘divisions of nature’ in this Ambiguum rather as ‘divisions and unity of nature’, since physical differences also promise the possibility of movement of all creation toward unity with God.

I argue that anarchist ideas for organising human communities could be a useful practical resource for Christian ethics. I demonstrate this firstly by introducing the main theological ideas underlying Maximus the Confessor’s ethics, a theologian respected and important in a number of Christian denominations. I compare practical similarities in the way in which ‘love’ and ‘well-being’ are interpreted as the telos of Maximus and Peter Kropotkin’s ethics respectively. I further highlight these similarities by demonstrating them in action when it comes attitudes towards property. I consequently suggest that there are enough similarities in practical aims, for Kropotkin’s ideas for human organising to be useful to Christian ethicists.

This paper explores the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor and its relevance for contemporary ethics. It takes as it’s starting point two papers on Maximus’ cosmology and environmental ethics (Bordeianu, 2009; Munteanu, 2010) and from there argues that we can not consider environmental ethics in isolation from other ethical issues. This, as both Ware and Keselopoulos have also pointed out, is because the environmental crisis is actually a crisis in the human heart and in human attitudes toward everything about us. The paper goes through some key areas in Maximus’ cosmology according to his own formula of creation – movement – rest and considers at each stage the implications of this theology for the way the human should be living and treating other beings. The main sources for this exploration are Ambiguum 7, Ambiguum 41, and The Mystagogia with especial focus on the doctrine of the logoi and the divisions of nature. The paper concludes that Bordeianu and Munteanu are right to consider Maximus’ theology to be of ecological relevance, but that this relevance comes from the radical ethical statement being made about human activity. Maximus’ theology points the human toward becoming in the likeness of Christ who unites heaven and earth through love. The love of Christ when considered in an ethical context stands as a formidable challenge to current attitudes and institutions that advocate the exploitation and destruction of human or non-human creation.

For Athanasius, non-being describes the original state of creatures, and the state that creatures return to when they are not sustained by God. ‘Being’ is a gift given to creatures. Sin, for Athanasius, is creaturely rejection of God and therefore rejection of being itself. This implies that when we sin, humans fall into nothingness and cease to exist, leading to the implication that fallen human nature and personal sin should result in our immediate non-existence. In this paper I describe Athanasius’ position on non-being and sin, and then go on to look at how the theology of Maximus the Confessor may offer a means of understanding the difficulty implied in Athanasius’ work. I look at how Maximus understands being to be transformative, and something that humans grow into. Perfect being which is full communion with God, or absolute non-being are, through Christ, reserved for the time after this life on earth.

I explore virtue and love in Maximus the Confessor’s theology with an aim to drawing an ethics from it relevant to the present day. I use a meta-ethical framework derived from contemporary virtue ethics and look at virtue as an instance of love within the context of Maximus’ cosmic theology. Virtue becomes a path that leads us towards love – who is God Himself. Virtue is thus about movement towards theosis. I describe virtue as a relationship between humans and God, brought about through the mutual practice of a life of ascesis from humans and grace from God. I look at the mediatoral role of humans as microcosms gathering up the universe in an image of Christ’s activity. In particular I analyse the way that human activity is simultaneously cosmic and ascetic; personal and communal. The ethic of virtue that we pursue is always caught up in a conversation about what creation gathered in love looks like. Using a number of tools derived from Maximus’ thought, I suggest that this ethics will necessarily transform our current communities and personal practices. Recognising the cosmic dimension of personal behaviour means that our communities must be scrutinised as extensions of our actions. As an example, I critique the state as an inadequate form of loving relationship, illustrating its systemic reliance on violence and ideologies of alienation and hatred. I give examples of alternative ways of human organising drawn from anarchist thought that might better enable us to love and, more importantly, enable us to call to account failures to love. I conclude that to seek theosis after the manner Maximus describes involves recognising our personal and communal failures to love. His holistic understanding of human purpose can help us see the cosmic dimension to personal ascetic practice and consequently set our sights on a more cosmic vision of love here in the present world.

This paper demonstrates the ontological status of virtue as an instance of love within the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor. It shows that we may posit the real existence of a ‘virtue’ in so far as we understand it to have its basis in, and to be an instance of love. Since God is love and the virtues are logoi, it becomes possible and beneficial to parallel the relationship between love and the virtues with Maximus’ exposition of the Logos and the logoi. In particular, Cvetković ’s interpretation of the circle and radii analogy will be utilised (Cvetković, 2011 & 2013). It will be shown that when one practices a virtue, one is practicing and participating in love, and, by extension, partaking in God. Within the context of Maximus’ cosmology, this means that practicing virtue and love is the ultimate purpose of humanity in its journey to gather all creation to communion with God. This paper is primarily an exposition of primary sources from St Maximus, but discussion of the ontology of virtue is made with a view to bringing it into dialogue with modern theories of virtue ethics. This paper arises in part as a response to the August 2013 papers by Louth and Blowers on the need for increased scholarship on Maximus and virtue ethics.