Paul Blowers has established himself as one of the most profound readers of St Maximos the Confessor; in this book he brings to his exposition years and years of patient reading and pondering. In some ways, it seems to me that Paul is uniquely placed to grasp the very kernel of Maximos’ thought. Many of the increasing number of Maximian scholars seem to have come to Maximos with an overriding issue in mind. Maximos as the one who sees the pure gold in Origen’s metaphysical theology, and sifts this from the questionable elements that had also been immensely attractive to some of his (especially monastic) readers: one could say this of Polycarp Sherwood. Maximos as, in some way, bridging the divide, already becoming a rift, between East and West—the group of mainly Dominican scholars, disciples of Le Guillou, who grabbed the headlines of Maximian scholarship in the 1970s; or the grander claim Hans Urs von Balthasar made in the revised edition of Kosmische Liturgie, seeing Maximos as transcending East and West, where “East really means Asia and West das Abendland—the whole of the West tout court.” Or Maximos as articulating as none other the cosmic dimension of Christianity, or the cosmic dimension of Christology: Tollefsen and others. Or some other particular, though axial, doctrine: deification, it may be—Larchet, perhaps—or his profound sense of the crucial distinction between the created and the uncreated: Lévy? None of these approaches and insights is mistaken, but they lead to the heart of the matter, rather than being that heart itself. Paul Blowers, however, began his engagement with the Confessor somewhere else, with a particular work, his Quaestiones ad Thalassium. Larchet, in his introduction to Maximos’ thought that prefaces the new Sources Chrétiennes edition of Ad Thalassium, elegantly structures his account of the ‘corps de l’ouvrage’ by saying that it is “en apparence un commentaire de passages difficiles de Écriture . . . ,”1 but “. . . en réalité un traité de spiritualité.”2 The more one reads Maximos’ Quaestiones ad Thalassium, the more one realizes that here we are at the heart of the Confessor’s concerns: Scripture is for him an engagement with the Word, an engagement that illuminates the other “incarnations” of the Word, in creation and in the Incarnation proper, and an engagement that draws the reader into the very heart of the mystery of Christ. What might look at first sight like another collection of difficulties for Maximos to solve—a genre that was to remain fundamental in later Byzantine theology—is rather a series of examples of how, by reading and meditating on Scripture, the Christian (or monk, in this case, but Maximos wrote for others, too) can deepen his own participation in the mystery of Christ. The fact that Paul began his study of Maximos by engaging with the very heart of his theological endeavour—promoting and fostering the spiritual life of those who turned to him, rather than refining Christian doctrine in some way—has given Paul’s reflections their own unique authority. Starting from his doctoral thesis, published as Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor (1991) and leading to the two major works of recent years, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (2012), and the book honoured in this symposium, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (2016), Paul has pursued a course marked by a host of truly central articles concerned, mostly, with Maximos the Confessor, and especially with his understanding of the dynamics of the Christian’s engagement with God in Christ, as he or she seeks to reconstruct him- or herself, or perhaps better allow such reconstruction to take place in the fire of encounter with the divine. To this task Paul has brought profound and wide learning (manifest especially in his Drama of Divine Economy), a persistent, almost nagging, questioning of what Maximos really means, and a lively imagination.

All that is more important than anything I have to offer in this attempt to further a conversation with Paul, a conversation that has been going on for a long time, but alas, mainly in my head, by reflecting on a few places in his latest book, where I want to push the debate onwards, maybe also questioning some of his assertions and aspects of his approach.

The first query that arose in my mind reading Paul’s book occurred early on: on page 60. There Paul tells us that “the dispute [at Bizya] began with Theodosios querying Maximus about divine foreknowledge and predestination.” In fact, the dispute at Bizya, an interrogation intended to get Maximos to recant over his opposition to the Typos, does not begin like that. It begins by Theodosios greeting Maximos: “Πῶς ἔχεις, κῦρι ἀββᾶ”—How are you, lord abba? A polite greeting. It is Maximos who turns his greeting into a theological discussion, when he says, “As God preordained before all ages a way of life for me in his providence, that’s how I am.” It might seem a small point, but the text of the Dispute presents Maximos as wholly in charge of the sequence of the dispute, as does the text of the trial (Relatio motionis). It seems to me that, at no point in the trial and the later interrogation, does anyone lead the discussion other than Maximos; and this is remarked on in the text. Maximos’ serene trust in providence, even in the hardship and worse to which he was subjected, is something strange to miss. There is, true, something of a topos about it—one thinks of St John Chrysostom exiled not too far away from where Maximos was eventually to be exiled repeatedly asserting Δόξα τῷ Θεῷ παντῶν ἕνεκα!

A more serious misreading—or so it seems to me—concerns something that Paul repeatedly affirms: that there is a fundamental διάστημα—distance—between God and the created order. What Paul means is correct and fundamental: there is no point of contact/overlap between the uncreated and the created, between God and the created order. This perception, fundamental to the Orthodox rejection of “Arianism” in the fourth century, is something that Maximos radically affirms. In this he reveals his debt to the great fathers of the fourth century, especially Gregory of Nyssa, with whom he shares many of his fundamental metaphysical insights. But neither Maximos nor Gregory expresses this sense of the radical distinction between the uncreated and the created by saying that there is a distance, a διάστημα, between them. Rather, it seems to me, what they both affirm is that διάστημα is characteristic of the created order: created beings are distant from one another; this “distance” (not just spatial, but also temporal, or indeed, I have argued elsewhere, still more general in its application)3 marks the nature of the created order, both manifold and finite, in contrast to the Godhead, one and unbounded. There is no διάστημα between the persons of the Trinity; they know a unity beyond anything that created beings could know. This is clear, it seems to me, in the principal place where Maximos speaks about what we might call, following (though not too closely) his Latin translator and disciple, Eriugena, “divisions of being”: the beginning of Ambigua 41. There Maximos introduces the notion of five divisions, διαιρέσεις, that characterize the substance of everything that has come into being. The first division is between God and the created order; the second, in the created order, between the intelligible and the sensible; the third, in the sensible, between heaven and earth; the fourth, in the earth, between paradise and the inhabited world; the fifth in the world inhabited by humans, between male and female. What is striking about these divisions (διαιρέσεις, not διαστήματα), is that the first is presented in a rather roundabout way: “division” here is called the “ignorance (ἄγνοια) of what it is that distinguishes creation from God.” The other divisions are comprehensible, but this division—between the uncreated and the created—is not; it has to be characterized as “ignorance,” “unknowing.” What Maximos means here is, it seems, clear, even if it is difficult to find a way of expressing it, for God does not belong to τὴν πάντων τῶν γεγονότων ὑπόστασιν, “the substance of what has come to be” in which the five divisions are found. There is no category that embraces both God and the created order, so the “first division” is different from all the rest, which divide the beings that have come to be; we have to characterize it by “ignorance.”

Acknowledgment of this is important, if we are not to misunderstand Maximos (and indeed the whole tradition to which he belongs). God is not “distant” from his created order; there is no distance, διάστημα, that God has to overcome in order to be present to creatures. If God were not present to them, they would have no being at all.

This leads to another topic which Paul mentions in his book and which he will, I hope, one day develop further. This concerns Maximos’ doctrine of the Wisdom of God, his “sophiology.” Paul has this to say:

The activity of Christ as the Logos and Wisdom of God saturates the drama from beginning to end. He is the central character whose appearance is also constantly qualified by his elusiveness. Most mysteriously, his appearance in flesh and on a cross is what holds the primary key to understanding the role and presence in the beginning and end of the world. Maximus thus not only renews a Wisdom Christology, he relates to it a Wisdom cosmology and anthropology. (108)

It is ungracious to complain that Paul takes this no further. No one else has made much of an attempt. Marcus Plested, in a communication to the 2003 Oxford Patristics Conference, remarked that “the theme of wisdom in [Maximos’] work is not one that has attracted any sustained or systematic scholarly attention,” and sought to show that “wisdom constitutes a ‘master theme’ of Maximus’ theological vision.”4 But such a demonstration needed more than the time allotted to a communication. I, too, have failed in such an attempt;5. I can hardly hope to do much better in such brief a space as remains for me. But, as Samuel Beckett says, “Fail again; fail better.”

It seems to me that our reflection of the absence of διάστημα between created and uncreated, human and divine, is the key here. God does not have to overcome any distance between himself and the created order, he is present to it; and this presence, in all its manifestations, is expressed in the Wisdom of God. The problem with developing this, as I see it, is that Maximos rarely (ever?) makes a theme of the Wisdom of God. There are places that can be cited, where he speaks of the Wisdom of God: see Marcus’ article, or Paul’s footnote 29 on page 109. What is much more characteristic of Maximos’ language of σοφία is that for him it is a virtue, a virtue that sums up all other virtues. Perhaps the reason why Maximos seems, from time to time, to gesture in the direction of what we might call sophiology, but then seems never to develop it, lies in the fact that he does develop a comprehensive doctrine of the logoi of being: most of what he wants to say here is expressed in terms of his doctrine of the logoi, rather than in terms of sophia/Sophia. One of the most tantalizing places for grasping what Maximos makes of the wisdom of God, whether the uncreated Wisdom of God, which is the Son, or the wisdom by which we apprehend God (uncreated or created wisdom, to recall the speculations of Bulgakov) is the sixtieth of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium, which Paul has himself translated.6 This question explores the passage in 1 Peter, which speaks of Christ as the Lamb, foreknown before the foundation of the world. The theme of foreknowledge, in a different context, takes us back to where my reflections began. I don’t think the word σοφία is used, and yet the notion of the Wisdom of God manifest in Christ is omnipresent in ad Thalassium 60; so too is the notion of wisdom as constituting our entering into that mystery (there are several places in the Centuries on Love—I. 96, or IV. 2, where σοφία is coupled with δύναμις or γνῶσις—that might be cited in this context). I would be tempted to see here a starting-point for developing Maximos’ doctrine of Sophia, beginning with the crucial role the virtue of sophia plays in his understanding of our response to God.

But, as I said to begin with, all I am seeking to do here is develop further a conversation prompted by Paul’s lifetime achievement in seeking to understand the Confessor.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been an explosion of English-language monographs on Maximus the Confessor; Paul Blowers has written one of the best. Unlike Aquinas, Maximus never wrote a Summa, and the systematization of the dispersed aspects of Maximus’s thought into a coherent vision differentiates this book from the rest. Many of the recently published monographs touched on pieces of the Maximian cosmological mosaic, but Blowers presents the completed image in a way that reflects Maximus’s intent. While not being sympathetic to Blowers’s opposition between “vision” and “philosophical cosmology”—Torstein Tollefsen effectively demonstrated that Maximus did offer the latter—Blowers is right to use the language of “vision,” because Maximus’s concern went beyond philosophical coherence; he wanted to guide the faithful reader to be the very cosmology he was portraying. Although dogma is important, Vladimir Lossky was right in saying that the purpose of dogma is to guide the Christian to be the living dogma. Blowers confirms Tollefsen’s demonstration of the coherence of Maximus’s thought, but in the form of a theo-dramatic narrative that invites the reader into the dramatic play of freedom between the Creator and the created.

Maximus used a variety of forms for distinct purposes, but nowhere does Maximus use narrative and dramatic forms to theologize. Maximus was not a Barthian. The appearance of such words as “theo-dramatic,” “play,” “theatre,” “script,” and “dance” signals Blowers’s affirmation of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s intuition about Maximus’s thought, if not particular interpretations on specific points. Blowers may have opened himself up to critique of superimposing Balthasarian categories on Maximus’s vision; and, indeed, I find it rare—almost refreshing—to witness a scholar of historical theology make use of a contemporary theologian for interpreting one of the church fathers. Simply because Maximus does not use narrative or dramatic forms does not mean that such forms could not be useful both for manifesting the coherence of Maximus’s thought and inviting the reader—as Maximus always did—into that which God has made possible for creation.

The one-sided use, however, of the category of dialectic may slide Blowers’s interpretation of Maximus toward a Barthian scale. Blowers rightly indicates that several kinds of dialectic—cosmological, anthropological, Christological, to name a few—structure the temporal drama between Creator and creature from the moment of creation to that of redemption. An excessive emphasis on the dialectics structuring time can obfuscate a more fundamental logic undergirding Maximus’s thought, which is iconolectic; in the end, only an iconolectic logic makes sense of the relationship between eternity and time, one of the most difficult theological and philosophical problems, and one which problematized Maximus. Tollefsen painstakingly demonstrated that Maximus’s “Christocentric Cosmology” offers a philosophically defensible account of the relation between eternity and time. Blowers does give one of the clearest explanations of Maximus’s well-known notion of the logoi in relation to the Logos, but to discuss the logoi simply as “teleological codes” or “scripts” points only to their temporal dimension, without necessarily making it clear how they are related to and reflective of the pre-eternal Logos. If, in fact, there is a dialectical logic that surrounds the manifestation of the logoi in time, there is an iconolectic logic that structures their relation to the Logos, even as the theo-drama continues to play out.

Blowers does not fail to touch on all the major elements of Maximus’s theology and offers some of the clearest explanations of complex ideas. One such idea is that of the gnomic will, and Blowers is masterful at analyzing the various dimensions of the gnomic will, but also clarifying Maximus’s own struggles in deciding whether and in what way a gnomic will could be attributed to Christ. I agree with Blowers that early Maximian attribution of a gnomic will to Christ can best account for Jesus’s agony at Gethsemane. As successful as Blowers was in clarifying so much that is difficult in Maximus, there is one area where he could have said more: virtue. Blowers does, indeed, include a chapter on virtue, and does provide an excellent understanding of what Maximus meant by virtue. One will not find, however, in this book, nor in the wider literature, an elucidation of what I would call the mechanics of virtue.

Throughout his corpus, Maximus gives a very sophisticated account of virtue in which one finds strong echoes in Aquinas’s own account of virtue. Since Maximus’s concerns were not those of Aquinas, Maximus’s own discussion of virtue lacks Aquinas’s clarity, even if it meets Aquinas’s demand for coherence. Maximus says so many things about virtue, however, that beg for clarification, which include how some virtues engender others and how such engendering ultimately leads to the virtue of all virtues, which is love. Maximus also gives specific advice on the practices one should perform to manifest the virtues and to counter the vices, but as Blowers’s own voice was evident in his discussion of Maximus’s understanding of the gnomic will, it would have been helpful to engage Maximus’s own practical advice on virtue. Is it really true that fasting, hard labor and vigils will check the desires of the concupiscible dimension of the soul? Would solitude, contemplation, and prayer decrease such passions? Would long-suffering, the forgetting of offenses, meekness check anger? Would love, almsgiving, kindness and benevolence decrease anger? Is it really the case that love is begotten of detachment, which is begotten of hope in God, which is begotten of patient endurance and long-suffering, which are begotten of self-mastery, which is begotten of fear of God and, finally, which is begotten of faith, where it all begins? Maximus envisions as part of the wider vision a mechanics of virtue, and while he gives enough to provoke thought, and even virtue, much of what he says remains unclear.

A fuller account of Maximus’s mechanics of virtue would be important for several reasons. First, his prioritizing love as the virtue of virtues constitutes one of the most important contributions and insights of Christian theology. In doing so, he counters Evagrius’s excessive emphasis on knowledge at the expense of love; Maximus does not flip the coin, but argues for the mutually dependent relationship between knowledge and love. The link between virtue and love also makes for fruitful comparison between Maximus and Aquinas, which has yet to be done in any real convincing way that does not simply see Aquinas as a better version of Maximus. They share so much in common, which would make one wonder whether Aquinas was equally as much an ascetic as a philosopher. Differences do exist, and one of the most important being that Maximus does not have the language of acquired and infused virtues. How does such a difference matter for two Christian thinkers who puzzled over the human desire for love of God and saw virtue as a key to the fulfillment of such a desire? Elucidating Maximus’s mechanics of virtue would provide the ground for a more fruitful comparison of Aquinas and Maximus.

In interpreting all other virtues in light of the struggle for learning how to love, Maximus effectively broadens the category of virtue from a moral category to an existential category. Virtue is not simply about right action, or moral knowledge, or even about knowledge in general, but refers to the psychosomatic existence of the human being who struggles to be in authentic relations with self, others and God. As embodied theosis, virtue has relevance not simply for the moral life, but for the full range of experiences possible to the human being, including the experiences of violence and trauma. I have already argued in my own writings that Maximus’s understanding of virtue illuminates the existential experience of violence on the human person in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, moral injury, capacities for learning, and domestic abuse. These situations are not simply about “morality,” but about the human being in her fullness. To be fair, Blowers does in the final chapter indicate how various elements of Maximus’s theology could impact virtue ethics. A more fully fleshed-out understanding of Maximus’s mechanics of virtue would have surely facilitated its influence on the broader discussions of virtue ethics. It would also have enabled a broader discussion with psychological literature. In effect, Maximus does want to share his discernment and insight in how to learn how to love, and in doing so, he often sounds like someone trained in cognitive behavioral therapy. I would argue that basic psychoanalytical categories of the self could further bolster Maximus’s basic insight into the human learning how to love, but with emphasis on those unconscious factors that affect our capacity to love. Maximus seems to always offer concrete behavioral tips in relation the various passions; but, our capacity for self-deception—itself grounded in unconscious insecurities, anxieties, fear, or even the traumatic experiences—cannot be so easily remedied by certain behavioral strategies. It requires a courageous and often painful ascesis of self-reflection. In short, more could have been said about Maximus and virtue and one can only hope that someone soon will build on the basic understanding that Blowers provides.

I do have one minor quibble and that is with Blowers’s interpretation of John Zizioulas’s reading of Maximus. Blowers seems to have joined the onslaught of criticism of Zizioulas’s theology by patristic scholars, and given the fact that very few exhibit the kind of generosity seen in Blowers’s reading of other scholars, his one-sided treatment of Zizioulas was surprising. For those who are familiar with my work, I am, quite predictably, going to play the role of defending Zizioulas. I do so, not because I think some criticisms are unjustified. Indeed, Blowers’s justifiably critiques Zizioulas’s interpretation of Maximus on nature, but he fails to mention Zizioulas’s rethinking of nature in one of his most recent articles, “Person and Nature in the Theology of St. Maximus.” Blowers does reference the article, albeit only once, but only to indicate—I think misleadingly—Zizioulas’s intransigence on this point. Blowers also fails to give credit to Zizioulas for highlighting in a way that no other Christian theologian has—patristic or systematic—the significance of the category of hypostasis for thinking about what it means to be human. According to Blowers’s own analysis, Maximus tethers his notion of logoi to their tropoi, or modes of existence. If Zizioulas can be criticized for over-emphasizing the tropoi (hypostasis) at the expense of the logoi (nature), then I think Blowers has over-corrected in favor of nature without explaining the existential significance of the tropoi in relation to the logoi.

Such minor quibbles, together with my own desire for more on virtue, should not obfuscate the fact that, again, Blowers had produced one of the best books on Maximus. Those engaging Maximus for the first time should start with this book, while the scholar of Maximus will find much detailed analysis that cannot be ignored and provides solid ground for further insights into Maximus’s vision.

Paul Blowers has plunged deep into the texts and studies of Maximus the Confessor to emerge with a richly-researched, carefully-argued perspective on the Byzantine monk. I imagine this study, like Blowers’s previous work on the great theologian, will nudge Maximus still further into the central conversations of constructive theology today. Maximus is theologically generative because his locutions and descriptions are at once faithful to church doctrine and yet, for many of us trained in Western systematics, so fresh as to be strange. I’d like to take one strange Maximian locution—that of “multiple incarnations”—to think with the Maximus that Blower gives us about an emerging conversation in Christology. I want to ask how Blowers’s Maximus extends, deepens, or challenges the conversation about “deep incarnation.”

But first, what does Maximus mean by multiple incarnations?

Realizing the Mystery of the Logos’s Embodiment

As far as I can tell, the actual phrase “multiple incarnations” is Blowers’s own.1 He develops this Maximian term for the way the Logos “always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment [ἐνσωματώσεως τὸ μυστήριον]” (Blowers 73, quoting from Maximus’s Ambiguum 7).2 Throughout his book, Blowers returns to this beautiful description, which evokes God’s longing for intimacy with the world and foreshadows a time when God will be all in all. It is a dense phrase, revealing something of who God is and suggesting a dramatic arc for the multiple incarnations of the Logos.

The “all things” in which the Logos seeks to be embodied include creation, virtuous people, sacramental bread, the church, Scripture, and other holy texts—a diverse list that yet does not exhaust the Logos’s various embodiments (73, 182). What Blowers calls the “economies of the material self-manifestation of the Logos” are vast, such that, in his words, “God’s embodiment is larger, but not qualitatively greater, than his enfleshment in Jesus of Nazareth” (139). In naming an enfleshment of the Logos that extends beyond Jesus without ever surpassing that definitive incarnation, it might sound as if Blowers is positioning Christ’s incarnation at the top of a pyramid of incarnations, culminating a series of embodiments as the best and most important among them. But Blowers takes care to distinguish Maximus on this point from Origen and Eriugena (291). He argues that for Maximus, it is “the Logos as Christ who initiates the terms of his own appearance (and hiddenness)” such that these embodiments are “immediately tributary to the recapitulative purpose of his historical incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth” (78). Christ is not one embodiment of the Logos among others, nor even simply the best of the embodiments. Christ is the subject who through the Logos embodies himself in the world, and these embodiments in turn pay homage to the incarnation of Christ. The multiple incarnations are not separable, at any level, from the incarnation of Jesus Christ. They echo and extend it.

And yet the very multiplicity of incarnations reveals God differently than a singular, echo-less, extension-less incarnation. In particular, the multiplicity displays God’s perfect freedom and surprising playfulness—two related themes for Blowers’s Maximus. That the Logos can realize the mystery of his embodiment so diversely speaks to the freedom in which the Logos initiates the terms of his revealedness and hiddenness; there is no constraint on divine desire. Blowers points to the way Maximus follows Gregory of Nazianzus in this vision of the Logos, for as Gregory writes, “The Logos on high plays (παίζει‎‎) in all sorts of forms, mingling (κίρνας‎‎) with his world here and there as he so desires” (86, quoting Gregory of Nazianzus Poemata theologica (moralia) 1.2.2, a passage Maximus quotes in his Ambiguum 71). Nazianzen here construes the Logos’s realization of desire through mingling in the world as testifying to the playfulness of the Logos, and Blowers returns often to the image of the Logos-at-play, claiming it as central to Maximus’s Christology and indeed his entire theological story. “At core of this cosmic drama of embodied life . . . is the Logos-Christ himself ‘playing’ manouevering, piloting his creatures through the vagaries of corporeality in virtue of his own assumption of the flesh and appropriation of creaturely finitude” (118). The Logos plays, for example, in the polysemy of Scripture, encouraging the reader to “play along” in this dynamic of concealedness and revealedness, issuing an invitation to a cosmic “game of hide-and-seek” (86). The Logos plays in the world, “teas[ing]” creatures through his corporeal life to “goad [them] toward enduring, eternal goods” (86). The goading Logos desires embodiment in all things to arouse creatures’ desire for intimacy with himself—making himself visible to awaken their desire, hiding to strengthen it as they seek him, and so orienting them to the divine life.

The Dramatics of Multiple Incarnations

The Logos who plays in multiple incarnations is a rich image for reflecting on God’s work in the world. It is rich, in part, because it resists reducing incarnation to the solution to a problem. Or, to put it in Blowers’s terms—drawn from John Behr’s work on Irenaeus—the incarnation is a “solution” that precedes any problem (103). Models of salvation history risk casting the incarnation in a functionalist logic, indexing it to its expedience in solving the problem of sin. But the Logos who plays hide and seek with humanity, embodying himself in multiple ways throughout the world to draw us into divine life—this is a purposiveness that is not reducible to a simple function. It is play.

If the incarnation is not a solution to a problem, neither is creation a starting point for linear salvation history. It is, rather, a stage. The Logos who desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment is shorthand for an entire divine economy, in which, as Blowers writes, “creation and salvation are ongoing, seamlessly interconnected aspects of the single divine initiative, or energeia, God’s urge to share his glory with an ‘other’” (139). In Maximus’s theology, creation, incarnation, redemption, and eschaton are not distinct occurrences that follow after one another; they are intimate and overlapping, various refractions of the embodiment-realizing Logos. From the perspective of creation, the incarnation in Jesus Christ is both unanticipated and yet a continuation of God’s activity; salvation then reveals “the incarnational fullness of Christ and the inauguration of a whole new creation” (228). In this way, the theological plot unfolds as Aristotle claims good tragedies should, with the action building in a way that is fitting, even necessary—until an unexpected twist, which can only in retrospect be seen as itself fitting. And, indeed, Blowers describes the movement of Maximus’s theology as “like a good play” and Maximus as a “skillful dramaturge” (221, 223). He is not thinking of Aristotle, though, but Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose reading of Maximus Blowers wants to affirm even as he deepens it with more recent scholarship (322–23).

Deep Incarnation and Multiple Incarnations

I want to continue Blowers’s work of interpreting Maximus together with recent theological scholarship by considering Maximus’s “multiple incarnations” in light of an emerging conversation in constructive theology about “deep incarnation.” The deep incarnation movement originates with Niels Gregersen, who claims that in becoming incarnate as a particular human in Christ, the Logos “also conjoined the material, living, and mental conditions of being a creature in any epoch.”3 This line of thought has been fruitful for ecologically-minded theologians, as well as those interested in the intersections of religion and science. But it is not without its critics.

In her contribution to a recent volume on deep incarnation, Celia Deane-Drummond names two potential dangers for theologies of deep incarnation. One is Christomonism, in which Christ eclipses the Triune God through a theological habit of eliding Trinitarian accounts of divine work with descriptions of Christ.4 The other is a form of naturalism, in which Christ’s presence in the natural world is equated with that world. How can a theologian committed to deep incarnation avoid collapsing Trinity into Christ and Christ into world? Deane-Drummond suggests as remedy a theo-dramatic framework that does not displace reflection on Christ’s ontological significance but instead helps to interpret it.5 Such ontology-friendly theo-drama can display Christ’s joining with the material world across time, space, and the creaturely spectrum in a way that is meaningful, yet that construes this joining in terms of the revelation of the character of God (avoiding Christomonism) while also maintaining ontological descriptions of Christ’s distinctiveness from the natural world (avoiding naturalism).

I hope it is clear at this point how Maximus’s “multiple incarnations” is exemplary of the theo-dramatic approach to deep incarnation that Deane-Drummond urges. I want to go one step further to identify how engagement with the Maximus Blowers gives us can advance this conversation about deep incarnation to a yet richer place. For, Maximus’s multiple incarnations guard against conflation with the natural world, not just by assuming Christ’s difference from the world but by implying the differences of Christ’s embodiments from one another. The Logos as Christ, for Maximus, is not present to the logoi of creation in the same way that the Logos-Christ is present to the sacramental bread or Scripture or to holy women and men. One way to describe the differences among these presences would be simply to point to the theo-dramatic framework, to the way creation stages the Logos’s movement of greater revelation. But in itself, that single-axis approach to divine presence does not adequately express playfulness of the Logos. The Logos is not just more present in Scripture than in creation; the Logos is differently present.

Maximus does not, so far as I can tell, lay out a taxonomy for modes of the Logos-Christ’s presence. Yet he does suggest important differences in presence. Blowers hints at these differences in his discussion of humanity bearing logoi as creatures, eikon as humanity, and the possibility of likeness and assimilation as holy and deified humans (179–80). He suggests these differences again in his account of the church as a “rich and multifaceted symbolic vector toward deifying assimilation to God” in which the liturgy images and presents Christ differently in different moments (170, 178). But perhaps the place where Blowers underscores the potential for modes of presence most strikingly is when he broaches Maximus’s silence about the anaphora. There he writes, “In the Dionysian-Maximian dialectics of disclosure and concealment, the anaphora, as the nucleus of the Eucharist, effectively poised the faithful between the ‘saturating’ presence of the incarnate Word (the Word who aspires always to be incarnate in all created things) and the infinitely inaccessible essence of the Trinity—an inaccessibility experienced as ‘absence’ but in no way constricting God’s own freedom to be present in the celebration” (191). This complex dynamic of absence and presence insinuates the complexity and nuances to the way the Logos is present in the world—that Christ is not just more or less present (the inaccessibility of the Trinity does not name a diminishment of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist) but present in a distinct mode, in a particular way. Blowers comes closest to naming modes of presence when he claims, “the manner by which Christ can be both the Host (Giver) of the eschatologically-charged Eucharistic banquet and its food (Gift) remains a pure mystery for the Church in the historical meanwhile” (194). The embodiment of the Logos as Giver and the embodiment of the Logos as Gift are not easily disentangled—but neither are they identical. They are, in Blowers’s language, different “manners” of presence.

With a more nuanced approach to divine presence, Maximus can help refine the conversations around deep incarnation. For if deep incarnation (at its Deane-Drummond–approved best) offers a way of reflecting extensively on God’s union with the world in Christ, and if a theo-dramatic framework that interprets ontological difference helps guard against diminishing that union into either Christomonism or naturalism; then Maximus’s theology offers another dimension to the incarnation. The Logos-Christ seeks embodiment differently in diverse forms. The way the Logos-Christ comes to us in the Eucharist is not the way the Logos-Christ comes to us in Scripture, nor in the priest as he enters the sanctuary. And meditating on these different modes of the Logos-Christ’s presence cuts still further against the threat of Christomonism, suggesting a Pneuma no less playful than the Logos. It also provides a way of reflecting on Christ’s relationship to the natural beyond the polarities of union and difference. Maximus, it seems to me, can offer the emerging conversation on deep incarnation theologically generative ways forward.6 Here is just one way that Blowers’s volume makes clear that we need more constructive theological conversations with Maximus.

Having gorged myself on the theological feast that Blowers has prepared for us, I will be digesting his rich food for some time to come. In my stupor of satiation, I offer a petty criticism. I wonder if the phrase “multiple incarnations” suppresses some of the gifts Maximus’s theology gives, particularly in flattening the multiple modes and forms the Logos’s embodiment takes in the world. (I wonder if the intermittent scare quotes around the term indicates Blowers worries about this, too.) I wonder if the more beautiful, unwieldy phrase, the Logos who “always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment,” is more suggestive of the diversities of these enfleshments in the world—despite the pleasing provocativeness of “multiple incarnations.”

I’m of the view that the “Maximus fad” of the past two and a half decades is here to stay, and for our benefit. Blowers’s deceptively dense volume validates this persuasion. You can’t read it and deny Maximus’s perduring relevance to Christian theology.

First, then, an encomium. Anyone familiar with Maximus’s writings knows how convoluted they can be. Blowers has managed not only to limn a fairly comprehensive portrait of Maximus and his thought, but to do so with distinctively Maximian chiaroscuro. Christology is like the soft luster in play with the darker tones of dramatic human existence, in Maximus as in Blowers: we see Maximus’s context (part 1), cosmos (part 2), microcosm (part 3), and after-contexts (part 4), with sophisticated Christology canvassed not in discrete discussion but throughout parts 2 and 3. The form speaks the Maximian axiom that contemplation of Christ is at once that of God, creation, and humanity. Another merit. In what I take to be Blowers’s basic thesis we glimpse Maximus’s “cosmo-politeian” vision, so different from George of Pisidia’s: Christ, and no single achievement of civilization, is the perfect divine-human politeia (101) such that against this horizon we can assume “a healthy dialectic of trust and distrust” of whatever current empire (24). Blowers is also right to press that in an age reared on a “hermeneutics of suspicion” we “have great difficulty fathoming the possibility that anyone could act out of sheer theological principle,” and that Maximus’s entire life and death is proof to the contrary (333).

Specialists typically take great interest when a senior scholar like Blowers weighs in on perennial issues. They will not be disappointed. He suggests that Maximus is more Origenist than is usually granted (1–3, 67–68, 222–24). He accepts Maximus’s Palestinian provenance against the Greek Life (30–42), which he calls “dubious” (71n23). You’ll find among the most incisive treatments of how Maximus can deny Christ a gnomic will and yet account for Christ’s overt fear of death in Gesthemane (156–65, 234–40). Blowers does address the question of apokatastasis in Maximus. This is of special interest since the two opposing voices are those of Blowers’s own authorities (von Balthasar = yay; Fr. Daley = nay). There’s admittedly some disappointment when he evokes his theo-dramatic approach only to suggest that Maximus makes of Gregory Nyssen’s universalism a universal summons to right living (252). But these and other discussions in the book betray a well-trained eye guiding the reader through the nettles of Maximus’s and his commentators’ thought alike. I rather think this volume nearly establishes Blowers’s own name under those of its four dedicatees.

Now, an engagement. I cast my principal issue as a question about Maximus’s talk of four divine incarnations or embodiments (Jesus, universe, language/Scripture, deified person): Of the three last, do we say they are incarnations or “incarnations”? A corollary: if indeed we nestle incarnation-talk between scare quotes, how do these qualify the content of the word “incarnation”? Very often Blowers indulges the quotes (78, 107, 181, 187, 257). This would imply, and Blowers once says, that there’s a qualitative difference between “the incarnation proper of Jesus of Nazareth” and “the ‘incarnation’ of the Logos in the logoi of nature” (107). Yet not a few times the quotes vanish (78, 87, 92, 119, 182). So too do their buffering effect. This leads Blowers to make some provocative claims. The Logos’s Incarnation in the logoi of creatures attests to “the depth of his identification with the creation” (113, my emphasis). This kenotic identification of Word and World means creation bears the cross as its most basic form, its fundament (105; cf. Th. Oec. 1.66). Blowers even faults Eriugena’s reception of Maximus to the extent that the former misses that “all [the Word’s] incarnations are eschatologically simultaneous and it is precisely the Logos qua Christ who is fully present in all of them” (291, his emphasis). It would seem that Blowers like Maximus wants to tender the radical view that the very act of creation is divine Incarnation—untamed by quotes. Incarnation here means that creatio ex nihilo is at once creatio ex Deo and Deus ex Deo. This is to conceive the generation of the World in its absolutely natural difference from God and in its fundamentally hypostatic or personal identity with Him. Creation would be divine ecstasy in the precise form of divine Incarnation, a hypostatic relation that exceeds whatever participative or analogical relation obtains between created and uncreated natures exactly because it precedes every natural relation. Or in Maximian conceit, the Logos (qua hypostasis) becomes the logoi by a “creative and sustaining procession [πρόοδον] of the One to individual beings.”[1] God wrought created nature by His own personal ecstasy, the donation of Himself to be the being of created being, just as in the historical Incarnation He generated His human nature by willing to be that nature in Mary’s womb.[2] If creation be Incarnation, then the God-World identity must be of a hitherto unthinkable order.

But Blowers follows von Balthasar in receding from such a prospect, finally discerning in Maximus only the logic of analogia entis so precious to Catholic theology last century. Perhaps thence comes the adventitious scare quotes. Take, for instance, how Blowers narrates divine and human ecstasy in Maximus. In Amb 71, so important to Blowers’s portrait, Maximus equates Dionysius’s portrayal of God being moved out of Himself toward creation with the Logos’s Incarnation as the logoi of creation.[3] Blowers rightly observes that this movement sets the stage for the dramatic play of mutual erotic ecstasy between God and creation (124). What’s odd is that “ecstasy”—in Dionysius and Maximus a cypher for highest union—is then virtually reduced to the difference between God and World. Blowers recruits Jean-Luc Marion to explain that the Ab-solute “is ecstatically disappropriated from Itself in order that man might receive himself ecstatically in difference.”[4] Divine ecstasy is “a ‘withdrawal’ granting a ‘space’ for creatures to participate in the ‘mystery of alterity.’”[5] Marion assures that alterity “grows as much as union,” but the accent falls squarely on difference, for union lies “solely in distance, anterior and perennial, permanent and primordial.”[6] Marion’s “distance” is for Maximus “the non-negotiable hiatus, or διάστημα, separating Creator and creatures-ex nihilo like an ontological and epistemic fault line,” it’s “a horizon, for participation and communion, ultimately inducing deification but without that frontier ever being fully traversed.” As von Balthasar says, “Being different from God . . . is [already] a way of imitating him.” Blowers glosses: “The image (εἰκών) of God (Gen. 1:26–7) in human beings still presupposes this difference, otherwise there would be no space for ongoing assimilation (ὁμοίωσις) to God.”[7]

Maximus himself braves more than this last remark. Deification is not simply the movement from image to likeness of God. After evoking just this trope, Maximus says when we in “union with the archetype” become “images of Christ,” we further “become one with Him through grace (rather than being a mere simulacrum), or even, perhaps, become the Lord Himself, if such an idea is not too onerous for some to bear.”[8] Nor is the diastemic gap between created and uncreated natures “non-negotiable,” never fully traversed. It was fully traversed at least once—in Christ. But as Blowers also knows (107), Maximus claims that the historical Incarnation of Jesus was not some exceptional instance of God traversing that natural chasm in person. Rather it revealed such identity as the vocation of human nature itself:

Had man united created nature with the uncreated through love . . . he would have shown them to be one and the same by the state of grace the whole man wholly pervading the whole God, and becoming everything that God is, without, however, identity in essence, and receiving the whole of God instead of himself.[9]

The universal vocation of humanity is to traverse the diastemic gap, to make them “one and the same” (ἓν καὶ ταὐτὸν). Blowers’s emphasis on natural diastemic difference is surely correct: Maximus himself says creation can never be with God “the same reality” (ταυτόν) by participation.[10] But then Incarnation sans scare quotes means precisely to invoke the unique way the Logos became both “one and two.”[11] And it’s not by participation or assimilation. It’s rather that hypostatic identity not only exceeds every natural relation (and so union), but generates the very natural difference itself.[12] So while the διάστημα ought never to be fully transgressed by some sort of natural closure, this tells nothing of the divine freedom to become identical to all things in the kenotic movement of His own hypostasis. Indeed for Maximus not only can the Word traverse the diastemic gap, He, in His unfathomable condescension, is the gap itself: “Insofar as He had contracted us for Himself into union with Himself, to that extent He Himself expanded [διέστειλεν] Himself for us through the logos of condescension.”[13]

All to say that an “ecstasy” in the manner of divine Incarnation opens up new possibilities for the God-World relation. Several times Blowers takes issue with Yannaras’s and Zizioulas’s emphasis on how divine and creaturely persons can experience an ecstasy from nature in erotic union. Not an ecstasy from nature, counters Blowers, but only of nature (191–92, 317–18). When the Son “goes out” of Himself in the historical Incarnation, for instance, He didn’t forsake His divine nature on the empyrean heights. Divinity comes with Him so that it remains unmoved in essence while the Son’s Person yet bears it. But surely divine ecstasy as Incarnation means both an exodus of and from the divine nature: to the extent that His Person is the divine nature, it’s an ecstasy of that nature; to the extent that His Person is the human nature, it’s an ecstasy from the divine nature; and to the extent that His Person is both, it’s an ecstasy both of and from the divine nature.[14] And if so for the historical, why not for the cosmic Incarnation?

Such is testimony to the merits of Blowers’s book. It’s a historical work that provokes the deepest theological queries—the highest prize in historical theology by my lights. And should my above riposte seem overly contrarian, I hasten to add how it reasserts Blowers’s portrait of the Maximian vision all the more. What could be more dramatic than that creation is not simply a setting of the stage, but is itself the first act of the principal dramatis persona, the profoundest kenotic ecstasy wherein Word identifies Himself with the World and so generates the World—the institution of natural difference by a still more mysterious and ineffable identity between Creator and creation?[15]

[1] Amb 7.20. Translation, Greek, and precise paragraph enumeration of the Ambigua come from On The Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols., edited and translated by Nicholas Constas, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[2] For the logoi as the Logos’s personal implantation in the whole of creation as in a womb—and indeed in explicit comparison to His gestation in Mary—see Amb 6.3.

[3] Amb 71 cites DN 4.13: “He is enticed away from his dwelling place above and beyond all things, condescending to penetrate all things according to an ecstatic and supernatural power wherewith he can still remain himself”; also quoted at 260.

[4] Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance, 153; quoted at 125.

[5] Blowers 126, quoting Marion, Idol, 140 and 162.

[6] Blowers 126, quoting Marion, Idol, 156.

[7] Blowers 126–27, citing Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, translated by Brian E. Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003 [1988]), 87. On von Balthasar’s making of Maximus a prime proponent of analogia entis, see Blowers 321–23.

[8] Amb 21.15 (my emphasis): “καὶ ταὐτὸν αὐτῷ μᾶλλον κατὰ τὴν χάριν ἢ ἀφομοίωμα, τυχὸν δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ Κύριος, εἰ μὴ φορτικὸς ὁ λόγος τισὶν εἶναι δοκεῖ. . . .” It’s striking that what Maximus calls a “mere simulacrum” (ἀφομοίωμα), to be transcended in mystical union, is precisely the term Proclus uses to qualify the likeness of the highest gods (henads) to the transcendent One; cf. Th. Plat. VI.3: “ἀφομοιωμᾶτικός.”

[9] Amb 41.5, slightly modified.

[10] Ep. 6.

[11] Ep 15 (PG 91, 560D).

[12] Amb 5.14: the mystery of hypostatic identity between two incommensurable natures becomes evident in the “generation of opposites (τῇ τῶν ἐναντίων γενέσει γνωριζομένην).” This is the inevitable issue of the christological principle of “enhypostatization”; cf. Ep 12 (PG 91, 468AB).

[13] Amb 33.2, my translation and emphasis: “τοσοῦτον ἡμᾶς δι’ ἑαυτὸν πρὸς ἕνωσιν ἑαυτοῦ συστείλας, ὅσον αὐτὸς δι’ ἡμᾶς ἑαυτὸν συγκαταβάσεως λόγῳ διέστειλεν.”

[14] This is a necessary issue of Maximus’s modified Neo-chalcedonian formula that Christ’s hypostasis was “out of” the two natures, “in” the two natures, and indeed “is” the two natures. See Ep 12 (PG 91, 468C); Amb 5.12. For a concise discussion and several more references in Maximus’s corpus, see Pierre Piret, “Christologie et théologie trinitaire chez Maxime le Confesseur, d’après sa formule des natures «desquelles, en lesquelle et lesquelles est le Christ»,” in Maximus Confessor: Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur, Fribourg, 2–5 septembre 18 1980, edited by Felix Heinzer and Christoph Schönborn (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1982), 215–22. That this emphasis on identity was dear to Maximus is clear from the fact that Leontius of Byzantium, a fellow Neo-chalcedonian from whom Maximus drew liberally, never went so far. See Brian Daley, “The Origenism of Leontius of Byzantium,” Journal of Theological Studies 27.2 (1976): 360.

[15] Perhaps this is why Christ is foreknown by God “before” creation only ever as the sacrificial Lamb (1 Pet 1:20; Rev 13:8): the Lamb is slain before the foundation of the World because that is the foundation of the World.