The Whole Mystery of Christ

Jordan Daniel Wood

Description

A thoroughgoing examination of Maximus Confessor’s singular theological vision through the prism of Christ’s cosmic and historical Incarnation.

Jordan Daniel Wood changes the trajectory of patristic scholarship with this comprehensive historical and systematic study of one of the most creative and profound thinkers of the patristic era: Maximus Confessor (560–662 CE). Wood's panoramic vantage on Maximus’s thought emulates the theological depth of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy while also serving as a corrective to that classic text.

Maximus's theological vision may be summed up in his enigmatic assertion that “the Word of God, very God, wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his Incarnation.” The Whole Mystery of Christ sets out to explicate this claim. Attentive to the various contexts in which Maximus thought and wrote—including the wisdom of earlier church fathers, conciliar developments in Christological and Trinitarian doctrine, monastic and ascetic ways of life, and prominent contemporary philosophical traditions—the book explores the relations between God’s act of creation and the Word’s historical Incarnation, between the analogy of being and Christology, and between history and the Fall, in addition to treating such topics as grace, deification, theological predication, and the ontology of nature versus personhood. Perhaps uniquely among Christian thinkers, Wood argues, Maximus envisions creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis: the mystery of Christ is the revealed identity of the Word’s historical and cosmic Incarnation. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of patristics, historical theology, systematic theology, and Byzantine studies.

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction: The God-World Relation in Modern Maximus Scholarship

1. The Middle: Christo-Logic

2. The Beginning: Word becomes World

3. The End: World becomes Trinity

4. The Whole: Creation as Christ

Conclusion: The Whole Mystery of Christ

An Analytic Appendix of Key Concepts

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Philosophie médiévale, scolastique
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Medieval
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Ireneo de Lyon
• Edad Media
• Neoplatonism
• Trinitarian theology
• Maximus the Confessor
• Incarnation
• Theology
• Origen
• Orthodox
• Middle Ages
• Irenaeus
• Christology
• Christianity
• Plato
• History
• Incarnation (christianisme)
• Logos
• Irénée de Lyon

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268203467
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Whole Mystery of Christ
THE WHOLE MYSTERY
OF CHRIST

CREATION AS INCARNATION
IN MAXIMUS CONFESSOR
JORDAN DANIEL WOOD
foreword by
JOHN BEHR
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2022 by Jordan Daniel Wood
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935756
ISBN: 978-0-268-20347-4 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20350-4 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20346-7 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Nicht jedwedem ist gegeben, das End zu wissen, wenigen, die Uranfänge des Lebens zu sehen, noch wenigeren, das Ganze vom Ersten bis zum Letzten der Dinge zu durchdenken.
—F. W. J. von Schelling, Die Weltalter
In hac autem consideratione est perfectio illuminationis mentis, dum quasi in sexta die videt hominem factum ad imaginem Dei. Si enim imago est similitudo expressiva, dum mens nostra contemplatur in Christo Filio Dei, qui est imago Dei invisibilis per naturam, humanitatem nostram tam mirabiliter exaltatem, tam ineffabiliter unitam, videndo simul in unum primum et ultimum, summum et imum, circumferentiam et centrum, alpha et omega , causatum et causam, Creatorem et creaturam, librum sciliet scriptum intus et extra; iam pervenit ad quandam rem perfectam, ut cum Deo ad perfectionem suarum illuminationum in sexto gradu quasi in sexta die perveniat, nec aliquid iam amplius restet nisi dies requiei, in qua per mentis excessum requiescat humanae mentis perspicacitas ab omni opere, quod patrarat .
—St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum VI.7
αὐτου γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα, κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς οἷς προητοίμασεν ὁ θεὸς ἵνα ἐν αὐτοῖς περιπατήσωμεν.
—Ephesians 2:10
Βούλεται γὰρ ἀεὶ καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ Λόγος καὶ Θεὸς τῆς αὐτοῦ ἐνσωματώσεως ἐνεργεῖσθαι τὸ μυστήριον.
—St. Maximus Confessor, Ambigua ad Iohannem 7.22
CONTENTS
Foreword, by John Behrix
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION. The God-World Relation in Modern Maximus Scholarship
ONE. The Middle: Christo-Logic
TWO. The Beginning: Word Becomes World
THREE. The End: World Becomes Trinity
FOUR. The Whole: Creation as Christ
CONCLUSION. The Whole Mystery of Christ
Analytic Appendix of Key Concepts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
John Behr
According to The Martyrology of Jerome , “On March 25, our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, conceived, and the world was made.” Whatever the original author made of this coincidence of dates and the sequence in which the actions are given, it summarizes well this exceptional and groundbreaking—and provocative—book by Jordan Daniel Wood!
The heart of this present work is not Maximus’s “Christology” but rather the “Christo-logic” that undergirds his theology as a whole. As has long been known, Maximus asserts that “the Word of God and God wills eternally and in all to accomplish the mystery of his Incarnation” ( Amb. 7, and repeatedly in other formulations elsewhere). Such statements have routinely been taken as metaphorical or as extending the work of “the [real] Incarnation” on a cosmic scale. Jordan, however, takes Maximus at his word. He does this by first exploring, with great precision, the metaphysics of Neo-Chalcedonian Christology—Maximus’s Christo-logic—in a much more comprehensive manner than is generally done. Doing so shows that it is precisely in Christ, who is both God and human, without confusion, in one hypostasis, that the very distinction between uncreated and created is at once grounded, differentiated, and unified, so that the idea of creatio ex nihilo proves to be creatio ex Deo . This then provides the basis—the Christo-logic again—for a sophisticated treatment of protology and eschatology, necessarily treated separately though ultimately not to be divided. Here we read a truly profound exposition of Maximus’s otherwise perplexing assertion that Adam turned away from God “together with coming-into-being” (something also never really taken seriously in Maximian scholarship), thereby bringing about the phenomenal but illusory (and death-dealing) world, which is nevertheless inscribed, through the juxtaposition of providence and judgment, within the creative work of God. And so God’s creation is brought to completion at the end, when the creature, necessarily brought into existence involuntarily (for how could it be otherwise?), now voluntarily gives assent to be born into life in and as Christ, entailing that creation is indeed Incarnation.
Jordan’s argument is complex and sophisticated yet laid out clearly and comprehensibly. After an initial review of the way in which Maximian scholarship has treated such problematics (largely by avoiding the implications of Maximus’s words), the bulk of the work is four tightly argued and structured chapters. The argument running throughout these chapters is presented concisely at the end of the first chapter, in terms of two premises (first, the four elements of Maximus’s Christo-logic, and, second, how these four elements likewise define his “cosmo-logic”) and the conclusion (that “Incarnation” does in fact mean in cosmology what it also means in Christology), as well as how these four chapters all address different aspects of the statement from Ambiguum 7 quoted above. The Preface discusses the hermeneutical issues involved in doing historical theology, and the Conclusion explores the implications that his findings have for more systematic questions about how we understand God, Christ, and creation. Jordan also offers a most useful “Analytic Appendix” of the key terms used by Maximus, noting with precision the way in which they are used; reading through the Appendix, one can see, in nuce , the grand scheme laid out. In fact, readers might do well to begin there before working through the main text.
There is one particular aspect of Jordan’s work that I would like to emphasize. In his Preface, discussing what it means that his work is a piece of historical theology, Jordan comments that “ theology is the noun that historical modifies.” He explains this by reference to a point made by Bernard Lonergan, that the task of the historian is to comprehend “texts” rather than the “objects” these texts refer to, in this case the mystery of Christ that Maximus expounds in all its dimensions. He also points to the notion of a “thick retrieval,” meaning, first, listening attentively to the author, but then also bringing into the conversation the author’s own questions. As Gadamer made so clear, understanding always takes place in a hermeneutical circle. Understanding is always historical (how could it be otherwise?), but understanding is always in the present (again, how could it be otherwise?). One must project a historical horizon, he insists, to hear the distinctive voice of the author one hopes to hear. Yet if understanding is to be achieved, this horizon cannot “become solidified into the self-alienation of a past consciousness”; rather, it “is overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding. In the process of understanding, a real fusing of horizons occurs.” 1 In such a “melding of horizons” we will inevitably find more in a text, a surplus of meaning; this is not a claim to “understand the author better than he understood himself ” but a further understanding resulting from a conversation. Perhaps one can go further. As Bakhtin asserted: “Works break through the boundaries of their own time, they live in centuries, that is, in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their lives there are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time. . . . It seems paradoxical that . . . great works continue to live in the distant future. In the process of their posthumous life they are enriched with new meanings, new significance: it is as though these works outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation.” 2 Having read a great interpretation of a great work of art, for instance, one can never see that work in the same way again; text and interpretation have, in Gadamer’s terms, fused. Achieving this requires meticulous historical study, careful analysis of the text, and, in this way, hearing the voice of the author. But it also requires great clarity of mind of the scholar, asking the right questions to find meaningful answers and so arrive at a new expression of the reality itself and the vision of a new profundity.
It is just such a vision that we meet in Jordan’s book. He has presented us not simply with a picture of one aspect, as it were, of Maximus’s theology, to take its place alongside other historical examinations, but rather the whole vision, that which underlies everything else, but seen again, anew. It is indeed a remarkable achievement, a work of theology proper, worked out through rigorous historical study, yet offering a systematic vision grounded in the crucified and risen Lord. It is my hope that, precisely as a work of historical theology , this contribution can help reunify not only the increasingly separated fields within theology, as a singular discipline, but also the supposedly distinct “doctrines” that are really nothing other than various aspects of the single and whole mystery that it contemplates.
PREFACE
Perhaps the last serious Western reader of Maximus Confessor (580–662 AD), prior to the twentieth century at least, was the Irish monk, prodigious translator of significant Greek fathers (Maximus among them), and court theologian John Scotus Eriugena (815–77 AD). Eriugena attributes many insights to Maximus. He credits Maximus with special insight into the riddle of the world’s procession from God. And so he writes in the preface to his versio Latina of Maximus’s Ambigua ad Iohannem :
To mention a few of many points, [Maximus most lucidly