Andrew Louth - Selected Essays - Volume I - Studies in Patristics (Ed. Lewis Ayres & John Behr)

Selected Essays
Selected Essays
Volume I
Studies in Patristics
A N D R EW L O U T H
Edited by
L EW I S AY R E S A N D J O H N B E H R
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For my offspring
Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac
Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
Andrew Louth has been a central figure in the world of Anglophone Patristic
studies for the past four decades, and a key theological figure within Orthodoxy
(especially Orthodoxy in the diaspora) for three. Andrew is also a thinker known
far beyond the world of those devoted to the study of early and Byzantine
Christianity, and far beyond the circle of those confessionally Orthodox. His
works have been a major source for all those—across many Christian traditions—
interested in the work of ressourcement, of turning again to the resources of clas
sical Christianity (especially as it is developed in the Greek world between Plato
and John Damascene). His monographs cover a considerable range, from his
early and much appreciated two volumes The Origins of the Christian Mystical
Tradition and Discerning the Mystery to his translations and commentaries, and
on to his magisterial surveys John Damascene: Tradition and Development in
Byzantine Theology and Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071.
Andrew’s range and depth of knowledge are rendered all the clearer in his recon
ceptualizing and editing of the fourth edition of the Oxford Dictionary of the
Christian Church (2022).
But alongside these volumes Andrew has always also been a significant essay
ist; many of his most significant contributions to scholarship and to theology are
scattered throughout journals and edited collections, some of which are rather
difficult to access. These contributions, often delivered initially as lectures at insti
tutions and to conferences and symposia around the world testify to his range
and erudition, as well as to his willingness to contribute to the life of the theo
logical community. The same virtues are, of course, seen in his long contribution
as co-editor of the Oxford series “Oxford Early Christian Studies,” and “Oxford
Early Christian Texts.” The present two volumes attempt to reveal something of that
range and erudition by presenting seventy-four of his essays, in a selection made
by Andrew himself. One notable principle of selection here is that Andrew has
not included any of the many pieces he has produced for “handbooks” over
many years.
Dividing the essays between the two volumes has presented something of a
challenge because Andrew’s work on Patristic theology is also intrinsic to his
work as a theologian—the division is not one between history and theology. But
neither is it one simply between the theology of the Fathers over against work in
modern theology or on modern theologians. Such a divisions would contradict
Andrew’s very conception of the manner in which engagement with the Fathers is
the enduring heart of theological work, however much it also must reflect on the
viii Editors Preface and Acknowledgments
streams of thought that are ours today. The division between the volumes is thus
intentionally fluid. Those essays that are most directly focused on exploring the
thought and world of figures in the early Christian world (and in a few cases
exploring the links between that world and the world of Byzantine Christianity)
appear in the first volume. In the second volume many of the essays consider
broader theological topics, some focus on Byzantine and modern theological
writers (especially some of the great figures of the twentieth-century Orthodox
diaspora), while yet others consider the legacy of early Christian theology. The
essays in this second volume are offered in chronological order, allowing the
reader to gain a sense of how Andrew’s thought has developed. As these essays
were written at a variety of points over the past half-century a number of them
use styles of expression that reflect the periods in which they were written. We
have therefore left the wording of the essays as they were published.
Alongside the editors, a team of Andrew’s former students and friends helped
to prepare these essays for publication, especially the arduous task of checking
pre-published electronic versions against the final published forms, and turning
PDFs into text. We would like to thank Dr Krastu Banev, Dr Evaggelos Bartzis,
Fr Demetrios Bathrellos, Fr Doru Costache, Prof Brandon Gallaher, Fr Antonios
Kaldas, Dr Samuel Kaldas, Fr Justin Mihoc, Dr Wagdy Samir, Dr Christopher
Sprecher, Dr Gregory Tucker, and Dr Jonathan Zecher.
We also wish to express our gratitude to the Publishers, Journals, and others
who have granted permission for the essays collected in these volumes to be
reprinted.
Lewis Ayres and John Behr

October 2022
Contents
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1. The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology 7
2. The Use of the Term ἴδιος in Alexandrian Theology from
Alexander to Cyril 21
3. Ignatios or Eusebios: Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology 26
4. On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great
between the Desert and the City 39
5. St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor:
The Shaping of Tradition 52
6. St Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology 63
7. ‘From Beginning to Beginning’: Continuous Spiritual Progress
in Gregory of Nyssa 76
8. St Makrina: The Fourth Cappadocian? 83
9. Evagrios: The ‘Noetic’ Language of Prayer 97
10. Evagrios on Anger 108
11. Augustine on Language 115
12. St Augustine’s Interpretation of the Transfiguration of Christ 123
13. Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers 130
14. Heart in Pilgrimage: St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms 145
15. Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the
Areopagite 155
16. ‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things’:
Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible 162
17. The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor 171
18. The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World: Maximus
to Palamas 182
x Contents
19. Dionysios the Areopagite: The Unknown God and the Liturgy 197
20. St Maximus the Confessor between East and West 211
21. From the Doctrine of Christ to Person of Christ: St Maximos
the Confessor on the Transfiguration of Christ 225
22. Eucharist and Church According to St Maximos the Confessor 237
23. The Views of St Maximos the Confessor on the Institutional Church 250
24. Virtue Ethics: St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared 257
25. St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoi of Creation 271
26. Mystagogy in Saint Maximus 279
27. The Lord’s Prayer as Mystagogy from Origen to Maximos 292
28. St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγος and τρόπος and the
Ontology of the Person 305
29. Pronoia in the Life and Thought of St Maximos the Confessor 312
30. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos the Confessor 321
31. The Doctrine of the Image of God in St Maximos the Confessor 329
32. The Holy Spirit in the Theology of St John Damascene 343
33. John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between
Humanity and God 350
34. The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast Controversy 359
35. Photios as a Theologian 366
36. Knowing the Unknowable God: Hesychasm and the Kabbalah 382
37. Aquinas and Orthodoxy 396
Details of Original Publication 409

Index 413
Abbreviations
Abbreviations used in the essays collected here have been retained from their original
publication style; where they are not explained (for instance, some journal or series titles),
they may be found in The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical and
Early Christian Studies, ed. P. H. Alexander et al. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999).
Introduction
Looking at the essays and lectures collected in these volumes, I am struck by the
fact that I seem to have been a late developer: in each volume there are only three
essays published before 1990, by which time I was in my late 40s—one well before,
in 1978, ‘The Hermeneutical Question Approached through the Fathers’, the rest
in the 1980s. So I suppose I was, indeed, a late developer and wonder why.
Perhaps not as late as this might suggest, for my first two books came in rapid
succession after 1980: Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (1981), and
Discerning the Mystery (1983). That first book, amazingly well reviewed, rather
led to my being classified (still) as someone whose principal interest is in ‘mysti-
cism’ (in some ways disowned, or contextualized, in the second edition of 2006
with its afterword). On reflection, it seems to me that my interest in the ‘mystical
tradition’ had other roots, for I was not so much interested in ‘mysticism’ as in a
form of religion independent of institutions or dogmas (what has come to be
called ‘spirituality’), nor in mysticism as, in a tradition revived by William James
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, concerned about ‘peak experiences’,
rather my interest was to do with the way in which theology is rooted in prayer,
both personal and liturgical.
Discerning the Mystery adumbrated, as I see it now, an approach to theology for
which the practice of prayer, and what such practice presupposed, was
indispensable—indispensable, not in the sense that theology demanded prayer,
and therefore faith, so that the answers had smuggled themselves in before being
asked, but indispensable in that prayer expresses an openness to the transcend-
ent, and therefore calls in question any idea that the nature of things could be
encompassed by human conceptuality, ruling out the notion of a closed universe.
There has remained lodged in my memory—largely unconscious, though sur-
facing from time to time—some lines of thought discussed by Thomas Vargish in
his book, Newman: The Contemplation of Mind (1970). Discussing Newman’s
‘illative sense’, Vargish spoke of it as ‘that “subtle and elastic logic of thought” . . . elas-
tic and delicate enough to take account of the variousness of reality, the unique-
ness of each thing experienced’ (p. 68), and a sense of faith, not so much as
delivering ‘truths’, as requiring freedom, in which theology ‘makes progress by
being “alive to its own fundamental uncertainties” ’ (p. 87, quoting William
Froude). It was a freedom I had sensed in the Fathers’ use of Scripture, as
Andrew Louth, Selected Essays, Volume I: Studies in Patristics. Edited by: Lewis Ayres and John Behr,
Oxford University Press. Collection © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192882813.003.0001
2 Selected Essays, VOLUME I
discussed in the earliest essay included in these books—a freedom from both the
prescriptive nature of Catholic theology and the anxiety of Protestants for a single
determinative meaning to be found in Scripture.
I suppose I was beginning to move towards the Orthodoxy of the Eastern
Church (as a friend of mine, the late Geoffrey Wainwright, perceptively pointed
out to me after reading Discerning the Mystery). Another—quite different—aspect
of these early books is contained in the subtitle of the first of them: ‘From Plato to
Denys’. For there had never been any question for me but that that book would
begin with Plato—an interpretation of Plato much indebted to A.-J. Festugière’s
seminal work, Contemplation et vie contemplative selon Platon (3rd edition, 1967).
Plato has remained important to me—probably returned to more often than to
any Christian writer—possibly because of my early enthusiasm for mathematics
(and G. H. Hardy’s conviction that pure mathematics is concerned with realities,
not ideas humanly constructed).
It might seem that, in finding my intellectual feet, as it were, reception into the
Orthodox Church, by (then) Bishop Kallistos Ware, soon followed. That was at
the end of 1989, the year in which my third book, Denys the Areopagite, was pub-
lished—in response to a request from Brian Davies, OP, for his series, Outstanding
Christian Thinkers. I had responded to Brian Davies’ suggestion with alacrity,
because a year or two before that I had read St John Damascene’s On the Orthodox
Faith, which had fascinated me, in a largely uninformed way, and it already
seemed to me that two profound influences on the Damascene were Dionysios
the Areopagite and St Maximos the Confessor. Furthermore, my mind was then
full of Dionysios, anyway, for I had spent a fallow year in Bodley, reading every-
thing I could find about that mysterious thinker. The sense that, ultimately, I was
going to write something on the Damascene led me, a few years later, to agree to
the request of Carol Harrison, the editor of the Early Christian Fathers, to prod
uce a volume for the series: I chose Maximos the Confessor. Those three books
were conceived in sequence—but not as a trilogy, for they are very different, the
first on Dionysios—Denys, as I called him then—simply an introduction, the sec-
ond on Maximos an even shorter introduction accompanied by translations of a
brief selection of his works, mostly drawn from his theological, as opposed to his
spiritual, works (an opposition unsatisfactory especially in the case of Maximos),
and the third a lengthy study of the surviving works of a monk, writing, most
likely, in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem during the construc-
tion of the edifices there celebrating the triumph of Islam.
So I found myself exploring, in a way I had probably not anticipated, what still
seem to me the three writers who, together by inheriting and interpreting the
Greek patristic tradition, fashioned the lineaments of Byzantine Orthodoxy (and,
indeed, its best, and most enduring elements). Plato, and especially the develop-
ments of Platonism in late antiquity, remained a preoccupation of mine, and
I became more deeply convinced of the coinherence of Platonism and Christianity.
Introduction 3
The books speak for themselves, and many of the articles in this collection fill out
aspects of this Byzantine synthesis of theology and philosophy, prayer and asceti-
cism, and liturgy and song.
II
Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual development,

though this is hampered by the oddities (as it certainly must now seem) of my
formation as a theologian. I never studied for a PhD (or DPhil), so have no
Doktorvater. I did, however, while studying for the Anglican priesthood in
Edinburgh, enrol for the MTh at the Faculty of Divinity in the university there
under Professor Tom (T. F.) Torrance; the subject of my dissertation for that
degree was the doctrine of the knowability of God in Karl Barth’s theology, the
most important sections of which were on the place of natural theology in his
Church Dogmatics and doctrine of analogy. The chief influence on me during
undergraduate years in Cambridge (plus one, preparing for Part III) was without
doubt Donald MacKinnon, the Norris Hulse Professor of Divinity, under whose
guidance I took two courses in the section on Philosophy of Religion of Part III of
the Theological Tripos. Despite this, I could never make much of the style of phil
osophy of religion that I mostly encountered in Cambridge (I don’t think
MacKinnon made much sense of it either) and rather made my own way by care-
ful textual study of the texts—Descartes to Kant—that we were expected to read;
but it was from MacKinnon’s extraordinary Socratic style of engaging with his
students that I learnt to think (or rather—though that is perhaps the same thing—
discovered that I could think). Another don at Cambridge, with whom I had a
few supervisions in patristics, was Maurice Wiles, from whom I learnt a great deal
even though largely by way of disagreeing with him—a disagreement that con
tinued when we were both in Oxford from 1970: him as Regius Professor of
Divinity, and me as a lecturer in theology in the University and Fellow and
Chaplain of Worcester College. That appointment, though probably due to my
philosophical training with MacKinnon (a new joint degree in Philosophy and
Theology had just been introduced), did not specify what area of theology I was
to pursue, so I decided to make myself a patristics scholar, a decision I have never
regretted. Also, while in Oxford, I came to know Henry Chadwick, who moved
from the Regius Chair of Divinity to being Dean of Christ Church in 1970, whom
I held in awe, though I never got to know him very well (though well enough in
the eyes of others to be asked to write his obituary for the Independent). I also
came to know, in the end very well, academically as a colleague rather than as a
student, and more importantly as my spiritual father, the recently departed
Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), the Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Studies
during my time in Oxford (and before and after): my debt to him is incalculable.
There are many others to whom I am indebted, not least the two editors of
this volume.
Others who affected my intellectual formation I mainly (or entirely) knew
through their books; in the later 1970s (as I remember it), I often devoted the
long vacation to reading some massive work that I wanted to come to terms with.
One year it was Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, which I read in
conjunction with the English translation as a crutch for my (then) feeble German.
Another year it was A.-J. Festugière’s monumental four- volume work, La
Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, the title of which tells you more about its origins
(in the notes he made in the course of translating and annotating, with A. D. Nock,
the Budé edition of the Corpus Hermeticum, published 1945–54), than its con-
tents (a series of soundings in the religious and philosophical thought of late
antiquity). Another year it was Henri de Lubac’s Exégèse Médiévale (4 vols,
1959–64), another work that starts from a particular problem and casts light
much more widely. Hans Urs von Balthasar, to whose writings I was introduced
by Donald MacKinnon, came later, but I read with excitement Herrlichkeit (for
which I translated some parts of sections II and III, as part of team led by John
Riches), and then Theodramatik, and eventually much of Theologik.
My encounter with Orthodox thinkers came later, and they seemed to fill out
and deepen insights that I had originally discovered in Western writers, such as
those already mentioned. It was mostly through reading their works, though
I came to know personally several members of the Orthodox Church, of course,
Fr Kallistos (as he then was), Nicolas Zernov, living in retirement in Oxford when
I arrived in 1970, and later Father (now St) Sophrony of Essex. One Orthodox
thinker whom I read early on was the French convert, Olivier Clément, the dis
ciple of Vladimir Lossky, who has also been a constant presence. Bulgakov
became increasingly important to me (I encountered him first in the French
translations by Constantin Andronikof), later Florensky (for whom I am indebted
to Boris Jakim’s translations, though I have struggled myself with his Russian, as
well as the Russian of others). I have learnt a great deal about Florensky from
Avril Pyman, the author of an acclaimed biography, published in 2010, already by
then a great friend. She is an expert on the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian literature and
helped me to see Florensky, and indeed others, such as Vladimir Solov´ev, in the
broader cultural context of the Silver Age.
In a not dissimilar way, my encounter with modern Greek theology, not least
Christos Yannaras, was consequent on a fairly wide reading in Greek literature—
especially the amazing poets of the twentieth century, Cavafy, Sikelianos, Seferis,
Elytis—through whom I came to read Philip Sherrard, who translated and inter-
preted them (but whom, alas, I never met), before I came across his theological
writings. The great man of letters, Zisimos Lorentzatos, I also encountered
through my reading in Greek literature and had some sense of his theological
insights before ever engaging with Yannaras, with whose writings I have tried to
Introduction 5
keep up over the years (in recent years much aided by Norman Russell’s excellent
translations). Through Lorentzatos I discovered Alexandros Papadiamandis,
which opened up for me layers and layers of the Greek experience of Orthodoxy
(a few of whose short stories I was later encouraged to translate). Something of
this engagement with Orthodoxy—mostly the fruit of my becoming Orthodox,
which seemed to me a fulfilment of my intellectual and spiritual development,
not a rejection of the West (although such anti-Westernism has been a Leitmotiv
of too much Orthodox theology since the beginning of the second Christian mil-
lennium)—is to be found in two later works of mine: Introducing Eastern
Orthodox Theology (2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to
the Present (2015), which were the result of four years spent as Visiting Professor
at the Amsterdam Centre of Eastern Orthodox Theology in the Vrije Universiteit,
now the St Irenaeus Institute of Orthodox Theology at the University of Radboud,
Nijmegen.
Another stage of my academic career that I have somewhat passed over is my
ten years at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1985 to 1995. During
this period Goldsmiths went through a major change from being an Institute with
Recognized Teachers to becoming a School of the University of London. From
being head of a small department of Religious Studies I eventually become head—
for five years—of a new department of Historical and Cultural Studies, made up
of the old departments of History, Art History, and Religious Studies, in which I
taught early medieval and Byzantine history, often along with my colleague, Paul
Fouracre, a fine Merovingian and Carolingian historian. I learnt, mostly from
him, a lot about the ways of the historian’s mind—very different were the ways of
the theologian’s mind—which affected my own way of thinking about history
(and indeed theology). Some of the fruits of that are to be found in my volume,
Greek East and Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071 (2007), in the series, The
Church in History, originally conceived and planned by John Meyendorff.
Have I learnt anything over these years? I hope so, though I am not at all sure
what. My writings are mostly studies of others; my aim has been to elucidate their
thought and their concerns. It looks like, I daresay, theology as a branch of intel-
lectual history, but one thing I have learnt is that ideas do not—as so many essays
in intellectual history seem to imagine—float in some kind of noetic ether; ideas
are thought by people, who live at a particular time and in a particular place.
Their ideas are part of the way in which they have sought to make sense of the
world in which they lived, and theological ideas are no exception: they, too, are
the products of human minds seeking to make sense of the place of the Gospel
and the Church in a world created by God and governed by his providence, in
however mysterious a way. It was with deliberation (inspired by another who
greatly influenced me, Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun who spent her final years
near Whitby in Yorkshire) that I called my book on modern Orthodox theology,
Modern Orthodox Thinkers.
I cannot end this Introduction without thanking the editors, my friends and
colleagues, Lewis Ayres and John Behr, for undertaking to bring this collection of
essays of mine to publication. Although the work of publication is theirs, what is
to be found in these volumes is, for better or worse, mine, and I would like to
dedicate the volumes to my offspring: Charlie, Mary, Sarah, and Isaac.
Andrew Louth
Feast of St Frideswide of Oxford, 2022
1
The Necessity of Platonism for
Christian Theology
It is a great privilege to be asked to give the Crouse Memorial Lecture for 2021, a
privilege exceptionally great as I realize that it was the tenth anniversary of
Fr Robert’s death only a couple of days ago; I hope that I shall be able to do him just
ice. But that is a tall order: he was a fine and meticulous scholar, given in his own
works to an ascetic brevity. My impression of him (I hardly knew Fr Crouse per
sonally; I met him on a few occasions, the last time, I think, after giving a paper to
a seminar organized by Professor Wayne Hankey in King’s College, Halifax) is
that a great deal of his achievement as a scholar and teacher was as a mentor,
encouraging and directing those who were his students. There is something
intangible about such an achievement, but its intangibility in no way diminishes
its depth and importance. He was also, in a unique way, a representative of a trad
ition of refined spirituality that drew on a deep knowledge of the Western Latin
tradition—Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Honorius Augustodunensis, Aquinas,
but also, perhaps especially, Dante. Fr Crouse belonged to a profoundly Catholic
Anglican tradition, which for all its distinctiveness was welcome in a wider
Catholic world—towards the end of his life he was, on several occasions, Visiting
Professor of Patrology at the Augustinianum in Rome. I have the feeling that I am
digging myself into a hole: for I am an ex-Anglican priest, now an Orthodox arch
priest, who has concentrated a lifetime’s scholarship mainly on the Greek patristic
tradition. Nevertheless, I have been asked to give this lecture in Fr Crouse’s
honour, and am delighted to do so, as I held him, and hold him, in the very high
est regard.
There is one area of scholarship in which our interests overlap, though Fr
Crouse is a brightly shining star in this field, something to which I cannot myself
aspire, that is Neoplatonism, understood not just as a scholarly specialism, but as
a powerful intellectual presence in traditional Christian theology. It therefore
seemed to me appropriate to take as my title for this lecture: ‘The Necessity of
Platonism for Christian Theology’. I think Fr Crouse would have warmed to such
a subject, though I am sure that he would have approached it from a very different
perspective than mine, and he now beholds the truth of these matters, without
any veil.
Choosing a topic is one thing; writing a lecture about it another (and it has to be a
written lecture, when in other contexts I might have talked from notes, because I am
not with you in the chapel of King’s College, Halifax, but looking at a screen,
which prescinds from the personal dimension of addressing people present in
front of me). As I thought about it, it dawned on me that the format I was consid
ering was very traditional indeed: for what you are going to hear is something
very much after the model of the medieval question or quaestio. That is: I shall
start by considering objections to my proposition that Platonism is in some sense
necessary for Christian theology; these objections will form the first part of the
lecture. Then moving to the Sed Contra, I shall develop my thesis about the neces
sity of Platonism for Christian theology. However, in this first part, I shall not
simply register the objections, as, for example, St Thomas Aquinas did in what
often seems to be a kind of ‘intellectual striptease’, leaving him, as it were, naked
in the face of the powerful objections he has raised to his thesis: no, I shall dispose
of them, as I raise them, and indeed use them as an introduction to what I want to
say, by making clear what it is that I do not want to say.
So, first of all, I do not mean that you have to be a Platonist in order to be a
Christian, though I do think that you have to be open to some Platonist intuitions
in order to think as a Christian. But Christianity is not an intellectual pursuit as
such; it is a way of life, and a way of life characterized fundamentally by love, a
love inspired by God’s love for us manifest on the Cross of Christ. To be a
Christian is to respond to Christ’s love on the Cross and enter more deeply into
that love in our lives. We do not need to think about it in an intellectual way;
indeed, one might say that one only needs to think about it in order to clear away
half-baked and misleading ways of thinking about what Christ and the Cross
mean. The heart of the matter of being Christian is to take up our Cross and fol
low Christ: some—many? most?—won’t need to think about this, they will just
get on with it.
But when we do start to think? Some could readily take my title as indicating
that I am going to advance and defend some form of Christian Platonism. I don’t
want to do that at all, and I think it would be helpful to explain why. Christian
Platonism is often thought of as a way of using Platonism as a kind of intellectual
launchpad for Christian theology. Used in this sense, it might be contrasted with,
say, Christian Aristotelianism, or to move closer to the present (though Plato and
Aristotle are always with us), Christian existentialism. To oppose, or contrast,
Plato and Aristotle has been a frequent theme in the intellectual history of the
West; Renaissance ‘Platonism’ saw itself in opposition to the ‘Aristotelianism’ of
Scholasticism; the growing influence of the newly discovered Aristotle in the thir
teenth century was sometimes opposed in the name of Platonism (though more
commonly in the name of theology); however, I do not need here in King’s
College, if only virtually, to remind you that the greatest of the Schoolmen
claimed for Aristotle, namely St Thomas Aquinas, never lost his profound
Platonic roots. Coleridge, as is well known, saw a fundamental contrast between
Platonists and Aristotelians: in his Table Talk, he put it thus:
The Necessity of Platonism for Christian Theology 9
Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that

any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born
Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of men,
beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.1
But what the contrast entailed has varied from age to age: we can trace it back into
late antiquity, though it keeps on changing its valency, but making the contrast
has the effect of promoting the notion of ‘Christian Platonism’. There is no doubt
that among the Fathers Plato could be held in high regard: St Athanasios, in his
De Incarnatione, refers to Plato as ὁ μέγας παρ᾽ Ἕλλησι (‘great among the Greeks’:
inc. 2. 3), though in the context of attributing to him the false doctrine of creation
from pre-existent matter; and in Anastasios of Sinai’s Questions and Responses, we
find this story:
There is handed down an ancient tradition, that a certain learned man used
often to curse Plato the philosopher. Plato appeared to him in his sleep and said
to him, ‘Man, stop cursing me, for you only harm yourself. For that I have been a
sinful man, I do not deny; but when Christ came down into Hades, truly no one
believed in him before me.’2
Plato, then, had a certain respect among the Fathers, at least in late antiquity. By
the end of the first Christian millennium regard for Plato was more conflicted;
among the anathemas added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy after the condemna
tion of John Italos in 1082, anathema was pronounced ‘on those who pursue
Hellenic learning [which certainly included Plato] and are formed by it not sim
ply as an educational discipline, but follow their empty opinions, and believe
them to be true . . .’.3 Aristotle himself had less appeal to the Fathers. In a famous
phrase, often cited by others, St Gregory the Theologian recommended that
Christians should present their theology ἁλιευτικῶς, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἀριστοτελικῶς—‘in
the manner of the fishermen/apostles, not in the manner of Aristotle’: a quip that
was capped by St John Damascene when writing against John Philoponos he
commented that Philoponos’ problems, both Trinitarian and Christological,
would not have arisen had he not introduced ‘St Aristotle’ as the ‘thirteenth
apostle’.4 In both these cases, it seems that ‘Aristotle’ meant his logical works,
1 See S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk and Omniana (Oxford University Press, 1917), 118 (entry for 2nd
July 1830). It is contrast to which Coleridge returned: see, e.g., one of his marginalia in his copy of
Hooker, to be found in S. T. Coleridge, A Book I Value: Selected Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson (Princeton
University Press, 2003), 186–7. See, also, D. Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English
Romantic Thought (John Murray, 1974).
2 Anastasius of Sinai, Quaestiones 61. 2; CCSG 59, ed. M. Richard and J. A. Munitiz (2006), 111–12.
3 Anathema 7 against Italos, in J. Gouillard, ‘Le Synodikon d’Orthodoxie. Édition et commentaire’,
Travaux et Mémoires 2 (1967), 1–270, at 59.
4 John Damascene, Contra Jacobitas 10. 13 (ed. B. Kotter, PTS 22 [1981], 113).
which had, in fact, already been incorporated into a fundamentally Platonic

context.5
But ‘Christian Platonism’? That seems to me a category mistake. In late (and
classical) antiquity Platonists were those thinkers who appealed to the authority
of Plato and his writings; Aristotelians to the Aristotelian corpus. In contrast to
them, Christians appealed to the Christian Scriptures, the Old and the New
Testaments. The idea of Christian Platonism, which is very widespread, sees these
positions—Christianity, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism—as collections of
doctrines. Recent scholarship has retrieved a much more adequate understanding
of what was meant by philosophy in late antiquity by insisting that such philoso
phies were not just a matter of doctrines (though they involved doctrines, and the
philosophers argued over them amongst themselves), but are primarily to be
seen, to use part of the title of a book containing English translations of articles by
the most prominent scholar espousing this view, namely Pierre Hadot, ‘as a way
of life’.6 In this sense, certainly, Christianity could be regarded—and indeed some
times presented itself as—a philosophical school, but to speak of ‘Christian
Platonism’ muddies the waters. This has been evident especially since Mark
Edwards published his book with the provocative title, Origen against Plato, in
which Origen is presented, not as a ‘Christian Platonist’, but as an explicit critic of
Plato.7 The different philosophical schools in late antiquity could, and did, over
lap in the doctrines they espoused, but what distinguished them was also quite
clear: it was where they found their authority for the doctrines they maintained—
the dialogues of Plato? the writings of Aristotle? the Christian Scriptures? In late
antiquity, in reaction against the Christian (and Jewish) appeal to their ancient
Scriptures, we find philosophical schools of a generally ‘Platonic’ colour appeal
ing to the authority of supposed ancient oracles, such as the Chaldaean Oracles or
the treatises ascribed to Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Hermes Trismegistos—oracles
that were claimed to be the ultimate source of the doctrines of Plato, who was
believed in late antiquity to have been a disciple of Hermes Trismegistos.8 Plato’s
envisaging Socrates as having learnt the true doctrine of love from Diotima,
priestess of Mantinea, in the Symposium had hardly discouraged the growth of
such a notion.
The notion of ‘Christian Platonism’ confuses the issue, suggesting that
Christianity is, as it were, adjectival to Platonism, whereas the reverse was the
case for all of those claimed as ‘Christian Platonists’: they supported their
5 On the use of Aristotle in Christian theology up to Boethius and John Philoponos, prescinding
from the phenomenon of textbooks of logic that drew on Aristotle and his interpreters in the seventh
and eighth centuries, see now Mark Edwards, Aristotle and Early Christian Thought (Routledge, 2019).
6 See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. A. I. Davidson (Blackwell, 1995).
7 See M. J. Edwards, Origen against Plato (Ashgate, 2002).
8 For the notion of Egypt as the source of wisdom in late antiquity, see Garth Fowden, The Egyptian
Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
doctrines by appeal to the Scriptures, so at best they could be regarded as ‘Platonic

Christians’. The only thinker of late antiquity that I can think of who might rea
sonably be regarded as a ‘Christian Platonist’ was Synesios of Cyrene, a Platonist/
Neoplatonist who became a Christian, indeed a Christian bishop, but made it
clear in a letter to his brother that truth was something that he had learned from
Plato, while what he was to preach as a Christian bishop were no more to him
than popular ‘myths’.9 But Synesios is pretty well a unique case: an attractive one,
and not without some influence (his hymns, much in the same vein as the
Neoplatonic Proklos’ hymns, are preserved in some monastic liturgical MSS, and
so must have been used liturgically, unlike the verse of his younger contemporary,
St Gregory the Theologian!).10
So, I am not making a case for Christian Platonism. What might seem a more
fruitful line could be to note the overlap in doctrines between Christian theology
and Platonism. There is genuine and important overlap in the doctrines Platonists
and Christians embraced: both believed in the existence of the divine (God or
gods); in divine providence or πρόνοια, that is, that the gods care for the universe;
and that humans are responsible for their deeds, and will be rewarded, or pun
ished, in an afterlife. In other words, both Platonist and Christian maintained a
belief in a moral universe, which required that divine providence held sway but
did not override human freewill (though to talk of ‘freewill’ is to use later
Christian terminology; earlier, philosophers—both pagan and Christian—spoke
rather of human αὐτεξουσία, responsibility). Other philosophical schools had dif
ferent doctrines, believing that the cosmos is either the result of chance (as
Aristotelians were held to believe, at least in the sublunary realms; in the celestial
realm the movement of the stars and planets was predictable) or governed by an
ineluctable fate (as the Stoics were held to maintain). Christian thinkers drew on
an established body of arguments that had been developed by earlier thinkers,
mostly Platonists. But there were Platonic doctrines that Christians rejected: for
example, Platonists believed that the soul was immortal, that is, it had existed
from eternity and would continue to exist to eternity; for Christians the soul had
only an immortal future. Christians believed in the resurrection of the body, a
doctrine incomprehensible to most non-Christian philosophers, as the Apostle
Paul had discovered at Athens (see Acts 17). Nevertheless, Christians responded
warmly to the idea that, in virtue of possessing a soul, there was a certain affinity
between the human and the divine, something expressed in a distinctively
Christian way by their doctrine of the human created in the image of God—an
idea expressed beautifully in the troparion or apolytikion for a saint not called to
martyrdom:
9 Synesios of Cyrene, Ep. 105.

10 See C. Lacombrade in his edition of Synesios’ hymns: Synésios de Cyrène, tome 1: Hymnes, ed.
and tr. C. Lacombrade (‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1978), 30.
In you was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for you
took up the Cross and followed Christ, and by your deeds you have taught us to
despise the flesh, for it passes away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing
immortal. And therefore your spirit rejoices with the Angels.
For it is important to grasp that even when Platonists and Christians agreed on
one doctrine or another, they did so for different reasons: Christians because it
was entailed by the Scriptures; Platonists because it was part of the body of doc
trines upheld by Socrates and his disciple, Plato. In some ways, Platonists contem
porary with Christians in the first Christian centuries shared something with
these Christians that they could hardly be said to share with the founders of their
school, Socrates and Plato: and that was a heightened religious sense. As R. E. Witt
memorably put it many years ago, late antiquity ‘was attracted not so much by
Plato the ethical teacher or political reformer, as by Plato the hierophant, Plato
who (according to an old legend) had been conceived of Apollo and born of the
virgin Perictione’.11 Nevertheless, this overlap or assimilation of Platonism and
Christian theology in the patristic period is not what I have in mind in speaking
of the necessity of Platonism for Christian theology.
Now, I suppose, I begin my Sed Contra. I want to do this by thinking, in a very
sketchy way, about what it is that is distinctive about the way philosophical ideas
are approached in Plato’s dialogues. I am aware that I am venturing into a thicket
of controversy, with which I am only imperfectly acquainted, but we cannot talk
about Platonism without talking about Plato and his dialogues! Nevertheless, in
embarking on this, I am not making any claims to have done much more than try
to make some sense of what is going on in the dialogues, drawing on any help that
seemed to be at hand. There are, it seems to me, two areas of thought—apparently
quite distinct from each other—where the ‘Socratic method’ is strikingly effective:
mathematics and ethics (perhaps it is because my earliest training was as a math
ematician that this has always struck me, and anyway, there was said to be
inscribed over the entrance to the Academy: Ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω). In
both cases, Socrates seems to move from the realm of empirical reality to some
kind of ideal world. In the case of geometry—let us confine ourselves to this case,
as indeed Socrates seems to do—instead of thinking of points, lines, and shapes,
as we actually see them—imperfect, with points occupying an irregular space,
lines neither exactly straight nor curved without irregularity, and triangles and
circles similarly imperfect, however ‘good’ they are, we are encouraged to think,
as Euclid does, of perfect shapes that conform perfectly to how they are defined.
And why? Because this perfection, though never manifest as such, is easier to
think with. If we had to take account of all the imperfections in empirical reality,
11 R. E. Witt, Albinus and the History of Middle Platonism (Hakkert, 1971; originally publish by
Cambridge University Press in 1937), 123.
we would simply make everything far too complicated to understand. We under

stand the relationships between points, lines, and shapes as they are ideally, and
recognize that in reality all we can expect to encounter are approximations to
these ideal realities. Furthermore, we have little hesitation about identifying the
real with the ideal, the actual with the imperfect. What Socrates is much more
concerned with, however, are forms of human excellence, ἀρεταί, ‘virtues’ we usu
ally call them, but the Greek word has a much stronger connotation of excellence,
even though Socrates is generally concerned with moral forms of excellence:
goodness, justice, truth, and the like. In the ‘Socratic’ dialogues (often regarded as
early), Socrates quizzes his interlocutors about what these virtues or excellences
are: definitions are offered, and then tested against examples of such virtuous/
excellent behaviour, and often found wanting. several of these dialogues seem to
reach no conclusion at all. That is, however, misleading in one fundamental way,
for it is taken for granted that we can recognize what is good or just or honest,
even if we cannot formulate a definition. In other words, we know the ideal form
of the excellence in question, even as we also know that we have never encoun
tered the perfect form of the excellence, and maybe never could. Both mathemat
ics and ethics reveal a similar state of affairs: knowledge of something ideal that is
never encountered in actuality—an ideal that is recognized as the reality, of geo
metrical form or moral excellence, that we know, even if we cannot perfectly for
mulate it.
I think all this might be clearer if I cite someone else’s account of it, that some
one else being, perhaps to your surprise, the nineteenth-century thinker, Walter
Pater, whose lectures on Plato and Platonism were first published in 1893. Pater
begins his exposition of what he called Plato’s theory of ideas (though he is at
pains to insist that Plato himself does not erect it into a ‘theory’—something that
Christopher Rowe also affirms, when he says that
It is Plato’s interpreters who have turned “forms” (“ideas”), eidē or ideai, into a
technical term. Plato has no technical terms, unless in the shape of a collection
of terms—and even then he is quite capable of talking about the things the terms
refer to without using the terms themselves. Variation is one of the signature
features of Platonic style . . . .12)
Pater’s exposition begins: ‘Platonism is not a formal theory or body of theories,

but a tendency, a group of tendencies—a tendency to think or feel, and to speak,
about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato’s dialogues as reflect
ing the peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion’.13 He goes on to
show how an appeal to the general does not detract from our attention to the
12 C. Rowe, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 275, n. 4.
13 W. Pater, Plato and Platonism (Macmillan, 1901), 150.
particular, but rather enables us to notice what is particular about the particular,
for it is only as we compare one particular with another of the same kind, that we
notice the particularity of the particular. Later on in this chapter, Pater puts it
like this:
By its juxtaposition and co-ordination with what is ever more and more not it,
by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper
and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by
the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world, concentrated
upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand now, and as if in a sin
gle moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently
from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of
nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one’s hand.14
What seems to me important about this procedure of understanding is that it

is not a procedure in which, as it were, by applying a certain method, we pass
from ignorance to knowledge, it is rather a process by which the knowledge we
already have—knowledge both of the world around us and of forms of human
excellence—is clarified and deepened. The process is one of clarification in the
light of experience, rather than appeal to some empirical observation that adds,
in some way, to our knowledge, understood as a collection of information. This
growing understanding is however a matter of ‘long experience’, an experience
that is itself central to a ‘way of life’.
Plato considers this advance in knowing through long experience explicitly in
his account of the soul’s pursuit of beauty through love in his Symposium. Here we
have an account of the ascent of the soul to the ultimate conceived of as the beau
tiful, an ascent in which the soul’s love, or ἔρως, is gradually purified as the soul
passes from loving one beautiful body to seeing that what constitutes the beauty
of one is common to all, and then passing to love for the immaterial beauty of the
soul; then passing to what makes the soul beautiful, namely its capacity for under
standing and knowledge; and then, finding itself drawn to the ‘great ocean of the
beautiful’, there is suddenly/immediately— ἐξαίφνης— revealed ‘a wondrous
vision, beautiful in its nature’ (Symp. 210DE). In the soul’s ascent to the beautiful
through love, the passage is, at each stage, a passage from what is acknowledged
as beautiful to the source of that beauty, so that in this passage there is both puri
fication of the soul’s love and a purification, simplification, of the beauty that
draws it. The soul’s ἔρως remains a longing, but as it passes beyond the beloved
one to beauty in itself, possession for oneself is transcended, for all share in the
one beauty. The beauty sought is also transformed from bodily charm to
14 Pater, Plato, 158.

something ‘that is eternal in being, neither coming into being nor perishing,
neither waxing nor waning, not partly beautiful and partly ugly’, nor relative to the
beholder, but αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ μεθ᾽αὑτοῦ μονοειδὲς ἀεὶ ὄν—‘itself eternally being of
one form according to itself with itself ’ (Symp. 211B). This final revelation of
ultimate beauty is ἐξαίφνης, conveying a sense of something both immediate, that
is, unmediated, and also something not attained by an effort on our part, but sud
denly, unexpectedly (though not without anticipation) revealed, as beauty dis
closes itself. This seems to me to express a principle that is present in every stage,
or aspect, of knowing: what we come to know is, in one sense, already known
through a kind of affinity, and yet is not attained, but acknowledged.
I think this intuition, for such I think it is, could be expressed something like
this. Plato had an abiding sense of human existence opening out on to the tran
scendent, to which he tried to give some shape in his theory of forms or ideas, but
this transcendent realm is itself transcended—by the Form of the Good or the
Beautiful, ‘beyond being’: ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας. This means that any meaning we
find in the world in which we live is, in some sense, received from (even given by)
something (not yet someone, for Plato) beyond understanding. This transcendent
reality, bestowing meaning, is glimpsed beyond the Good and the Beautiful. For
Plato himself this was something untheorizable: it remained an intuition, though
it almost imperceptibly tips over into a religious, even theological, intuition. I am
reminded of a quotation from C. C. J. Webb my revered mentor Professor Donald
MacKinnon used to growl forth in his lectures in Cambridge half a century ago:
‘We could not allow the name of God to a being on whose privacy an Actæon
could intrude, or whose secrets a Prometheus could snatch from him without his
assent’.15 Plotinos, as we shall see, takes a step beyond Plato, but does not take
away the sense of transcendence as beyond meaning, yet the source of meaning.
In this Plotinos finds a sense of something that would make possible the continu
ing fruitfulness of meditation on Plato in the Christian tradition, that, indeed,
lent the Christian vision the intellectual coherence it needed to articulate its own
vision of reality, a vision opened up by Revelation, though because it was the
revelation of God, ‘ineffable, incomprehensible’, it was revelation that remained a
mystery, unknown and unknowable.
What I have just expressed is something that I have only found the means to
articulate through recently rereading Hans Urs von Balthasar in order to write a
chapter commissioned for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Hans Urs von
Balthasar on the influence on the great Swiss theologian of Plato and the Platonic
tradition. In the long section on Plato in ‘The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity’16
Balthasar presents Plato as the supreme witness to philosophy in antiquity, while
15 C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man (James Nisbet & Co., Ltd, 1911), 25–6.
16 H. U. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity
(T. & T. Clark, 1989), 166–215.
at the same time recognizing inherent limitations. ‘ “Sternly shaking himself free”
from poetry and myth, as from an “old passion” ’,17 Plato devotes himself to the
quest for truth, discovered by reason. But this quest is for him a religious quest,
seeking true divinity that transcends the ‘gods’ of the myths: he ‘occupies himself
with “becoming like God, so far as this is possible, by becoming righteous and
holy with wisdom” ’.18 This is, however, a quest that, though pursued by reason,
cannot be represented solely by transparently rational procedures. The slave in
the Meno is shown already to be aware of truths which he has not been taught and
of which he is unaware, and this because learning is for Plato a matter of recalling
what the soul has already experienced: the myth of metempsychosis, of the rebirth
of the immortal soul in this life and this body, is evoked to explain something that
reason can reveal but not explain. Other attempts to explore what is involved in
the rational pursuit of truth, for instance in the Symposium or the Phaedrus,
invoke themes of inspiration, the longing of eros, understood as a daimon, neither
god nor human, immortal nor mortal—themes that seem to transcend, or under
mine, reason. ‘ “Myth”, for Plato, is to be found, and belongs, where the lines
drawn by philosophical reflection stretch beyond its grasp’.19 And in telling these
myths, Plato demonstrates a literary power to evoke and persuade in a way very
different from the demonstration of truth by rational argument. ‘Which brings us
to the alarming question’—Balthasar comments—‘where Plato is going to lead the
transcendence of knowledge’.20
Balthasar continues with a long meditation on how Plato leads us beyond
knowledge, or into the transcendence of knowledge. It is a classic piece of
Balthasar, learned, allusive, tracing the sequence of Plato’s thought in a way both
suggestive and tantalizing. The first staging-post for Balthasar is the emergence in
Plato’s thought of ‘the transcendental movement of knowledge as knowledge, of
philosophy as the “great daimon” of the “in between” ’. Heraclitus’ system of pure
becoming is rejected, and Plato seems to be following Parmenides in the pursuit
of pure being, an ascent that ‘only becomes more demanding, since now it must
take becoming with it up into being, the half into the whole. This whole is the
soundest, κάλλιστον, the most honourable, τιμιώτατον; inspiration, erôs, myth
can point to nothing higher . . .’.21 This leads into Balthasar’s final section on
Plato, entitled ‘The Breadth of the Kalon’. Passing through inadequate ways of
understanding the beautiful, which is part of the kalon, itself bound up with the
good, agathon, Balthasar finds the ‘key-word’ in the Timaeus: ‘All that is good is
beautiful, but there is nothing beautiful without inner measure’.22 This notion of
measure, balance, harmony, Balthasar traces throughout the Platonic corpus—in
17 Balthasar, Glory, 172; citing Rep. X. 607E. 18 Balthasar, Glory, 172; citing Theaet. 176B.
19 Balthasar, Glory, 195. 20 Balthasar, Glory, 197.
21 Balthasar, Glory, 200; citing Phileb. 30B, Tim. 30A.
22 Tim. 87C, cited at Balthasar, Glory, 204.
the balance of the virtues in the soul, parallel to the defining qualities of the
classes within the kallipolis (guardians, warriers, merchants, and labourers): an
arrangement ‘according to nature’ (κατὰ φύσιν), ‘both in man, who is a miniature
state, and in the state, which is man writ large’.23 The Timaeus provides a further
analogy: the cosmos, the word itself denoting adornment, which is both an image
of what the demiurge beholds in the realm of ideas—or rather more than that,
‘not only an image (εἰκών) of an archetype but rather a quasi-sacramental repre
sentation of the gods (ἄγαλμα τῶν ἀϊδίων θεῶν)’,24 which itself, as soul and body,
images the human. Balthasar sums up this sequence of thought thus:
This rounds off an aesthetic ethic immanent in the world, in which the divine as
well as the human appears in a final identity as a harmony of balance; the last
glimmer of a revelation from above—some features of which in the middle
period were left to the (transcendent) Sun of the Good—fades, or rather passes
over into the macrocosmic harmony which is accessible to philosophical enquiry.
Now is born that philosophical aesthetic of the grand style, to which even
Plotinus will be able to make no significant alteration and which will lay down
the pattern for all Western forms of humanism: of Antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and right into modern times. An aesthetic which seeks to draw out the glory of
God which breaks in upon the human scene in the direction of a human, of what
for the moment is the same, cosmic ‘sublime’. And all the time there will be dis
cernible powerful counter-currents—classical as well as Christian.25
But for Balthasar it is Plotinos who sees what the final implications of Plato’s intu
ition really amount to:
Plotinus stands in awe and wonder before the glory of the cosmos
—here Balthasar reaches for his touchstone for understanding Platonism, in this
case, that of Plotinos—
[the cosmos] is manifestly a vast ensouled organism, in which individual souls,

rational and irrational, have their share . . . Throughout this glorious world radi
ates the presence of an eternal and intelligent spirit in which noêsis and noêma,
the act of thought and the object of thought, are one (Aristotle’s god, νόησις
νοήσεως); and in the ultimate ground of this spirit there is an unutterable gen
erative mystery at work which in all the splendour of the cosmos simultaneously
reveals and hides itself, present everywhere yet unapproachable . . . All intellec
tual activity in heaven and earth circles around this unattainable generative
mystery, all longing love (ἔρως) struggles upwards towards it, all the beauty of
23 Balthasar, Glory, 207.

24 Balthasar, Glory, 211; citing Tim. 51C, 37C. 25 Balthasar, Glory, 213.
the world is only a sign coming from it and pointing to it so that as he contem
plates and seeks to understand the things of the world the philosopher is com
pelled at a deeper level to run away, to let go, to turn again (ἐπιστροφή) to the
uniqueness of absolute unity.26
On the one hand, the irrefragable wonder of the world around us, and on the
other, stemming from this, a sense of being touched by knowledge in which won
der seems to dissolve any sense of distance between the known and the knower.
Wonder before the cosmos does not, as a first step, highlight a contrast with our
everyday experience—as with the Gnostics to whom he was radically opposed
(who may include Christians)—but reveals a hidden sense of oneness:
For Plotinus, in contrast, the vision of the starry heavens directly reveals the
certainty of the world’s divinity, and an ‘awed reticence’ (εὐλάβεια) fills the soul:
it is ‘the manifest and glorious image’ of an ‘unimaginable wisdom’, a ‘wondrous
intellectual power’ reveals itself in this vision; how can the stars be anything but
‘divinity manifest’? Why should we rob this world, springing forth from God’s
spirit, of its maker and seek to confine him to a meagre ‘beyond’?27
Balthasar goes on to expound familiar aspects of Plotinos’ thought: the stress on

individuality, wholly positive, defined from above, where it is found in the realm
of the ideas, not from below, by material difference. Since the soul derives from
above, the individual soul cannot be evil, there is always something in it that
remains ‘above’. The ‘descent’ of the soul is not simply negative, just as emanation
from the One is ambivalent, both some kind of decline into multiplicity, but still
bearing something of its blessed origin; Plotinos speaks of procession as τόλμα,
risk—but also daring, temerity. An entailment of this is that ‘the One is not separ
ated from anything: because God is the absolutely transcendent, therefore he can
be the absolutely immanent in all things. Thus does Plotinus reject not only the
utter “beyondness” of Aristotle’s God, reposing in himself, but also the Platonic
χωρισμός [separation] . . .’.28 Intellection, νόησις, itself reflects the inexpressible
unity of the One, as the realm of one–many, ἕν–πολλά: ‘all this is one, nous, noêsis,
noêton’ (Enn. V. 3. 5). Its activity is without effort or noise: ‘Silently, and without
being moved, intellect has shaped all things’ (Enn. III. 2. 2).29 ‘This’, Balthasar
continues ‘leaves nothing except the One in its moment of eternal self-identity to
define what intellect stretches out towards: God is nothing other than the ‘inner
depth’ of things, the centre of that circle whose periphery they constitute . . .’30
Balthasar goes on to comment (touching base, as it were, again) that
26 Balthasar, Glory, 282. 27 Balthasar, Glory, 283. 28 Balthasar, Glory, 290.

29 Both cited in Balthasar, Glory, 299. 30 Balthasar, 299–300.
The real Plotinus could never rest content with speculation in the modern sense.
Throughout his life he was to stand speechless before the miracle of being that
transcends all reason. That there is something, that what is is a world of such
immense wonder, this is for him the clearest possible revelation of the source
lying behind all things, the groundlessly self-giving Good.31
It is this perception, conviction, that lies behind Plotinos’ deepened understand

ing of the meaning of beauty. For Plato (in Balthasar’s exposition) what finally
defined beauty is measure, even symmetry. For Plotinos (although he endorses
such a sense of beauty in his earlier works, for example, the very first Ennead,
chronologically speaking, Enn. I. 6), beauty is rather bound up with intellect’s
perceiving ‘beyond its own being something marvellous, a θαῦμα, something sub
limely worthy of veneration, σεμνόν, something at whose “blinding light” we can
as little stare at as we can at the sun’s brightness’.32 Beauty is perceived as some
thing lent by a higher realm (in the intellectual realm, the One; in the realm of
soul, from the intellect), but Balthasar emphasizes more than some other inter
preters that this sense of something ‘lent’ inspires awe, wonder, veneration. One
must not, either, forget the mutual entailment of transcendence and immanence,
which dispels any ‘distancing’ from the ‘beyond’. Both these points become
explicit when Balthasar affirms:
The fascinosum, which is the radiance sent forth by beauty at every level of
Intellect, Soul and nature, signifies beauty itself, yet also signifies that there is in
beauty something beyond it. The structure of the Beautiful inscribes itself within
the formal structure of a doctrine of God. The ‘in’ here is not voided of force by
the ‘beyond’; there is no reduction to ‘pure appearance’. But the radiance of
manifestation presupposes the One, from whose centre all the rays emanate and
become manifest.33
Balthasar concludes his chapter by making the following comment:
Plotinus draws together the various strands of the Greek heritage in his vision of
being as Beauty, because it is the revelation of the divine. Beauty is thus charac
terized by an inner differentiation between radiance and form, light and har
mony. It is in the fact that his formal ontology and aesthetics leaves the way open
to pure philosophy and self- conscious theology that Plotinus represents a
moment of kairos; it is in this that both the risks and fruitfulness of his thought
for future ages lie.34
31 Balthasar, Glory, 302 (my italics). 32 Balthasar, Glory, 303.

33 Balthasar, Glory, 307. 34 Balthasar, Glory, 313.
For Balthasar, Plotinos is clearly the apogee of Platonism, surpassing even the one
he regarded as his master. Transcendence, which for both is only fully sensed in
the Beautiful, is less, as with Plato, the subject of meditations, than a sense of
wonder before the transcendent: a raw wonder, not to be thematized or theorized,
but a speechlessness before the miracle of being—and its source. This transcend
ent is absolute, and therefore absolutely immanent, experienced as presence, as
immediate (ἐξαίφνης), palpable but intangible, felt but never understood.
It is this intuition of Plato’s—an intuition that penetrated to the very being of
Plotinos—that I want to claim is necessary for Christian theology, necessary in the
sense that without it the Christian thinker will find it impossible to articulate the
centrality of Christ, the centrality of the Cross, for Christian theology. It is this
sense of speechlessness before the miracle of being, and its source, that ensures
both acknowledgment of the reality of God, transcendent and immanent—
transcendent because immanent, and immanent because transcendent—and a
sense of the wonder of creation. Both of these are necessary if the mystery of
Christ is not to be either sucked up into the transcendent mystery of God or
drawn down into the mystery of created being. Plato’s—Plotinos’—intuition
remained for them something unfulfilled and unfulfilling. The sense behind this
intuition that meaning is always received, through being given, cannot be ultim
ately sustained if there is no Giver, no God who bestows meaning, for the sover
eign reality that must be recognized in the supreme Giver, the Giver of being
itself, cannot rest on the acknowledgment of the creature. This is the mystery of
grace, which cannot itself demand or require what can only be freely given.
I leave you with a paradox: that Christian theology stands in need of an intu
ition of the radical givenness of meaning, an intuition that formed the heart of
Plato’s metaphysics, an intuition that might even be said to have rendered speech
less before the mystery of being his greatest interpreter, Plotinos, but which for
both Plato and Plotinos could not but remain unfulfilled.
2
The Use of the Term ἴδιος in Alexandrian
Theology from Alexander to Cyril
When Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, quoted Rom. 8:32 (God ‘did not spare his
own Son’) to provide scriptural support in his argument against Arius,1 he
touched on a theme that was to echo throughout the Alexandrine tradition. This
theme is the use of the term ἴδιος to characterize intimacy and inseparability, at
first between the Father and the Son. Professor Williams points out that this use
of ἴδιος was one of the elements of Alexander’s teaching to which Arius took
exception, and speculates that Arius may have found the use of the term unaccept
able on logical grounds, as it could be taken to imply that the Son was simply a
property of the father with no independent being.2 That clearly makes sense of
Arius’ objection to the term, but why did Alexander use it in the first place? In the
letter in which he quotes Romans 8:32, he presents an elaborate argument against
the Arians. In essentials his argument is that there is a sharp distinction to be
drawn between the substance of God and the created order, and that, as the
Scriptures make clear, the Son belongs to the substance of God and is not part of
the created order. The reference to the Son as God’s ἴδιος υἱός is one way in which
Scripture makes that clear (incidentally, Romans 8:32 is the only place in Scripture
where Christ is called God’s ἴδιος υἱός3).
Athanasius takes up this usage of ἴδιος and develops it with some enthusiasm.
As we have seen, part of his gravamen against the Arians is that they reject it; but
our interest is rather what positive use Athanasius makes of this term. For
Athanasius, what is ἴδιος to the Father is from his substance (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας), and is
to be distinguished utterly from the created order which is not ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ
Πάτρος but rather ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων.4 Whereas the Son is ἴδιος to the Father, the crea
ture, the thing made (ποίημα), is outside (ἔξωθεν) God. Ἴδιος—ἔξωθεν expresses
the fundamental contrast between God and creature, between what belongs to
the divine substance and what is created out of nothing, and clearly the contrast is
between what is intimate to God and what is merely external. This contrast can be
developed further; what is created is dependent on the will (βούλησις) of the
1 Letter to Alexander of Thessalonica, 32 (H.-G. Opitz, Athanasius Werke III.1 (1934), Urkunde 14,
p. 24, 11.26f).
2 R. D. Williams, ‘The Logic of Arianism’, JTS N.S. 34 (1983), 58–62.
3 Pace G. C. Stead, as reported by Williams, ‘The Logic of Arianism’, 62, n. 34.
4 Cf. Contra Arianos I.29.
creator, while the Son is natural (κατὰ φύσιν), his begetting transcends willing;5
the creature is not necessary, the Son in some sense is6 (though Athanasius will
not have it that God is subjected to necessity7). Another term Athanasius uses in
contrast to ἴδιος is ξένος, foreign, though more rarely.8
In this trinitarian sense, Athanasius uses ἴδιος very frequently indeed (and also
applies it to the Holy Spirit: ἴδιον δὲ καὶ ἓν τῆς ἐν Τριάδι θεότητος9): it expresses
the uniqueness of the trinitarian relationships—the Son and the Spirit are related
to God the Father in a way utterly different from creatures—but also the intimacy
and closeness of the intratrinitarian relationships.10 He also manages to find
another Scriptural text to support his use: viz., John 5:18, where the Jews seek to
kill Jesus because he called God his own Father (πατέρα ἴδιον), thus—
significantly—‘making himself equal to God’.
But Athanasius extends the use of ἴδιος to another context: to characterize the
relationship between the two natures of Christ, or, more exactly, the relationship
of the humanity of Christ to the Word. The Word makes the body he takes from
the Blessed Virgin his own (ἰδιοποιεῖται11), it becomes his own body.12 Again we
find the same contrast as in the trinitarian use: since the body is the Word’s own,
the Word is not outside it (ἐκτὸς αὐτοῦ).13 It is because the Word is in it, because
the body is the Word’s own, that the death of Christ is effective: ‘the death of all
was fulfilled in the Lord’s body, and also death and corruption were destroyed
because of the Word who was in it’;14 or, as he puts it earlier in De Incarnatione,
men are saved from corruption and given life instead of death τῇ τοῦ σώματος
ἰδιοποιήσει, καὶ τῇ τῆς ἀναστάσεως χάριτι, ‘by the body’s having become his own,
and by the grace of the resurrection’.15 And again Athanasius finds a biblical text
to support his train of thought: ‘as high-priest he offered himself to the Father,
and by his own blood cleansed us all from our sins, and raised us from the
dead’16—an amalgam of Hebrews 9:12 and l John 1:7. The opposition own–
external, or internal–external, yields further implications in this context. On the
one hand, Incarnation, the Word’s making the body his own, was necessary to
deal with the consequences of man’s sin, because corruption (φρορά), the princi
pal consequence of the Fall, was not external to the body (φθορὰ οὐκ ἔξωθεν ἦν τοῦ
σώματος), so ‘if the Word had been outside the body and not in it (ἔξω . . . μὴ ἐν . . .),
death would have been conquered by him most certainly, since death does not
overpower life, but nonetheless the attendant corruption would have remained
5 Contra Arianos II.2. 6 Contra Arianos I.29. 7 See Contra Arianos III.62.
8 Contra Arianos I.11, I.19, etc. 9 Ep. ad Serap. I.21, cf. 25, 26, 32, etc.
10 R. P. C. Hanson notes how Athanasius uses the sun/ray analogy, in contrast to the earlier apolo
getic tradition, ‘to illustrate the intensely close relationship between the Father and the Son’: ‘The
Transformation of Images in the Trinitarian Theology of the Fourth Century’, in Studia Patristica
XVII (1982), 102 (repr. in R. P. C. Hanson, Studies in Christian Antiquity (1985), 261).
11 De Incarnatione 8. 12 De Incarnatione 20; C.A. I.44, etc. 13 C.A. I.45.
14 Inc. 20. 15 Inc. 8. 16 C.A. II.7.
The Use of the Term ἴδιος in Alexandrian Theology 23
in the body’.17 On the other hand, had man been saved by simple forgiveness and
not Incarnation, man would simply have been restored to Adam’s insecure state,
with the possibility of falling again, as he would have possessed grace only exter
nally (ἔξωθεν λαβὼν τὴν χάριν).18 For Athanasius the use of ἴδιος expresses the
close union of God and man that takes place in the Incarnation, a close union
necessary if the seriousness of man’s fallen condition (understood as something
interior, embedded) is to be dealt with. The result of the Incarnation is to draw us
into a closer union with God than Adam knew, as we have seen, but Athanasius
does not draw on the fourth Evangelist’s use of ἴδιος to express this (e.g., the sheep
who are ‘his own’ and ‘know his voice’; John 10:4), though he does say, in a rather
carefully worded passage, that by participation in the Spirit we cease to be ξένοι
καῖ μακράν . . . τοῦ θεοῦ and are united to divinity (συναπτόμεθα τῇ θεότητι).19
These two usages of ἴδιος—the trinitarian and the Christological—clearly go
together for Athanasius, because both (the intimacy of the Son with the Father,
and the intimacy of the union of human and divine in Christ) are necessary for
the accomplishment of redemption: so he suggests that those who deny that the
Son is the Father’s own should go on to deny that he took true flesh from Mary
the Ever-Virgin.20
Not surprisingly, given Cyril’s high regard for Athanasius, much the same pic
ture can be found in Cyril’s writings. The Son’s consubstantial relationship to the
Father is often expressed by saying that the Son is the Father’s own. He speaks of
the ‘great and transcendent love of the Father for the life of the world in giving the
Son who is from himself and his own (ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἴδιον αὐτοῦ)’ (which, inci
dentally, contains an echo of Romans 8:32, the origin of this use).21 The Spirit,
too, is ἴδιος and ὁμοούσιος.22 Even where Cyril does not use the term ἴδιος, we
find him expounding the trinitarian relationships to ways familiar from
Athanasius, and taking these ideas further. For instance, at the very beginning of
his commentary on John, he argues that the Son is οὐκ ἔξωθεν to his Father, he is
not ἔκφυλος or ξένος, he exists together with the Father inseparably (συνυπάρχον
καὶ ἀχωρίστως) together they form μία φύσις.23 Συνύπαρξις a more technical
term than we have found in Athanasius; Cyril uses too ἐνύπαρξις, arguing that the
fact that the Son exists in the Father, does not destroy his existing together with
him (τὸ ἐνυπάρχειν does not destroy τὴν συνύπαρξιν).24
Like Athanasius, Cyril transfers the use of ἴδιος from a trinitarian to a
Christological context: the Word makes his body his own.25 Indeed, as Ruth
Siddals observed in a notable paper at the last Patristic Conference, the whole
complex of ideas expressed by ἴδιος, συνύπαρξις, and so on are as applicable for
17 Inc. 44; cf. C.A. III.31. 18 C.A. II.68. 19 C.A. III.24. 20 C.A. III.70.
21 In d. Joannis Evangelium 153b, ed. P. E. Pusey (1872). 22 In d. Joannis Evangelium 931d.
23 In d. Joannis Evangelium 12b‒d. 24 In d. Joannis Evangelium 12c5f.
25 Letter II to Nestorius, 4, 5, ed. L. R. Wickham (1983).
Cyril in a Christological as in a trinitarian context (most of the examples of the

theme of the unity of the lily and its fragrance that Ruth Siddals gives are trinitar
ian, though her paper is mainly concerned with its Christological implications).26
But Cyril takes these ideas one step further: not only is Christ’s humanity his own,
but in the Eucharist the bread and the wine are appropriated by the Word so that
they become the Word’s own flesh and blood. So in his third Letter to Nestorius,
he insists that the holy flesh that we receive in the Eucharist we receive ὡς
ζωοποιὸν ἀληθῶς καὶ ἰδίαν αὐτοῦ τοῦ Λόγου: and this is iterated in the eleventh
anathema appended to the letter.27
The Son is the Father’s own; the human nature of Christ (or his body) is the
Word’s own; the flesh that the elements of bread and wine become in the Eucharist
is also the Word’s own—it is his ἰδία σάρξ, the Word is παλὶν ἐν σώματι. The kinds
of unity thus so similarly expressed are not the same: Father and Son form μία
φύσις without qualification; though Cyril is fond of speaking of Christ as μία
φύσις, to explain his meaning he has to resort to qualification; and the union with
the Word into which we enter by the act of communion, though real, is not nat
ural, but a matter of relationship.28 But though these forms of union are different,
it seems that Cyril is moved to talk about them in the same terms—including,
notably, ἴδιος—in order to underline their reality, closeness, and intensity. We
have to do with what is unequivocally divine in the Son, in the Incarnation, in the
Eucharist: and this contact with the divine is our salvation.
This linkage of ideas is uniquely—and somewhat narrowly—Alexandrine, and
in its primary trinitarian use it is in contradiction to what was to become the
accepted language of Greek theology. For in the Cappadocian Fathers, ἴδιος; trini
tarian theology expresses, not what belongs to the divine nature, but what belongs
to the individual persons: generation is ἴδιος to (or the ἰδιότης of) the Son, pro
cession is ἴδιος to the Spirit.29 It makes no sense to say that the Son is ἴδιος to the
Father. The Cappadocians seem to have been anticipated in this usage by a theo
logian often dubbed as Alexandrine, viz, Apollinaris. In his κατὰ μέρος πίστις,
ἴδιος is used in the Cappadocian way, not in the way we are familiar with in
Athanasius.30 Nor does he characteristically use ἴδιος in a Christological context,
though he does speak of God Incarnate as possessing τὴν ἰδίαν ἐνέργειαν.31
Didymus, or whoever wrote de Trinitate, also seems innocent of this Alexandrine
use of ἴδιος; though the author of the pseudo-Athanasian Contra Apollinarem is
familiar with it in a Christological sense.32
26 Ruth Siddals, ‘Oneness and Difference in the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria’, Studia Patristica
XVIII (1985), 207–11, esp. n. 13.
27 Letter III to Nestorius, 7. On this, see H. Chadwick, ‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian
Controversy’, JTS N.S. 2 (1951), 145–64 (repr. in History and Thought of the Early Church, 1982).
28 See Chadwick, ‘Eucharist and Christology’, 155, n. 3. 29 See e.g. Basil (?), Ep. 38.
30 H. Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule (1904), 172f.
31 Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea, 178, l. 14.
32 See e.g. Contra Apollinarem I.10, 12, etc.
The Use of the Term ἴδιος in Alexandrian Theology 25
Despite the great prestige of Cyril (not to mention Athanasius) this Alexandrine
use of ἴδιος is not much found in later Greek theology. Given the profound
Cappadocian influence on the seventh-century de Sancta Trinitate attributed to
Cyril,33 it is perhaps not surprising that ἴδιος is used to define what belongs to
each person of the Trinity, rather than in the Cyrilline way,34 and it is therefore
quite absent from John Damascene.35 In both these cases what was expressed by
this usage of ἴδιος seems to be supplied by the new term περιχώρησις, which like
ἴδιος is used in both trinitarian and Christological contexts, though its original
sense, in contrast to ἴδιος, seems to have been Christological.36
33 See B. Fraigneau- Julien, ‘Un traité anonyme de la sainte Trinité attribué à saint Cyrille
d’Alexandrie’, Rech. S. R. 49 (1961), 188–211, 386–405 (for the sources, the second part).
34 Though at least once Cyril uses ἴδιος (or more exactly ἰδίως) in this sense: In d. Joannis Ev. 128b5.
35 In a trinitarian sense, though he knows ἴδιος in its Christological use: Expositio Fidei, 59, l. 182,
ed. B. Kotter (1973).
36 See G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (1936; 2nd edn., 1952), 291–300.
3
Ignatios or Eusebios
Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology
The Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 and his subsequent

protection of and support for the Christian Church had a profound impact on the
Church’s understanding of its relationship to the world in which it lived. The
Roman imperial ideal and the Church’s sense of its universal mission mutually
influenced each other with results that can be felt—not least in the Eastern
Orthodox world—to the present day. This union between the Roman imperial
ideal and the Church’s universal mission is first set out and celebrated in the
works Eusebios composed in honour of Constantine on the occasion of the thirti-
eth anniversary of his accession as emperor: his Life of Constantine and his
Encomia. This sense of a providential ‘fit’ between the Roman imperial ideal and
the Church’s universal claims goes back beyond Eusebios; one can detect some
kind of allusion to this in the elaborate date with which the Evangelist Luke pref-
aces his account of the ministry of Jesus in his Gospel (Luke 3:1). With Eusebios,
however, the symbiosis of Empire and Church is worked out in greater detail. The
emperor is presented as appointed by God’s providence to establish a state of
peace in which the Church can preach the Gospel. As the Word of God holds
sway over the created order, so the emperor is appointed by God to rule the
inhabited world, the οἰκουμένη; in return the Church prays for the emperor, for
the victory of his armies in defending the peace of the empire. Both emperor and
Church have a concern for the unity of the Church—a fragile state, as Constantine
soon discovered, and as the prominent position of petitions for unity in the
prayers of the Church bears witness:1 the Church’s concern a consequence of the
prayer the Lord himself offered on the night before his death, that ‘they may be
one’, the emperor’s concern more immediately a consequence of his perception
that the prayers on his behalf offered by a united Church are more likely to be
heard by God, than the prayers of a divided and disunited Church. All this under-
lies the notion of a Christian Roman empire, co-extensive with the ‘inhabited
1 For instance, in the litanies that occupy such a prominent place in Orthodox services, not least
the great litany, called, significantly Τὰ Εἰρηνικά, ‘the litany of peace’, or in the Roman Canon Missae,
which prays ‘pro Ecclesia tua sancta catholica: quam pacificare, custodire, adunare et regere digneris
toto orbe terrarum’ (‘for your holy catholic Church, which you will think fit to give peace to, guard,
unite and rule throughout the whole world’).
Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology 27
world’, in which there is harmony, συμφωνία, between Empire and Church: an

ideal expressed nowhere better than in Novella 6 of the Emperor Justinian (535):
The greatest blessings of mankind are the gifts of God which have been granted
us by the mercy on high—the priesthood and the imperial authority. The priest-
hood ministers to things divine, the imperial authority is set over, and shows
diligence in, things human; but both proceed from one and the same source,
and both adorn the life of man. Nothing, therefore, will be a greater matter of
concern to the emperor than the dignity and honour (honestas) of the clergy; the
more as they offer prayers to God without ceasing on his behalf. For if the priest-
hood be in all respects without blame, and full of faith before God, and if the
imperial authority rightly and duly adorn the commonwealth committed to its
charge, there will ensue a happy concord, which will bring forth all good things
for mankind. We therefore have the greatest concern for the true doctrines of
the God-head and the dignity and honour of the clergy; and we believe that if
they maintain that dignity and honour we shall gain thereby the greatest of gifts,
holding fast what we already have and laying hold on what is yet to come. ‘All
things’, it is said, ‘are done well and truly if they start from a beginning that is
worthy and pleasing in the sight of God.’ We believe that this will come to pass,
if observance be paid to the holy rules [canons] which have been handed down
by the Apostles—those righteous guardians and ministers of the Word of God,
who are ever to be praised and adored—and have since been preserved and
interpreted by the holy Fathers.2
This impressive ideal had profound ramifications for the structure of the Christian
Church. Even before the peace of the Church, ecclesiastical structures had mod-
elled themselves on the administrative structures of the Roman Empire. A bishop
ruled over the church in a city and his hinterland, χώρα; the bishop of the
metropolis of a province soon assumed authority over the bishops of the prov-
ince; and canon 6 of Nicaea envisages the beginnings of the system of patriarch
ates, roughly paralleling the dioceses of the Roman Empire. From the beginning,
Rome glossed this arrangement with an understanding of apostolic authority,
independent of the imperial structures, and at the beginning of the second mil-
lennium began to make claims that fundamentally qualified this endorsement of
imperial structures. In the East, however, the model of symphonia was accepted,
the only serious check on it being found in the claim by some, at least, of the
monastic order to act as safeguards of the canons of the Church.3 This, however,
2 Preface to Novella 6: in Social and Political Thought in Byzantium, from Justinian I to the last
Palaeologus, translated with an introduction and notes by Ernest Barker (Clarendon Press, 1957), 75–6.
3 It is sometimes overlooked that any claim that the Byzantine Empire was ‘caesaro-papist’ needs to
be qualified by the claims of the monastic order to preserve the tradition of the Church, a claim
meant a check on certain acts of the imperial authority, not some continuing con-
stitutional arrangement.
The model, then, of the relationship of the Church and the World came to be
summed up in the notion of Emperor–Empire–Church. The fifteenth century saw
developments that only underlined and strengthened this pattern. On the one
hand, with the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox Christians formed a
‘people of the Book’ under Islam: the Roman people, the Rum Millet, led by the
patriarch, appointed by the Sultan. This enhanced the role of the patriarch and, if
anything, brought the notion of Church and ‘nation’, as the Rum Millet, into an
even closer symbiosis. The Byzantine ideal had been inherited by the Russians,
and there developed a notion of the Russian Empire as the legacy of the Byzantine
Empire, with the same pattern of Emperor–Empire–Church—though the pos
ition of patriarch leading the Church was replaced by that of the so-called ‘synod’
from Peter the Great until the eve of the Revolution.
This pattern—Emperor–Empire–Church—was adopted in the nineteenth cen-
tury, as the various Orthodox nations—Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania—
liberated themselves from the Ottoman Empire, and established themselves as
independent, Orthodox nations. In this context, however, the ideal was inevitably
modified. Emperor–Empire–Church had been a universal ideal. To be sure, it had
never been more than an ideal: the Roman Empire was not the οἰκουμένη—Persia,
not to mention China and India, were inhabited and not just barbarian lands—
nor was the emperor the ruler of the whole world, though Byzantine diplomatic
conventions carefully promoted this illusion.4 In fact, this Roman ideal actually
hindered the Church in its universal mission, promoting the falsehood that to be
Christian meant to be Roman. Nevertheless, it was an ideal that had some cur-
rency. In the nineteenth-century nationalist context, however, the ideal became
something else. Emperor–Empire–Church was transformed into King–Nation–
Church, though Russia preserved a belief in the older imperial model, though in a
potentially highly dangerous way. In this context, the older universal ideal had
been changed. Whereas ‘empire’ can accommodate, however imperfectly, the uni-
versal mission of the Church, a nation is one nation among others, and the cor-
respondence of nation and Church actually seems to contradict the notion of the
Church’s universal mission. The notion of autocephaly again means something
very different from whatever had been meant by the independence of the five
patriarchates of the ancient Pentarchy. What the nineteenth century saw was a
potential, or even actual, fragmentation of the Church by the several adoptions of
asserted during the iconoclast controversy in the seventh/eighth centuries and during the hesychast
controversy in the fourteenth century.
4 See Dimitri Obolensky, ‘The Principles and Methods of Byzantine Diplomacy’, In Byzantium and
the Slavs (SVS Press, 1994).
what had once been a structure intended to express the unity of the one Church
of the inhabited world. The story, however, is by no means wholly negative, and
we need to remind ourselves of this before we go any further. The traditions of
what became ‘national Orthodoxy’ were based on the way in which, during the
centuries of suppression by Islam, Orthodox Christians had preserved their
identity by a faithful following of Orthodox traditions that had become embed-
ded in their sense of identity as Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs living under the
Ottomans— and also those Romanians living within the Austro- Hungarian
Empire that refused even to acknowledge their legal existence. A stubborn attach-
ment to traditions that defined their culture as Orthodox—at the level of persist
ent patterns of worship and custom—arguably preserved an Orthodoxy purer
and closer to its roots than the attempts of theologians to articulate Orthodoxy in
the context of the post-Reformation debates of Western Europe. It certainly made
possible a sense of Orthodox identity that could be grasped and articulated by
ordinary people, in contrast to the experience of the West, where a combination
of intellectualism and pietism weakened and distorted the experience of Western
Christianity—a process that seems even to be catching up on popular expressions
of Catholicism that, very like Orthodoxy, preserved popular, vernacular forms of
religious belief and observance right up to the reforms of Vatican II. Nor should
we think of this as nothing more than some kind of folk religion (though folk
religion is not to be despised); Christos Yannaras, in his account of the revival of
genuinely Orthodox theology in the Greek world in the last century, sees the
roots of this revival in the celebration of the ‘common experiences of life’,
expressed in the living traditions and rhythms of life preserved in the villages,
that form the basis of the short stories of the great writer, Alexandros
Papadiamandis.5
The first Orthodox attempts to think back beyond the traditions of the
Eusebian model of ecclesiology occurred among the Russian émigrés from Soviet
Communism. It was out of the experience of diaspora, dispersion, that this new
thinking arose. I want to dwell a little later on the significance of the theology of
the Russian diaspora, qua diaspora, but let me now just remark that the religious
creativity of the experience of diaspora is something that seems embedded in the
tradition that we have inherited from the Jewish people: think of the creativity of
the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people, and the similar, or even greater, cre
ativity of the Jewish diaspora around the time of Christ—not to mention the
enormous creativity of the Jewish diaspora during the Christian centuries.
Ecclesiological reflection among the Russian diaspora was something for which
there had already been preparation. The long period of ecclesiological distortion
5 See Christos Yannaras, Ὀρθοδοξία καὶ Δύση στὴ Νεώτερη Ἑλλάδα (Ekdoseis Domos, 1996),
406–89. Trans. as Orthodoxy and the West (Holy Cross Orthodox Press), 251–308.
that had been created by Peter the Great’s promulgation of the Ecclesiastical
Regulation of 1721, and the suppression of the Patriarchate, had been addressed at
the Moscow Sobor of 1917/18. In the view of many of the émigrés, this sobor had
been a lost opportunity, but it had provided a forum for some serious thought
about how the Church should be organized, and consequently provoked some
ecclesiological reflection (distilled in dialogue form in Bulgakov’s Beneath the
Ramparts of Cherson6).7 That sobor had taken place under the shadow of the flight
of Minerva’s owl; even as it restored the patriarchate to its position in the imperial
symphonia model, the Communist Revolution was embarking on a process that
would lead to persecution intended to exterminate the Church altogether. In the
diaspora, the Russian émigrés found themselves among Western Christians who
were often very welcoming. This forced them to articulate their sense of identity
as Russian Orthodox Christians. Some, certainly, did this in a spirit of nostalgia,
with an evocation of a, now lost, Holy Russia, but for most of them something
much deeper was involved. This included discovering a sense of the unique spirit
of Orthodox—and especially Russian Orthodox—theology and life. As is well
known, this was an enormously contentious issue; there were those who wanted
to continue the tradition of theological-cum-philosophical reflection that had
marked the later years of the nineteenth century; Fr Sergii Bulgakov was the lead-
ing figure among these. Others, notably Fr Georges Florovsky, were convinced
that this tradition was bankrupt and that a radically fresh start was needed: which
Florovsky called ‘Christian Hellenism’ or the ‘Neo-Patristic synthesis’. There also
emerged a sense—uniting in some ways those otherwise opposed—that the fun-
damental issues between Orthodox and Western theology could be found in the
hesychast controversy of fourteenth-century Byzantium, with St Gregory Palamas
as the champion of Orthodoxy: a sense that in some way built on the tradition of
what one might call ‘Philokalic’ theology that had emerged in the nineteenth cen-
tury. In another way—in some ways paralleling what Yannaras sees happening
somewhat later in Greek theology with the influence of Papadiamandis—there
was a widespread sense that the heart of Orthodoxy could be found in the novels
of Dostoevsky: something one could place alongside the ‘Philokalic’ theology of
the popular work, soon translated into English as The Way of a Pilgrim. All this,
however, is not the concern of this article.
What concerns us is the more specifically ecclesiological reflection we find in
the Russian diaspora. There is a sense—made more acute by the perceived failure
of the Moscow Sobor—that the Eusebian tradition was bankrupt, that its under-
standing of the Church was fundamentally flawed, that Orthodox theology
6 Serge Boulgakov, Sous les ramparts de Chersonèse. Trans. Bernard Marchadier (Editions ad
Solem, 1999).
7 See the discussion in Hyacinthe Destivelle, Le concile de Moscou (1917–1918), Cogitatio Fidei 246
(Cerf, 2006), 263–78.
needed to seek more deeply for an authentic ecclesiology. In articulating their

sense of what was wrong with Eusebian ecclesiology, the Russians drew on ideas
that were becoming the conventional wisdom in the rapidly developing field of
New Testament and early Church scholarship. This (largely Protestant) scholar-
ship also enabled the Russian émigrés to articulate their difference from
Catholicism—differences that had been elided by the theology of the so-called
Symbolic Books of the seventeenth century that had formed the basis of seminary
theology in nineteenth-century Russia: all dismissed by Florovsky as a ‘pseudo-
morphosis’, characteristic of the ‘Babylonian captivity of [Orthodox] theology’.
In this search for an ecclesiology more deeply rooted in the early Christian
experience than the Eusebian ecclesiology, the Russians—pre-eminent among
whom was Fr Nicholas Afanasiev, professor of church history at the Institut St-
Serge in Paris—turned to the New Testament and the earliest Christian Fathers,
especially St Ignatios of Antioch. Here, in contrast to the relatively fixed struc-
tures of the post-Constantinian Church, they found a situation that was fluid,
with traditions still establishing themselves, and still varying from place to place,
from local church to local church. Patterns of ministry and ideas of the Church
were still evolving. The first point Afanasiev emphasizes is that it is the whole
people of God, the whole λαός, that is priestly, sharing the royal priesthood;
priesthood does not refer to a ministerial elite, but to the whole people of God. In
the post-Constantinian Church, seen as an imperial-wide structure, there rapidly
developed a tendency to focus on the structures of ministry, especially on what
was (much later) to be called the episcopal ‘hierarchy’—using, or misusing, a
word coined by the author of the Corpus Areopagiticum in the sixth century. On
the contrary, in the New Testament and early Christian writings, it is the local
community of the baptised that is the Church. This applies even to the expression
‘the Catholic Church’, ἡ καθολικὴ ἐκκλησία. The Eusebian model had more or less
taken it for granted that this meant the ‘universal Church’, the whole institution of
which ‘local churches’ were parts or members or branches. But, as contemporary
scholarship (then— as well as now) maintained,8 this is not what the New
Testament meant by the Church, nor St Ignatios, in whose epistles the expression
‘catholic church’ is first found. There the word ‘church’ designates the local church,
but not the local church apart from other local churches; rather it is the case that
the whole Church, the ‘Catholic Church’, the Body of Christ, is found in every
local church. Local churches are not members or constituents of the universal
Church, they are manifestations of the whole Church, found whole and entire in
every church, in every place. With Ignatios, this sense of the ‘catholic church’
existing whole and entire in each place is articulated as the community gathered
together with its bishop to celebrate the Eucharist, to form a eucharistic assembly:
8 See, for instance, K. L. Schmidt, ‘έκκληςία’. In Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament,
vol. 3, ed.Gerhard Kittel (Verlag von W. Kohlhammer, 1938), 502–39.
‘wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; just as wherever in Christ
Jesus, there is the catholic Church’ (Ad Smyrn. 8.2). So emerged what was to be
called ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’, which has come to characterize most Orthodox
theology and been widely influential—on both the decree Lumen Gentium of the
second Vatican Council, and on ecclesiological reflection within the World
Council of Churches. A top-down model—with local churches seen as branches
of the universal Church—has been replaced by a model in which the local com-
munity articulates the reality of being a church, being in Christ, something real-
ized in all local Christian communities, gathered together under their bishops.
The unity among the local churches is not formed by some sort of agreement; it is
constituted by the fact that each of them is the whole Church, and manifest in a
sense of solidarity, articulated, when necessary, by the gathering together, a syno-
dos, of the bishops.
In his great work, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Afanasiev draws out from the
writings of the first two Christian centuries his understanding of the development
of the Christian ministry. In his final chapter, he begins to reflect on how this
work of careful historical scholarship bears on our understanding of the
Church today.
During nearly two thousand years of history, under the influence of empirical
factors that have penetrated the Church, a ‘sediment’ has formed, one which has
concealed the true life of the Church almost entirely. Most of the time we slide
across the surface of this outer covering without attempting to penetrate to the
authentic essence of the Church. Finally we see the Church as it appears on
this surface and we take this external manifestation for the actual essence of
the Church.
External, empirical factors are thus ‘ecclesialized’ and the empirical principles
that are their foundation come to play the role of ecclesiological principles. Thus
they lose all contact with the empirical reality which was their source. But even then,
when they no longer are relevant in empirical life, they continue to shape the
life of the Church. This creates a rupture between the empirical stratum of
the Church’s life, which corresponds to a given historical moment, and the gen-
eral history of humanity. Thus we can see why it is that the life of Byzantium,
with all its particularities long since having disappeared from the stage of his-
tory, has been preserved, immutable and unchangeable, in our ecclesial life.
Byzantium survives in the Church. The shadow of the Byzantine emperor
remains present during certain liturgical actions when we reconstitute the cere-
monial of the Byzantine court. Meanwhile, the true spiritual heritage of
Byzantium is hardly known to us. We are not always able to distinguish the
action of authentic ecclesial sources from those of empirical factors assimilated
by the Church over a long period of time. And what is more, in constituting a
kind of historical moment fossilized in ecclesial life, these empirical factors
progressively distance the Church from the progress of history, preventing the
legitimate effects of new factors due to the mutations of history. The true nature
of the Church is no longer able to be manifest in the actual historical conditions
and this prevents the Church from fulfilling its mission in the historical life of
humanity. Our era demands that in our ecclesial life dead empirical factors be
distinguished from the truly ecclesial ones so that the life of the Church may be
opened to the impact of the new and the historical aspects of the Church’s exist-
ence be brought back to life. This is the only condition under which a true
renaissance of the Church’s life would be possible.
As with all of history, that of the Church is irreversible. We cannot return to
the time of early Christianity, not only because of radically changed historical
conditions but also because the experience of the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the
church, accumulated through the passage of time, cannot be laid aside.
Nevertheless, the time of early Christianity remains an ideal for us, according to
which we must check our ecclesial life. It was the time when the nature of the
Church shone clearly through the fabric of history.9
This puts very well the problems posed by any attempt to rethink the Byzantine
ideal of the relationship between Church and State in the modern world, and in
particular the difficulty in discerning between general principles that might apply
both to the Byzantine experience and to modern times and what was part of the
unique experience of the Byzantine period. However, put in Afanasiev’s terms,
these questions go beyond asking whether a national Church is possible, or
whether we can pass beyond a Eusebian political theology, on Orthodox prin
ciples: they raise serious questions about whether the notion of a national church,
or a Eusebian political theology, is coherent with Orthodox principles at all. These
are huge issues, and I can do no more than suggest a few lines of enquiry, but I
would like to make a start and proceed in three steps. First, by exploring how an
‘Ignatian’ ecclesiology undermines Eusebian political theology. Second, by mak-
ing some comments on the notion of a national church. And then, finally, to
return to the notion of diaspora, which was at least the catalyst for the challenge
to Eusebian ideas of ecclesiology we find among the Russian émigrés, and ask
whether, as many Orthodox in the diaspora seem to believe, diaspora is a tran-
sient category, or whether it is something deeper and more enduring. As with my
presentation of eucharistic ecclesiology, I shall not simply outline a theoretical
argument. There I traced how the appeal of an Ignatian ecclesiology grew out of
the historical experience of diaspora. This time I shall investigate developments
that might emerge, rather than simply considering theoretical possibilities.
9 Nicholas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit., trans. Vitaly Permiakov (University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007), 256–7.
The long quotation from Afanasiev suggests that much of the Byzantine heritage
of Eastern Christianity is a matter of historical contingency. It clearly requires
discernment to distinguish ‘empirical factors’ from ‘truly ecclesial’ ones, as
Afanasiev calls them, but he also suggests that ‘the time of early Christianity
remains an ideal for us, according to which we must check our ecclesial life. It was
the time when the nature of the Church shone clearly through the fabric of
history’. One of the elements that the union of the Roman and the Christian brought
into the Church was the notion of law. The whole system of the Holy Canons, in
accordance with which the Church governs its life, belongs to the Eusebian
Church. The so-called ‘Apostolic Canons’ belong in their present form to the late
fourth century, and though there seems to have been a tradition of canons gov-
erning the life of the Church in the pre-Constantinian Church, it would seem that
we have scarcely any access to them now. The body of the Holy Canons of the
Orthodox Church not only emerges in the fourth century, it does not survive
beyond the ninth: they are a body of historical canons belonging to a period long
past. They have remained unchanged now for over a millennium. What is their
status? Are they changeable or unchangeable? No one in the Orthodox world
seems to entertain the possibility that, as in the Catholic Church in the last
century—twice, in fact—the whole body of the Holy Canons might be brought up
to date. There is, indeed, discussion about whether the canons can be reformed at
all, but, for the most part, this discussion has a curiously unreal quality. Afanasiev
argued that the canons were reformable, changeable—and had in fact changed in
the past— even though what the canons represented in history was itself
unchangeable; he rejected the kind of solution found in Western canonists that
makes a distinction between divine and human law— jus divinum and jus
humanum—the former unchangeable, the latter changeable. Others, for instance,
Christos Yannaras, argue that the canons are unchangeable. Both Afanasiev and
Yannaras conclude, however, that Orthodox Christians nowadays cannot be
expected to conform strictly to canons that envisage a very different historical
and cultural reality from the present (avoidance of Jewish doctors, for example,
which, I am told, would make recourse to medical care very difficult indeed in the
East Coast states of the USA), but rather that the historically conditioned status of
the canons has— providentially, as it were— restored to modern Orthodox
Christians the freedom that the invasion of law into the Church had threatened to
take away. This paradoxical position is defended by both Afanasiev and Yannaras,
though expressed in what seem to be contradictory ways.10 The holy canons pre-
sent a vision of Christian life rooted in a quite particular historical reality (or
indeed quite particular historical realities); interpretation of them requires
10 See Nicholas Afanasiev, ‘The Church’s Canons: Changeable or Unchangeable?’ In Tradition Alive,
ed. Michael Plekon (Rowland & Littlefield, 2003), 31–45; Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality
(SVS Press, 1984), 175–93.
creativity. As Afanasiev puts it, ‘Orthodox teaching recognizes in principle the

alterability of canonical decrees. It would be more exact to say that the Church
demands a creative attitude to contemporary life. The Church examines contem-
porary life as a theme and as material for its creativity’.11 Yannaras puts it differ-
ently, but comes to a similar conclusion:
We, perhaps, see in these canons a system of law. But the Byzantines saw in them
the preconditions and possibilities for an ascetic realization of personal freedom
and distinctiveness, for the real manifestation of the beauty of life. The measure
of our understanding of the canons is a measure of our spiritual maturity.12
What, however, are the principles of such creative interpretation? For both
Afanasiev and Yannaras the ‘principles’, if one can call them such, are found in the
dynamics of the communio as found in the eucharistic assembly of the Church, in
which, in communion with others, personal freedom finds its realization. Law, as
Afanasiev admits more readily, perhaps, than Yannaras, has a role, but that role is
to ‘protect the individual from all sorts of aggression, not only on the part of other
persons but also on the part of society and the state’:13 it creates a space in which
each person can exercise creativity.
I suppose what I have just suggested indicates that it is perhaps not so much
the Eusebian political theology as a whole that can no longer be upheld, but rather
that the way the Byzantines themselves upheld and practised it enabled a creative
space that too literal an interpretation of the structures of Eusebian ecclesiology
would have suppressed. Nonetheless, we only realize this if we grasp how the fun-
damental living reality of eucharistic communion found expression in the more
formal structures of the Eusebian symphonia—or, to put this another way, how
the structures of the Eusebian symphonia themselves presupposed the Ignatian
understanding of the primacy of eucharistic κοινωνία as constituting the Church.
I suspect that a similar openness to ambivalence is required if we are to reach
a true assessment of the notion of a national church. As I have already sug-
gested, this has no roots in any recognizable Orthodox political theology,
whether based on Ignatian principles (whatever that would look like) or on
Eusebian principles, for it is the result of the restriction of the Eusebian ideal of
the one Church of the one oikoumene to the political realities of a nineteenth-
century nation, understood as the homeland of a people, defined by their use of
a common language—a notion that makes contact with Byzantine reality only
through the willingness (or acceptance) on the part of the Byzantine Empire of a
Slavonic liturgy and scriptures for the Slav people, initially of Bulgaria and later
of Rus’. However, that point of contact does recognize a principle that nowadays
11 Afanasiev, ‘The Church’s Canons’, 42.

12 Yannaras, Freedom of Morality, 182. 13 Afanasiev, Church of the Holy Spirit, 261.
hardly anyone would reject—namely, the principle of praying, both privately

and publicly, in one’s native tongue. That principle, followed through, accepts a
variety of religious expression according to the genius of each language: a con-
viction, as it were, of the triumph of Pentecost over Babel. However, questions
arise as to whether this principle needs any political expression, and whether it
is fully consonant with the universal mission of the Christian Church, for what
is missing in the national Church model—as opposed to the imperial model—is
precisely that conviction of universality, or œcumenicity, that made the imperial
model so attractive to Christians in the first place, though one might argue that
the vertical axis of universality (the Gospel reaching from the intellectuals to the
simple and uneducated) is just as important as the horizontal axis, embracing
the different nations.
In attempting to think through in political terms what might be meant by a
nation defined by a Christian culture, Orthodox East Europeans were not alone.
The parallels are not, however, encouraging. Western Europe saw similar
attempts to understand what might be meant by a nation defined by a Christian
culture. In England, T. S. Eliot, along with others, gave much thought to what
might be involved in conceiving of England as a Christian nation—an idea that
was receding, but still then not out of reach—and such attempts found a certain
urgency as England emerged from the devastation of the Second World War. In
an early attempt to articulate what such a society might require, Eliot made the
notorious remark: ‘What is still more important is unity of religious background;
and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-
thinking Jews undesirable’.14 Orthodox attempts to conceive of what might be
meant by an Orthodox society also found it difficult to articulate this in ways
that avoided any taint of anti-semitism. If political expressions of symphonia
seem to entail such a risk, perhaps we should rather seek to find in the experi-
ence of exile, diaspora, the roots of our political consciousness—which leads me
to my final point.
I suggested that, as a matter of history, actual reflection among Orthodox on
the Ignatian model of ecclesiology over against the Eusebian was the consequence
of the experience of diaspora, dispersion or exile from one’s native land. My
impression is that most Orthodox in the diaspora regard this condition—and
categorization—as temporary and unfortunate. The next stage is the attainment
of a national Orthodox Church—of Great Britain, say—that would unite all
Orthodox of whatever origin in a single Church, meaning by that, a Church with
a single united hierarchy, with one bishop in each ‘place’ (however defined),
which would one day seek autonomy, and indeed autocephaly. There is much to
14 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 20; quoted from C. Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (Faber & Faber,
1988), 41.
be said for looking to this ideal, not least insofar as it calls into question the
acceptance of separate jurisdictions rooted in different national hierarchies,
which become less significant as generation succeeds generation and there are an
increasing number of ‘native’ Orthodox. Such a goal was an important part of the
vision of the presence of Orthodoxy in Great Britain that the late Metropolitan
Anthony of Sourozh sought to promote. In the United States of America, this
vision went some way towards realization through Moscow’s granting autoceph-
aly in 1970 to the Orthodox Church in America.
The New Testament, however, gives little support to this idea of settling down,
with the Church becoming part of the political structures of the world, as it came
to be with the Eusebian and Justinianic ideal of symphonia. When the Apostle
Paul says to the Ephesians that they are no longer ‘strangers and foreigners’ (ξένοι
καὶ πάροικοι), he means that this is precisely what they are in this world, but that
the hidden reality of their existence is that they are ‘fellow-citizens of the saints
and members of God’s household’ (Eph. 2:19). Similarly, in the Epistle to the
Hebrews, those who live by faith are ‘strangers and pilgrims on earth’, who are in
search of their ‘homeland’ (Heb. 11:13, 14), while ‘here we have no abiding city,
but seek one to come’ (Heb. 13:14). The author of the second-century Epistle to
Diognetus reaffirms this, saying of Christians that ‘they live in their own coun-
tries, but as foreigners; they share in everything as citizens, but dwell everywhere
as strangers; every foreign country is theirs and every country foreign’ (Diog. 5.5).
Christians have, over the centuries, settled down and made towns and countries
their homes, but these words remind us that at a deeper level, we can never settle
down in this world. Perhaps there is some fundamental betrayal involved in the
Church accepting a place in this world, as if here it had found its ‘ancient home-
land’: that ‘ancient homeland’ towards which we look from afar, according to St
Basil, when we turn east to pray. Perhaps the condition in which most Christians
have found themselves in recent years—strangers in their own countries, taken
over either by the ideology of communism or by the more tenacious ideology of
modern consumerism—is not the defeat of Christianity, but rather an opportun
ity to discover and live a more truly Christian life, like that described in the Epistle
to Diognetus:
They dwell on earth, and are citizens of heaven; they obey the established laws,
and in their lives outdo the laws; they love all and are persecuted by all; they are
ignored and condemned; they are done to death, and brought to life; they are
poor, and make many rich; they lack everything, and are abundant in every-
thing; they are dishonoured and are glorified in their dishonour; they are blas-
phemed and are justified; they are reviled and they bless; they are insulted and
show honour; doing good they are punished as wicked; punished, they rejoice as
given life. (Diog. 5.9–16)
I am not sure that thinking through an alternative to the dominant Eusebian

model of political theology and the relationship between Church and State should
really be a priority, if it means working out another way of conceiving how the
Church is to settle down in the world. Perhaps we should explore more urgently
what it means to be ‘strangers and foreigners’ in our own countries, and to realize
again what it means to live in the world in which we cannot settle or make our-
selves at home. The temptation to recover what we have lost is very great—
whether it was lost to communism or is lost (or in danger of being lost) to Western
individualism and consumerism—but I am not sure that I see how a political
theology could secure that. What is needed is repentance, μετάνοια, and that
involves personal commitment, not political programmes.
4
On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity
St Basil the Great between the Desert and the City
The story of the origins of Christian monasticism has become so familiar that we
are scarcely aware of how it is rooted in the historical evidence—or not, as I think
the case really is. Monasticism started in the Egyptian desert, we are told. There
we find from the beginning the three classical forms of Christian monasticism:
the eremitical life with St Antony the Great, the cœnobitic life with St Pachomios,
and the lavra or the skete, as it was later called, with St Makarios and St Hilarion.
Out of these beginnings, Christian monasticism developed, and the traditional
account looks to Syria, Palestine, Gaza, and Sinai, and in the West to Lerins,
Marseille, and to the extraordinary story of Celtic monasticism. There follows a
story of constant vicissitudes, though quickly there emerges in the West a thread
that later becomes a steady cord, linking monasticism with its roots through
St Benedict and his rule.
What is problematic about this story? Well, two things, it seems to me. First of
all, notice how pervasive it is: the Egyptian desert becoming a city, or even para-
dise, lodges itself in the Christian unconscious very quickly. Think of the role of
the story of St Antony in the conversion of St Augustine; or, in a different vein,
the way Sulpicius Severus, in his Vita and, perhaps especially, Dialogues on
St Martin of Tours, is at pains to resist any comparison that would put St Martin in
the shadow of the great Egyptian figures such as St Antony. However, though we
can trace back this sense of the pre-eminence of Egypt, Egypt itself is not pre-
eminent in the actual evidence. The most influential account of the lives and
teaching of the Egyptian Fathers is found in Apophthegmata patrum, which only
emerges very late—towards the end of the fifth century—and is of a complexity
that still awaits a convincing unravelling. It was intentionally, deliberately, the pic-
ture of a golden age, dimly perceived from a much later period by one of the last
denizens of the Egyptian desert, who had left the desert, as it became an increas-
ingly dangerous place to live because of the incursion of those the Greeks called
‘barbarians’. I do not think that it is an utterly ahistorical account—some aspects
of it are borne out by earlier evidence—but it cannot be read—historically at any
rate— without some awareness of the warm and regretful memories of an
unknown monk or monks, from Skete, putting together the sayings and stories
probably somewhere in Syria. But the second thing that is wrong with the trad
itional story is closely related to this question of the historical evidence. If we
trace through the historical evidence, then it becomes apparent that Egypt is not
the only, not even perhaps the earliest, place where Christian monasticism estab-
lished itself. The fourth-century evidence for Egypt is Athanasios’ Vita Antonii,
the Pachomian material, and the writings of Evagrios: Athanasios’ uita is clearly a
special case, telling us as much about the way in which Athanasios presented the
great Egyptian father, and by implication the monasticism of which he was
emblematic, as supporting pillars of synodal orthodoxy, fashioned by bishops
such as himself; the Pachomian material has probably already been sifted by later
Coptic monasticism, notably Shenuda; while no one could think that Evagrios
was typical of anything—he is evidently a towering genius in his exploration of
the metaphysical underpinning of the ascetic life. There are, of course, the letters
of St Antony himself, but their complex textual tradition again suggests that the
access they provide to their author is far from straightforward. If we move on,
there is the genre of travellers’ tales— Historia monachorum in Ægypto and
Historia Lausiaca—which are full of interest, and confirm some aspects of the
presentation of the Desert Fathers in Apophthegmata, and then the conferences of
John Cassian, which are presented as eye-witness accounts of (oddly) rather
obscure Egyptian fathers, whose loquacity in their dispensing spiritual advice
seems far removed from the laconic dark sayings we find in Apophthegmata.
The historical evidence, then, does not consist of a kind of direct eye-witness
core, presented by the sayings and lives of the fathers, around which we can group
various attempts, more distanced from direct experience, to appropriate and
assimilate their teaching and example. Rather—partly because of, and partly cre
ative of—the sense of the Egyptian desert as a golden age, as the restoration of
paradise, there is the paradoxical sense that the closer we seem to come to the
living words of the desert fathers, the less we can actually hear.
The point of this introduction is to clear a little space to enable us to hear
another early monastic voice, which genuinely belongs to the middle of the fourth
century, but which has been largely neglected. I refer, of course, to St Basil the
Great and his monastic writings and reflections on the contemplative life. The
extent to which he is left in the shadows by scholarly accounts of monasticism is
amazing. He is not mentioned at all in the classic work on early eastern
monasticism—Derwas Chitty’s The Desert a City1—or in the much more recent
introduction to the literature of early monasticism—William Harmless’ Desert
Christians.2 But, unlike the historical evidence I have briefly surveyed, what we
find in Basil’s writings is contemporary reflection on early attempts at pursuing
the monastic life among Christians.
1 Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Basil Blackwell, 1966).

2 William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism
(Oxford University Press, 2004).
On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity 41
Not that Basil himself was entirely free from the lure of Egypt. When, after his
return from Athens—regarded by St Gregory of Nazianzus as a betrayal of their
friendship—he set off on what Gregory refers to as ‘voyages’, it seems that he
was—in company with, or perhaps better in pursuit of, Eustathios of Sebaste—
making a tour of the monastic centres of the mid-fourth century: not just Egypt,
but Coele-Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, as is apparent from later references
in his letters.3 (It is actually possible that Basil never made it to Egypt, in which
case Egypt remained for him a place only of report.)4 Basil was, then, well aware
of contemporary monastic movements, and the places—Egypt, Palestine, Syria—
that occupy a central role in traditional accounts of the rise of monasticism, but
there were other influences. It is worth exploring, even if briefly, these influences,
for they alert us to other aspects of the Christian monastic story, obscured by the
traditional account. These aspects are twofold. First, there is the question of
Christian pre-monastic asceticism. It is striking that in Athanasios’ uita, when
Antony finally responds to the call to leave all and devote himself to a life of
asceticism, he places his sister with “known and trusted virgins,” and he himself
soon finds an “old man, who had lived the ascetic life in solitude from his youth.”5
So in a uita, which is often read as the account of the first monk, though the uita
itself makes no such unambiguous claim,6 there are clear references to earlier
forms of Christian asceticism: in particular, groups of virgins (or widows), of
whom we know from other sources, such as the Didascalia apostolorum, and soli-
tary ascetics in villages. We can trace this background in Basil’s own life. Whatever
it was that Basil developed, there had already developed a kind of ascetic family
community in which his sister Macrina—according to his brother Gregory of
Nyssa, an important influence on Basil himself, though never mentioned by
him—played a leading role.7 Gregory of Nyssa’s Dialogus de anima et resurrec-
tione, and his life of his sister, gives us a picture of the role open to a determined
woman within the bosom of an ascetic Christian family, interesting—and maybe,
a little surprising—in itself, and probably important in fashioning Basil’s under-
standing of the ascetic and monastic life. But second, the traditional literature on
early monasticism sets it in the context of withdrawal—ἀποτάγη—from human
society. If, for Athanasios, as he praises Antony’s success, ‘the desert became a
city’, he is conscious of the paradox he has uttered, for the monasticism of
withdrawal meant withdrawal from human society. But such monasticism of
3 See Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, tch, vol. 20 (University of California Press, 1994), 73.
4 Rousseau, Basil, 73, n. 53.
5 Athanasios, va, 3 (sc 400.134–6).
6 It is perhaps in Jerome that we first find the idea that Antony was claimed as the first monk, for in
his Vita Pauli Jerome contests this claim and puts forward the—largely fictional—Paul as the true
candidate for the title.
7 On Macrina, see Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great, oecs (Oxford University
Press, 2005), esp. 60–83.
withdrawal was not the only kind of monasticism to emerge, it is just that the
sources for the ascetic communities that remained in the city are much less evi-
dent and much more difficult to interpret. However, after the research of such as
David Brakke and Peter Hatlie, we can form a much better picture of city (or
town) monasticism. Brakke has shown how much effort Athanasios devoted to
fostering ascetic groups in the towns and villages of Egypt, alongside his better
known attempt to secure the support of the desert monks,8 while Hatlie has built
up a picture—from an array of sources: hints in historians, canonical material,
and evidence from hagiography—of the development of monasticism in the city
of Constantinople, which, though scarcely typical, was far removed from the
asceticism of the desert.9 Basil became archbishop of Caesarea, and much of his
later reflection on the monastic state concerned the group, or groups, of ascetics
he established under his own authority in Caesarea of Cappadocia.
Basil, therefore, stands in a fascinatingly middle position: between the desert
and the city, as I suggest in my title, but also between the emerging monastic
movement of the fourth century and the unstructured asceticism that informed
groups of virgins and widows, which seem, most often, to have had a family set-
ting. He also occupies a position, not exactly in the middle, but at the confluence
of two traditions that nurtured the tradition of Christian monasticism: the trad
ition of classical philosophy and that of the Christian scriptures—between, as it
were, the philosophers and the prophets, between Plato and Moses, or Herakleitos
and Isaiah. I think it can be argued that, in looking at Basil, it is possible to see
more of the possibilities open to a Christian monk in the fourth century, than in
looking at any one else in that century.
I want to take this further by looking at various places where Basil speaks of
the monastic vocation and at some of the themes in these works. Let us start at
what is very nearly the beginning of his literary career: his second letter, which he
sent to his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, in about 359. The date and the recipient
of the letter are significant; Basil had a little earlier written to Gregory praising the
physical setting of his retreat in Pontos, to which he invites his friend Gregory
whom he had abandoned in Athens:
There is a high mountain, covered with a thick forest, watered on its northerly
side by cool and transparent streams. At its base is outstretched an evenly slop-
ing plain, ever enriched by the moisture from the mountain. A forest of many-
coloured and multifarious trees, a spontaneous growth surrounding the place,
acts almost as a hedge to enclose it, so that even Kalypso’s isle, which Homer
8 See especially David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, oecs (Clarendon
Press, 1995).
9 Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, c. 350–850 (Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
seems to have admired above all others for its beauty, is insignificant as compared
to this.10
And so on. Gregory eventually overcame his scruples and joined Basil in Pontos;
there, together, they compiled their tribute to Origen—Philokalia, an anthology
of Origen’s works. They were engaged in a joint intellectual quest, the pursuit of
philosophy—φιλοσοφία, a term that was rapidly changing its connotation in the
latter part of the fourth century to mean pursuit of the ascetic life.
But before Gregory joined Basil in Pontos, he had replied to Basil’s letter and
received a response, which is preserved in Basil’s correspondence as the second
letter. Gregory’s response to Basil’s account of the beauty of the place had been
guarded; he had apparently said (Gregory’s letter is lost) that he would rather
learn something about Basil and his companions’ “habits and mode of life” than
the beauty of the place—he wants to know about their τρόπος rather than their
τόπος. Basil, in his reply in what occurs in his correspondence as the second let-
ter, commends Gregory for this, remarking that, though he could leave behind his
life in the city, he has “not yet been able to leave [him]self behind.”11 What is
needed is separation from the world altogether, but what this means is not so
much bodily separation, as separation from sympathy, fellow feeling, with the
body and its concerns, which include home, possessions, love of friends, social
relations, and even knowledge derived from human teaching. To this end solitude
(ἐρημία) is very valuable, as it calms the passions and affords the reason leisure
(σχολή).12 Basil goes on to speak of the purifying of the soul, when it is deprived
in solitude of the constant distraction of civil and family life. The soul is enabled
to relinquish this world and “to imitate on earth the anthems of angels’ choirs; to
hasten to prayer at the very break of the day, and to worship our Creator with
hymns and songs.”13 The beginning of this purification of the soul is tranquillity
(ἡσυχία), which enables the soul to withdraw into itself and by itself to ascend to
contemplation of God. This reading of and meditation on the scriptures is valu
able, for they contain not just precepts to follow, but examples to imitate. Prayer is
stimulated by reading the scriptures; it engenders in the soul a distinct concep-
tion of God, but more than that brings about the indwelling of God in the soul,
for “the indwelling of God is this—to hold God ever in memory, His shrine
10 Basil, Ep. 14.2 Translation by Roy F. Deffarari (St Basil, The Letters, I, London: Heinemann/
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, p. 107). I have used the text found in Basilio de
Cesarea, Le lettere, I, ed. Marcella Forlin Patrucco, Corona Patrum, Turin: Società Editrice Internazionale,
1983, with its valuable commentary.
11 Basil, Ep. 2.1; Deffarari, trans., St Basil, 1.8.
13 Basil, Ep. 2.2.
e stablished within us.”14 There then follow reflections on the way of life that is
conducive to this: reflections on the way we are to behave one towards another,
with respect and courtesy, neither harsh towards others nor withdrawn; reflec-
tions on clothing, utilitarian not ostentatious; food is to be simple and adequate,
preceded and followed by prayer; sleep to be light.
There are several things that are striking about this. First of all, most of it could
have been said by a pagan philosopher, talking about the higher life of thought:
the emphasis on tranquillity, the sense of distance from the world ushering in
proximity to heaven and heavenly beings; again, Basil’s account of appropriate
dress for the Christian ascetic recalls the accounts of the cynic philosophers. But
the classical style and allusions are shot through with language that is distinctively
Christian. Patrucco’s fascinating commentary reveals, for example, that just after
describing the Christian monk’s dress in terms of the cynic philosopher, to
describe them as ‘mourners’, or ‘those who grieve’ (οἱ πενθοῦντες) is to employ a
word that had became a technical term for an ascetic in the Syrian tradition.15
A more obvious example occurs right at the beginning of the letter, when Basil
agrees with Gregory that solitude on its own is useless, because our minds remain
cluttered, and says that we need “to keep close to the footsteps of Him who
pointed the way to salvation,” and goes on to quote Matthew 16:24. Basil, then,
seems to stand, quite unselfconsciously at the interface between classical culture
and the message of the gospel. But having said that, we must add: Basil is certainly
facing in one direction—towards the scriptures; there is a kind of turning-point
in the letter when he says, “But the best way to the discovery of what is needed is
meditation on the Scriptures inspired by God.”16 It has recently been argued
that it was his elder sister Macrina who brought home to him the crowning
significance of the scriptures.17 Second, however, we find something else that is
to become characteristic of Basil: viz., the way in which our relationships with
one another become themselves an ascetic way. For Basil, though the ascetic
way involves an inward transformation, it is something that involves others,
something that is tested and furthered by our relationships with other people.
In this letter it is very striking, for however much the language recalls the
ideal of the ‘alone returning to the alone’, the letter closes with several pages
concerned with how we are to live together, how we are to behave one
towards another.
We need to underline that this ‘second’ letter is really quite early. Indeed, per-
haps this would be a good moment to give a brief sketch of the sequence of events
in Basil’s life. Basil was born in 329, the second son of devout parents, his elder

15 See Patrucco, Basilio di Cesarea, 1.272.
17 Silvas, Asketikon, 70.
sister Macrina being about two years older than him. When he was about 17, he
went to Caesarea to a kind of higher school, and there he met one who was to be a
lifelong friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. When he was 20, he continued his studies in
Constantinople, and shortly afterwards went to Athens, the “home of letters . . . a
city truly of gold, and the patroness of all that is good,” as Gregory put it in
his funeral oration for his friend.18 After about six years there, in 356, Basil
returned to Caesarea, and later on in that year, at the instigation of Macrina,
was baptised and ordained reader. There followed in 357 his travels to monastic
centres in pursuit of Eustathios, and at the end of that year he began to pursue the
ascetic life at his family’s estate at Annisa on the river Iris, in Pontos. In 362, he
was in Caesarea for the death of the Bishop Dianios, and was ordained priest
there. There follow eight years during which he spent much time in Pontos, as
well as brief periods in Caesarea. In 370 he was elected bishop of Caesarea. He
died on 1 January 379.
That is a very skeletal account, but it brings out how his adult life is determined
by two places: his family estate in Pontos and, the centre of his ecclesiastical activ-
ities, Caesarea in Cappadocia. In both places he was concerned with monastic
communities: something like a rural retreat in Annisa and a monastic commu-
nity in Caesarea that existed in the city and was under his authority. His monastic
writings quickly became very important for the Greek East, with the consequence
that what we have now—say, printed in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca—is a collection
of disparate material. The evolution of this material is something that has been
clarified in the scholarship of the last century, especially by the labours of Dom
Jean Gribomont. What we now have is called Great Asceticon—the big collection
of ascetic writings. This consists of the central core of the work, called the Longer
and Shorter Rules, together with a variety of small treatises, sermons, and letters:
all of this in Greek. There also exists a Latin translation, called the Rule of Basil,
translated by Rufinus into Latin. This latter has caused a good deal of puzzlement:
it consists of a series of ‘rules’, such as are found in the Longer and Shorter
Rules, but in a different order and with no distinction between longer and
shorter rules. It is now thought that it represents a translation of an earlier
version of the rules, before they were divided up between the longer and the
shorter. The translation, however, was—as is typical of Rufinus—pretty free,
and does not give us direct access to the earlier version of the Asceticon, known
as the Short Asceticon.19
That all sounds very complicated—and it is!—but the important points to
notice are these. First of all, Basil was concerned with two communities, one of
18 Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 43.14 (sc 384.146–8): τὸ τῶν λόγων ἔδαφος . . . τὰς χρυσᾶς ὄντως ἐμοὶ
καὶ τῶν καλῶν προξένους εἴπερ τινί.
19 For the details, see Rousseau, Basil, 354–9; and modifying and correcting this account: Silvas,
Asketikon.
which—that in Pontos—certainly had a life apart from him. That means that Basil
himself stands within a tradition; he is very aware that in his reflections on
monasticism he is introducing nothing new, but developing something already
deeply rooted in the Christian community. Second, and closely related, it is easy
to be misled by the term ‘rule’ and ‘rules’. It is in fact doubtful if they occurred at
all in the original Greek texts; only in the titles of the two sets of ‘rules’, and then
not in all mss, are they called ὅροι, definitions. The individual ‘rules’ are called
Ἐρωτήσεις, questions, followed by ἀποκρίσεις, responses, the terms used by Anna
Silvas in her recent translation; for the ‘rules’ are in fact questions and answers:
longer answers to general questions, and shorter answers to more specific points.
The longer responses, for example, begin by discussing the twofold command-
ment to love, love of God, love of one’s neighbour, fear of God, etc.
‘Rules’ occur in Basil’s works but elsewhere. He was bishop of Caesarea at a
crucial point in the development of the Church as an institution in the Roman
Empire, and in several of his letters to a friend, Amphilochios, who had been
appointed bishop of Ikonion, he does produce what later came to be known as
‘canons’—the ‘rules’ that constitute the legal framework within which the Church
operates.20 It is interesting that the Church came to call its legal enactments not
laws, νόμοι, but κανόνες, ‘rules’. Though this can be made too much of, there seems
to be manifest in this avoidance of the use of the term νόμος a sensitivity to the
fact that for Christians the ‘law’ is something found in the scriptures, something,
in fact, identical with the gospel. There is something similar, it seems to me, in the
fact that what the West translated as regulae are really much more in the nature of
advice to questions asked by Christians keen to know how to live the gospel.
But to see St Basil as the author of what came to be called the Asceticon, and
also the source of the largest group of the ‘canons of the fathers’ (in contrast to the
‘canons of the synods’), draws attention to something else of importance. They
show Basil assuming responsibility both for the ordering of the Church—of
which the development of the body of the holy canons is an important aspect, and
one that took its first steps in the years when Basil was archbishop of Caesarea—
and for the shaping of the monastic tradition. These two concerns overlap: syn-
odical canons often deal with monks, but usually in an antagonistic way: monks
were a problem for bishops; they needed to be controlled. With Basil it looks
rather different; it was more a case of a spectrum of concern for the ordering
of the Church. At the core, in the Longer and Shorter Rules, we see Basil con-
cerned to foster the enthusiasm of those who desired to live out the gospel in a
strenuously committed way. In the canons, we see Basil, for the most part, con-
cerned with the problems caused by those whose way of life breaches the stand-
ards of the gospel—many of them are concerned with people whose sinful
20 The bulk of the canons of St Basil are drawn from Epp. 188, 199, 217, and 236 to Amphilochios.
behaviour has come within the terms of the Church’s penitential system, and
determine the epitimia, the ecclesiastical penalties (usually in terms of years of
excommunication) required for such offences.
There is, then, with St Basil a sense of continuity between the monastic order
and the Church: they are not opposed, as many interpretations of the rise of the
monastic movement suggest, which see the monks as continuing the rigorous
ideals of the Church of the martyrs, as the institutional Church itself, led by
bishops, more and more enters into compromises with the state. There is another
sign of this sense of continuity: Basil has no terminology for ‘monks’. Epistula 22
has a, doubtless editorial, heading, giving its subject as: ‘On the perfection of the
life of monks’ (Περὶ τελειότητος βίου μοναχῶν); but the letter itself never men-
tions monks, μοναχοί, it speaks simply of ‘Christians’, Χριστιανοί. This is true of
the rest of his ‘monastic’—or, perhaps better, ascetic—writings, including the
Longer and Shorter Rules: they are addressed to those he calls Christians, not to
‘monks’. This is partly owing to the fact that Basil’s works are so early: termin
ology for monks had not yet developed. And though it is clear that Basil is not
simply addressing all Christians—for one thing, he is clearly addressing those
who have adopted the single life; he does not envisage among the Christians he is
addressing men and women, married with families—nonetheless, he has no sep
arate ideal to put before his ascetics: the Christian life is, for all, even the most
rigorous ascetic, simply a living out of the commitments entered into at baptism.
This lack of a sense of a clearly defined ‘monastic’ structure, different from that
of ordinary Christians, is, I think, manifest in other ways. For example: the struc-
ture of the community itself. Basil certainly envisages a community; he is an
advocate of cœnobitic asceticism, based on the common life, in Greek, κοινὸς
βίος. But there is little evidence of the kind of clearly defined, and often rather
authoritarian, structures that are frequently found in cœnobitic monasticism (not
least in the roughly contemporary cœnobitic monasticism of Pachomios in
Egypt). There is no evidence of an abbot, from whom all authority stems. Rather
Basil refers to ‘those who preside’, who seem to be a group, of both men and
women, who are more experienced and thus able to help those seeking to join the
community, or in the early stages of their ascetic life. It is striking, too, that Basil
envisages a community of men and women—the two tagmata, as he calls them.
He is aware of the potential problems, but seeks to deal with it by removing occa-
sions of temptation: individual encounters are not allowed, but there are occa-
sions when men may learn from women, and women from men (Longer Rule
33). In the question-and-answer on authority and obedience, it is a question of
obedience to the community as a whole—undertaking a task, not because one
fancies it, but because it is needed, balanced by the fact that someone who is good
at something should not abandon it, if it is something the community needs; such
decisions seem to be left to the community as a whole, not consigned to an indi-
vidual (Longer Rule 41). One of the shorter responses concerns the spirit of
humility with which we should accept a service from one’s brother. The brief
response runs thus: “As a slave from his Lord, such as the apostle Peter showed
when the Lord served him. From this we also learn the danger of those who do
not welcome this service” (Shorter rule 161). That last sentence is very interest-
ing: members of the community need to be able to receive, and not just to give.
This is perhaps even more telling than Basil’s memorably tart response to those
who exalt the solitary life: “Whose feet then will you wash?” (Longer Rule 7).
What is even more striking about that response on the solitary life is the whole
tenor of Basil’s words here. Running through that response are echoes of the
apostle Paul’s language about the Church as a body with many members, all of
which contribute one to another. It is against that background that Basil draws
out his objections to the solitary life. Love ‘seeks not its own’; but if you are on
your own, it is difficult to flesh that out. We need other people to draw out atten-
tion to our failings; we are not good at noticing them ourselves. What about love
of our neighbour—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked? How do we test our
humility? But the imagery of the body of Christ comes into its own as Basil makes
clear that the Church is the place of the charisms of God, the place where the gifts
of the Spirit are received. No one person receives all the gifts of the Spirit, but we
all can benefit from them. This sense of the Church or the monastic community
as the place where the gifts of the Spirit are poured out—apostolic in that striking
sense of the word—is enormously important for St Basil: important both for his
sense of the Church and his understanding of the monastic community. As Spirit-
filled, and dispensing the gifts of the Spirit, the community of ascetics perhaps
finds its fulfilment most naturally—not in the desert nor in rural retreat—but in
the city, where such a community can minister to the needs of humanity. Basil
certainly envisaged his community of ascetics as including those with the gift of
healing, and not just some remarkable charismatic gift, but those who had been
trained in medicine and the ways of healing.
We seem to have come a long way from where we started, in Epistula 2, with
Basil extolling the virtues of ἐρημία and ἡσυχία, solitude and tranquillity, which
he had found in the peace and beauty of his rural retreat in Annisa, on the banks
of the Iris, in Pontos. I do not, however, think this is a chronological journey:
from his youthful enthusiasm as he sought a life of solitude to his mature appre-
ciation, as a bishop, of the Spirit-filled life in common. Rather, I would see it as a
recognition of the two poles of St Basil’s thought: the pole that sees the desert as
an ideal, and the other pole that realizes the richness of a life in community, in the
city. I do not think Basil denies either pole; it is rather the case that if we are to
serve others—within and beyond the community—there will be needed in each
of us the kind of inner quiet that he extolled in his letter to Gregory; while, on the
other hand, the kind of independence of the cares of the world, distracting us
from God, that he also extolled in that letter, is grounded in a selflessness, that
comes about as our sharp edges, as it were, are smoothed away by the demands of
living in community with others. What remains constant is his conviction that
none of this is achieved simply by asceticism. Where in the second letter he had
spoken of the necessity of receiving in one’s heart “impressions brought about by
divine instruction,” for which the ‘greatest path’ is “meditation on the divinely-
inspired Scriptures,”21 in his Longer and Shorter Rules he speaks of the gifts of the
Spirit that the community as a whole, the Church, receives.
The importance of the Holy Spirit for Saint Basil hardly needs mentioning; one
of his greatest works was his treatise De Spiritu sancto, written in the last decade
of his life. Too much scholarly attention has been paid to his refusal publicly to
use the term homoousios of the Spirit, and too little to the manifold ways in which
the Holy Spirit informs his theology. To pursue that very far here would to be
digress completely from the subject of this paper. What I want to do is point out
how his approach to the doctrine of the Spirit is closely linked with his under-
standing of the spiritual life, and therefore of the monastic life.
There is a famous passage in De Spiritu sancto in which he talks about what is
meant by coming to know the Spirit, or more precisely coming to be assimilated
to the Spirit. He says (I abbreviate occasionally):
The soul’s assimilation to the Spirit is not a matter of spatial approach . . . but is

separation from the passions, which, through love of the body, gain entry to the
soul and estrange it from closeness to God. Purified, therefore, from ugliness
that has accrued through vice, and returning to its natural beauty, and as it were
through purity being restored to the ancient form after the royal image: this is
the sole means of drawing close to the Paraclete. He, like the sun beheld by a
pure eye, shows to you, in himself, the image of the invisible. In the blessed
vision of the image, you see the ineffable beauty of the archetype. Through Him,
hearts are raised up, the infirm are led by the hand, those making progress find
perfection. This One, shining in those who are purified from every stain, ren-
ders them spiritual by communion with Him. And just as bodies made radiant
and diaphanous, when the ray falls on them, themselves become brilliant, and
shine with a radiance other than their own, so the Spirit-bearing souls, illu-
mined by the Spirit, are themselves rendered spiritual and pass on grace to
others. Thence come: foreknowledge of future things, understanding of myster-
ies, comprehension of hidden things, distribution of charisms, a heavenly way of
life, dancing with the angels, unending joy, dwelling in God, assimilation to
God, and the pinnacle of our longings—to become God.22
21 Basil, Ep. 2.3. See n. 16 above.

22 Basil, De Spir. sanct. 9.23 (sc 17bis.326–8): Οἰκείωσις δὲ Πνεύματος πρὸς ψυχὴν οὐχ ὁ διὰ τόπου
προσεγγισμὸς . . . ἀλλ’ ὁ χωρισμὸς τῶν παθῶν ἅπερ ἀπὸ τῆς πρὸς τὴν σάρκα φιλίας ὕστερον ἐπιγινόμενα
τῇ ψυχῇ, τῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ οἰκειότητος ἠλλοτρίωσε. Καθαρθέντα δὴ οὖν ἀπὸ τοῦ αἴσχους ὃ ἀνεμάξατο
διὰ τῆς κακίας, καὶ πρὸς τὸ ἐκ φύσεως κάλλος ἐπανελθόντα, καὶ οἷον εἰκόνι βασιλικῇ τὴν ἀρχαίαν μορφὴν
διὰ καθαρότητος ἀποδόντα, οὕτως ἐστὶ μόνως προσεγγίσαι τῷ Παρακλήτῳ. Ὁ δε, ὥσπερ ἥλιος,
Let us focus on a few points. First, separation from the passions—where Basil
begins with his characterization of the contemplative life in Epistula 2—is tanta-
mount to assimilation to the Spirit. But this means, too, restoration to the ‘ancient
form’, the ‘royal image’, our state in accordance with the image of God (κατ’ εἰκόνα
τοῦ Θεοῦ) for which God intended us. But the thrust of the passage is not to look
back, nostalgically, to paradise, but to look forward: to the future transfiguration
in the Spirit. Note, too, the way in which Basil emphasizes that assimilation to the
Spirit means that we become sources of illumination for others. The passage ends
with a list of eschatological blessings: the fulfilment of prophecy, entry into the
mystery of God, showering with the gifts of the Spirit, dancing with the angels,
and immersion in God: becoming God, deification, θέωσις, to use the word first
used frequently (and maybe coined) by his friend, St Gregory the Theologian.
The eschatological tenor is very striking, but there are also, it seems to me,
liturgical echoes, especially ‘the raising up of hearts’, καρδιῶν ἀνάβασις, which
recalls the sursum corda (Ἄνω τὰς καρδίας) of the divine liturgy. Together, they
suggest what I would like to call an ‘epikletic’ understanding of the Christian life,
and of the monastic life: both are conceived as lives lived through invocation,
epiklesis, of the Holy Spirit. I need hardly tell you that in the Liturgy of St Basil,
the epiklesis of the Holy Spirit is the culmination of the anamnesis, the recalling
and representation of the mystery of Christ. In the Liturgy of St Basil (in this no
different from the other regularly used liturgy in the Orthodox Church, that
ascribed to St John Chrysostom), the Holy Spirit is invoked to come upon—not
just, or even first, the bread and the wine—but also ἐφ’ ἡμᾶς, upon us, and for this
purpose: “that we all, partaking in the one bread and the cup, may be united one
with another in the communion of the one Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is invoked
to come upon us and the gifts of bread and wine, and make us and them the body
and blood of Christ, “poured out for the life and salvation of the world.”
It takes place for others: the key point that underlies Basil’s conviction of the
perfection of the cœnobitic life. But that cœnobitic life needs to have at its heart
the silence in which the Word and Spirit of God can come. Silence—in this case
σιωπή, rather than ἡσυχία, tranquillity—has an important role in the argument of
the treatise De Spiritu sancto. You will recall that St Basil invokes a distinction
between the public proclamation, κήρυγμα, and the teaching, the δόγμα, of mys-
teries preserved in silence. He gives the obscurity of the scriptures as an example
κεκαθαρμένον ὄμμα παραλαβών, δείξει σοι ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ ἀοράτου. Ἐν δὲ τῷ μακαρίῳ τῆς
εἰκόνος θεάματι τὸ ἄῤῥητον ὄψει τοῦ ἀρχετύπου κάλλος. Διὰ τοῦτο, καρδιῶν ἀνάβασις, χειραγωγία τῶν
ἀσθενούντων, τῶν προκοπτόντων τελείωσις. Τοῦτο τοῖς ἀπὸ πάσης κηλῖδος κεκαθαρμένοις ἐλλάμπον,
τῇ πρὸς ἑαυτὸ κοινωνίᾳ πνευματικοὺς ἀποδείκνυσι. Καὶ ὥσπερ τὰ λαμπρὰ καὶ διαφανῆ τῶν σωμάτων,
ἀκτῖνος αὐτοῖς ἐμπεσούσης, αὐτά τε γίνεται περιλαμπῆ, καὶ ἑτέραν αὐγὴν ἀφ’ ἑαυτῶν ἀποστίλβει· οὕτως
αἱ πνευματοφόροι ψυχαὶ ἐλλαμφθεῖσαι παρὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος, αὐταί τε ἀποτελοῦνται πνευματικαὶ καὶ εἰς
ἑτέρους τὴν χάριν ἐξαποστέλλουσιν. Ἐντεῦθεν, μελλόντων πρόγνωσις, μυστηρίων σύνεσις, κεκρυμμένων
κατάληψις, χαρισμάτων διανομαί, τὸ οὐράνιον πολίτευμα, ἡ μετὰ ἀγγέλων χορεία, ἡ ἀτελεύτητος
εὐφροσύνη, ἡ ἐν Θεῷ διαμονή, ἡ πρὸς Θεὸν ὁμοίωσις, τὸ ἀκρότατον τῶν ὀρεκτῶν, θεὸν γενέσθαι.
of a ‘form of silence’, but most of his examples are liturgical: prayer facing East
and standing upright, the epiklesis itself, and other liturgical practices. But the
way he introduces these liturgical actions, or gestures, that speak of mysterious
dogmas is worth noting:
For this reason we all look towards the East in our prayers, though there are few
who know that it is because we are in search of our ancient fatherland, Paradise,
which God planted towards the East. We fulfil our prayers standing upright on
the first day of the week, but not all know the reason for this.23
The liturgical actions that we perform are not expressive gestures that we entirely
understand, they are traditional gestures, accepted by us as we become part of the
Christian community. They are essentially a matter of community; as individual
gestures we do not necessarily, and perhaps never will fully, understand them.
Also: they take up one aspect of what I have called ‘epikletic’, the sense of invoking
the Spirit, while we stand on the threshold of eternity. St Basil continues, in the
passage just quoted, to unfold the meaning of these liturgical acts: praying facing
East, and praying standing (on Sundays and during the Paschal season), and this
unfolding is full of eschatological echoes: we are looking towards τὴν ἄπαυστον
ἡμέραν, τὴν ἀνέσπερον, τὴν ἀδιαδόχον, τὸν ἄληκτον ἐκεῖνον καὶ ἀγήρω αἰῶνα—“the
day without end, knowing neither evening nor tomorrow, that imperishable age
that will never grow old”; “The whole of Pentecost recalls the resurrection that
awaits us in eternity.”
‘Between the desert and the city’: St Basil’s quest was literally that, inspired
both by the solitude of the desert and the needs of the city, with the result that, in
his reflection on the monastic, or ascetic, life, as I have already suggested, we gain
a much better sense of the variety of ways in which the call of what was to be
called the monastic life could be pursued. But whatever way one follows, for Basil
we cannot forget the different ways others follow, for they all complement one
another within the Spirit-filled and Spirit-bearing body of Christ, which is the
Church. But my final reflections, venturing beyond the actual ascetic texts Basil
has bequeathed to us, suggest that it is in the divine liturgy, to the rites of which
Basil contributed so much, that we find how all these strands are woven together
in an understanding of the Church as embracing a multitude of different people,
who together stand imploring the coming of the Spirit and the fulfilment of God’s
promises.
23 Basil, De Spir. sanct., 66 (sc 17bis.484): Τούτου χάριν πάντες μὲν ὁρῶμεν κατ’ ἀνατολὰς ἐπὶ τῶν
προσευχῶν· ὀλίγοι δὲ ἴσμεν ὅτι τὴν ἀρχαίαν ἐπιζητοῦμεν πατρίδα, τὸν παράδεισον, ὃν ἐφύτευσεν ὁ Θεὸς
ἐν Ἐδὲμ κατ’ ἀνατολάς. Ὀρθοὶ μὲν πληροῦμεν τὰς εὐχὰς ἐν τῇ μιᾷ τοῦ σαββάτου· τὸν δὲ λόγον οὐ πάντες
οἴδαμεν.
5
St Gregory the Theologian and
St Maximus the Confessor
The Shaping of Tradition
One of St Maximus the Confessor’s most important works is his Liber ambiguo-
rum, as it is usually referred to in the title given it by its first, and for the most part
only, translator, the ninth-century John Scotus Eriugena—his Book of Difficulties
(for the Greek behind Eriugena’s ambiguum is aporia, perplexity or difficulty).
It is, in fact, as is generally known, not a single work, but consists of two parts:
Ambigua (Amb.) 6‒71 are a discussion of a string of difficult passages from the
writings of St Gregory of Nazianzus that had been raised with Maximus by John,
archbishop of Cyzicus, to whom Maximus’ replies are addressed. Polycarp
Sherwood dates these to 628–630, during Maximus’ earlier African sojourn;
Sherwood’s work on these ‘Earlier Ambigua’, as he calls them, is indispensable
(it is, incidentally, only these earlier Ambigua that Eriugena translated). Ambigua
1–5 are addressed to a certain Thomas, described as ‘the sanctified servant of
God, spiritual father and teacher’: the first four discuss difficult passages in
Gregory, like the earlier Ambigua, the last a difficult passage in Denys the
Areopagite’s fourth letter (the letter that contains the famous phrase about Christ’s
‘divine-human energy’; Maximus’ discussion in this difficulty includes a long
analysis of the phrase). Sherwood dates these slightly later, to 634 or shortly after,
just as the Monothelete controversy (at this stage I suppose ‘monenergic’ would
be better) was getting under way. How and when these two parts were put
together to form the Book of Difficulties is the subject of much controversy: it does
not look as if there will be any definitive answer until we have a proper critical
edition of all Maximus’ works.
But the Book of Difficulties is one of the most important of Maximus’ works.
Some of the discussions of difficult passages are very extensive and constitute vir-
tual treatises in their own right: Ambiguum 7 is a massive refutation of Origenism;
according to Sherwood, ‘it is here that one finds, perhaps alone in all Greek
patristic literature, a refutation of Origenist error with a full understanding of the
master’;1 Ambiguum 10 is even longer (fifty columns of Greek in the Migne
1 Polycarp Sherwood OSB, An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, Studia
Anselmiana 30 (Centro Studi San’Anselmo, 1952), 32.
St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor 53
edition) and is a sustained meditation on the Transfiguration of our Lord. For

the most part, the Ambigua have been used as a quarry for the teaching of the
Confessor, and it is certainly true that most of the central topics of Maximus’
theology—his doctrine of deification, his doctrine of double creation, the import
ance for him of the ordered triad generation–change–rest, much of the detail of his
anthropology—are discussed in the course of his responses to these ‘difficulties’.
Much less has been done on a rather different question raised by these works,
and that is the light they shed on the relationship between St Gregory the
Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor. All the difficulties, save one, are raised
by passages in the works of Gregory Nazianzen. This suggests to me that Maximus’
relationship to Gregory is, in some respects, ambiguous (to use the word with its
usual meaning) or double-edged. The Book of Difficulties is often cited as evidence
for the influence of Cappadocian thought on Maximus the Confessor, but it is
equally, and perhaps more obviously, evidence for the difficulties Maximus had
with his Cappadocian heritage, and in particular with the heritage of St Gregory
Nazianzen. As we look at the relationship between these two theologians, as evi-
denced in this collection of difficulties, what we are seeing is something about the
nature of tradition or, perhaps more exactly, something about the shaping of trad
ition, something about how Gregory is received by Maximus as a part of trad
ition, indeed a mouthpiece of tradition. To use language that Professor Wiles has
made familiar, we are looking at the making of doctrine, and a making which is
also a remaking.
To begin with, one might ask: why Gregory? And this can be answered at two
levels. First, what kind of evidence is there for discussion of Gregory that might
lead to someone sending Maximus a collection of ‘difficulties’ to clear up? There
is, in truth, not a lot of evidence, but there is one very valuable piece of evidence
in the letters of Varsanuphios and John—the Great Old Man and the Other Old
Man of the Gaza desert in the first half of the sixth century. One of the queries
addressed to Varsanuphios speaks about those who believe in pre-existence as
appealing to the authority of Gregory the Theologian on this matter. Varsanuphios’
reply is not, perhaps, very helpful: he says that such speculative matters are
beyond him, that all God requires is ‘sanctification, purification, silence and
humility’, that the mysteries of God are even beyond the Fathers themselves, that
consequently their works contain both true ideas and speculations that are not
inspired, and that we should ‘walk in the steps of our father, Poemen, and his
disciples’ and weep and grieve for our sins.2 But we have here evidence that
Gregory was being used, a century earlier than Maximus, as an authority by
Origenist monks for their ideas. And that is not at all surprising. As a young man,
2 Barsanuphe and Jean de Gaza, Correspondance, trans. L. Regnault et al. (Solesmes, 1972), 395–8
(Letter 604). Cyril of Scythopolis records a similar appeal to Gregory Nazianzen: see his Life of
Cyriacus, cited in Norris, 1991: 103.
Gregory with his friend St Basil the Great had compiled a book of extracts from
Origen, which they called the Philokalia; and Gregory himself had called Origen
‘the whet-stone of us all’.3 The Book of Difficulties is evidence that the problems
caused by Origenist recourse to the authority of Gregory were continuing to exer-
cise monastic minds in the seventh century.
That is one level: Gregory was discussed because Origenist monks sought to
make capital out of him. But there is another level. According to Gregory the
Presbyter, the author of a life of Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory was ‘the only one to
be called theologian after the evangelist John’.4 Gregory the Presbyter was writing
in the sixth or seventh century: either a little before Maximus or contemporary
with him. The presbyter’s words suggest that by his time Gregory Nazianzen had
acquired a kind of pre-eminent authority among the Greek Fathers: he was the
theologian, to be ranked with the evangelist John, also the theologian. So in
authority he seemed to stand alongside the scriptural writers themselves (in the
writings of Denys the Areopagite, at the beginning of the sixth century, theologos
meant exclusively a scriptural author). But the real evidence for this is to be found
in Maximus himself. For Maximus, what Gregory says is unquestionable, virtu-
ally infallible. The twenty-first Difficulty is caused by the fact that in the Second
Theological Oration Gregory refers to John the Evangelist as the ‘forerunner’. It
does not occur to Maximus that Gregory, in the midst of his flights of rhetoric,
might have forgotten for a moment to whom he was referring and thus confused
the two Johns. No, what Gregory has said must stand, and Maximus is obliged to
develop a complex explanation of how John the Evangelist, too, can be called ‘the
forerunner of the Word, the great voice of the Truth’ (though I think it is worth
noting in passing that the ingenuity demanded of Maximus here is not unre-
warded: as he tries to show how the Evangelist, too, can be called ‘the forerunner’
he produces an understanding of the gospel as having a spiritual interpretation
that would delight the heart of Cardinal de Lubac, who finds something similar
among the Latins:5 that just as the law is a preparation for the Incarnation and the
proclamation of the Gospel at the First Coming, so the Gospel is a preparation for
those who are led through it to Christ, the Word in spirit, and are gathered up in
the world to come according to his Second Coming, which leads into an elaborate
analysis of the stoicheiosis—both preparation and composition—of the spiritual
cosmos). Or again, the sixth Difficulty is concerned with what the distinction can
possibly be between kataspasthai and katechesthai—to pull down and to hold
down—which Gregory seems to use synonymously in his sermon on the love of
the poor. We would be tempted, I think, to say that they simply are synonyms,
3 So Suidas, Lexicon, s.v. ‘Origines’, ed. A. Adler (Leipzig, 1928–38), III, 619.
4 Cited in G. W. H. Lampe, ed., A Patristic Greek Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1963–8), s.v.
‘theologos’.
5 See his Exégèse mediéval, in Théologie, Études Publiées sous la Direction de la Faculté de
Théologie S. J. de Lyon–Fourvière, 41–2, 59 (Paris, 1959–64).
that Gregory’s rhetoric demanded a certain expansiveness here. But not Maximus:
there must be a difference. Gregory would not have wasted a word by using it to
say something he had said already.
For Maximus Gregory is the theologian, the ‘great and wonderful teacher’. Just
as for Denys, the writings of the ‘theologians’—the Holy Scriptures—are to be
understood within a tradition of interpretation, or—earlier still—for Clement of
Alexandria, the utterances of the Teacher, the Word himself, are captured and laid
bare by the tissue of patient explanation he explores in his Stromateis, so for
Maximus the writings of Gregory are a source of truth, handed down by trad
ition, and interpreted by repeated meditation within that tradition. The Book of
Difficulties is not just evidence for Maximus’ attempts to come to terms with an
authority become traditional, they also bear witness to a tradition of interpret
ation. Eight times (seven times in the earlier, once in the later Ambigua) Maximus
appeals to the authority of a certain ‘old man’ (geron), a ‘blessed old man’, or ‘the
frequently mentioned great and wise old man’. He is anonymous, his authority is
not just the authority of one who was Maximus’ mentor, but the anonymous
authority of tradition. It is for that reason, I suspect, that he is deliberately
anonymous, for it certainly seems that Maximus is referring to an identifiable
individual (that is, I think, implied by the last phrase quoted above: someone ‘fre-
quently mentioned’) and Polycarp Sherwood may well be right in guessing that it
refers to Sophronius, whom Maximus had known in Africa and who became
Patriarch of Jerusalem in 634 and led the early resistance to the Monothelete
heresy.6 Whoever he was, this ‘old man’ is a living witness to tradition as Maximus
has received it and, to judge from the tenor of his remarks, one who naturally
expressed his understanding of tradition in language redolent of the Areopagite.
Mention of the Areopagite reminds one of Denys’ own relationship to his revered
mentor Hierotheos, a relationship which seems to have combined something of
both Maximus’ relationship to his geron and his relationship to Gregory the
Theologian. Apart from appearing in the Difficulties, this ‘old man’ appears in
Maximus’ book on the Ascetic Life and in his Mystagogia.
What did Maximus make of Gregory as he discussed the difficulties raised by
his writings? Maximus’ responses vary considerably. As we have seen, some are
virtual treatises, while others are no more than scholia. So we find Maximus
explaining what is meant by ‘critical sweat’, a medical term used metaphorically
by Gregory in one of his sermons (Amb. 43); in another place he gives a definition
of grammatical terms—symbasa and parasymbasa—that Gregory had used with-
out explanation (Amb. 69); Ambiguum 70 deals with a real textual obscurity in
Gregory’s panegyric on Basil, which Maximus attempts to solve by putting the
phrase in the context of the argument of the sermon. A whole series of difficulties
6 Polycarp Sherwood OSB, The Earlier Ambigua of St. Maximus the Confessor, Studia Anselmiana
36 (Centro Studi San’Anselmo, 1955), 9.
supplement the allegorical explanations of people associated with the Passion of

Christ that Gregory had already given in his second Easter Sermon (Amb. 52–9).
In these responses, Maximus is simply helping the reader to understand Gregory
more intelligently. In terms of the distinction George Steiner has made between
the different kinds of difficulty encountered when reading,7 Maximus is here
dealing with ‘contingent’ difficulties in Gregory’s sermons,
Other difficulties we might call— to continue with Steiner’s taxonomy—
‘tactical’ difficulties. What I mean by this (developing rather freely Steiner’s own
explanation of his taxonomy) is difficulties caused by the shift in interpretative
framework between Gregory’s time and Maximus’. The doctrinal issues of
Gregory’s day were largely concerned with trinitarian and christological prob-
lems: in these contexts Gregory’s language is careful. In Maximus’ day, the doctri-
nal issues were much more provoked by the debate caused by Evagrianism (the
Monothelete controversy developed after Maximus had written his Difficulties);
read in that context, some of Gregory’s language seemed somewhat careless. It is
sometimes careless because he uses an expression—for instance moira theou, part
of God—that Evagrians could pick on as support for ideas regarded as heretical
by the orthodox. In this case (discussed in Amb. 7) the idea that we are ‘part of
God’ was being used to support the notion of the pre-existence of the human
soul; Maximus responds by developing his notion of God’s logoi in creation (an
idea that would not have been foreign to Evagrius, but which is developed by
Maximus in a way that owes a lot more to Denys). But Gregory’s language some-
times seems careless to Maximus (i.e. constitutes a difficulty) because it ignores
what for Maximus is an accepted pattern of thinking (often itself due to Evagrius).
An example of this is the difficulty dealt with in Ambiguum 10. Here Maximus
has to deal with a passage in Gregory’s panegyric on St Athanasius where he
speaks of those who ascend to kinship with God and are assimilated to the most
pure light through ‘reason and contemplation’. Here the problem is that Gregory
has said nothing about praktike, the active struggle against temptation that in the
Evagrian scheme is the absolute bedrock of monastic or Christian progress. Here
Maximus is an Evagrian, and Gregory must be interpreted as an Evagrian. It is
not difficult: Gregory has not denied the place of praktike, he has simply concen-
trated on the role of contemplation, and he has spoken of passing beyond ‘cloud’,
which Maximus is able to interpret as alluding to the stage of praktike. Maximus’
difficulty with Gregory here produces a profound discussion of the Christian life
that we are grateful to have for its own sake, however little it seems to be needed
for making Gregory’s words acceptable. Here, as often, the point is that Gregory’s
words—or thought—are not systematic, whereas Maximus’ thoughts, for all their
episodic expression, have in the background a pretty clearly worked-out system.
7 George Steiner, ‘On Difficulty’, On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford University Press,
1978), 18–47.
What this suggests to me is that an underlying difficulty, behind all the dif-
ficulties, is what Steiner calls ‘modal’ difficulty. What Steiner means by that is
the difficulty we encounter in reading a poem (say), when, even after we have
done all our homework, looked up all the unfamiliar words and worked out all
the allusions and metaphors, we still find that the poem refuses to ‘speak’ to us.
We are not looking for what the poem has to say, we are not responsive to its
meaning. There is a difference of ‘register’. I think this ‘modal difficulty’ is
often there as Maximus seeks to respond to difficulties raised by Gregory. For
he is reading Gregory, whereas Gregory wrote his sermons to be delivered, to
be listened to.
Gregory was a rhetor by training, one of the most accomplished amongst the
Fathers of the Church: one of his sermons would be an oratorical performance,
particularly brilliant displays of rhetorical mastery would be applauded by his
congregation. The aim of the rhetor was, by a display of verbal wizardry, to per-
suade, to induce a sense of achieved insight. A story told by Jerome, who met and
was deeply impressed by Gregory in Constantinople, is worth relating here. He
had asked Gregory about the meaning of a particularly obscure expression in
St Luke’s Gospel (6:1, the expression ‘on the “second-first” sabbath’, perhaps the first
sabbath but one: that is the current best guess). Gregory had been unable to come
up with a satisfactory explanation, and had smilingly advised Jerome to come to
church and hear him preaching about it: there, amid the wild applause of the con-
gregation, he would understand, or at least imagine he understood, its meaning
(Ep. 52.8).8 Gregory has sometimes been taken to task over this story, the German
scholar Grützmacher, for instance, accusing him of ‘gelehrte Charlatanerie’. But
that is to take Gregory too seriously, and to miss his tone of voice: eleganter lusit
are Jerome’s words. Dr Kelly is nearer the mark when he says, ‘the great orator was
sufficiently human to be vain about his powers to move an audience, but also
realistic enough to appreciate the worthlessness of the persuasion so induced’.9
But is the persuasion thus induced really so worthless? Doubtless so, if one is con-
cerned with a philological point like the meaning of an odd word. But Gregory’s
rhetorical persuasion always had a much higher purpose: in the Theological
Orations he was trying to lift the mind and heart of his congregation to an appre-
hension of the coequal and coeternal Trinity of the Nicene faith. The unity of
God, the equality of the persons—the apprehension of these is not a matter of
logic alone, but a vehicle for praise and wonder. Denys the Areopagite used the
verb ‘to hymn’, ‘to celebrate’, to describe what we are doing when we devise appro-
priate theological language. It is a terminology Maximus gratefully adopts; and it
is, it seems to me, something Maximus makes explicit at one point in the course
of the tenth Difficulty.
8 Discussed in J. N. D Kelly, Jerome (Duckworth, 1975), 70. 9 Kelly, Jerome, 70.
When the saints are moved by visions of things as they are, it is not primarily to
behold and know them as they appear to us, but in order to celebrate [Denys’
word: hymnēsosi] God who is and manifests himself in many ways through all
things and in all things and to gather together for themselves a great capacity for
wonder and a reason for giving glory. (Amb. 10: 1113d‒1116a)
Being caught up in wonder is the goal rather than just knowing things.
Nevertheless, Maximus is interested in knowing things, in understanding: the
influence of Aristotle is found not just in the dry analytical quality, on occasions,
of his prose (which often draws on Aristotle, through the medium of his
Neoplatonic commentators), but in Maximus’ tireless patience as he seeks to
understand. It is this, I think, that makes Maximus’ difficulty with Gregory at root
what I have called ‘modal’ difficulty. For Maximus, to use words and concepts to
understand is not a matter of rhetorical persuasion but of philosophical under-
standing. Bur this does not mean, as it might with us, that Maximus simply finds
that Gregory leaves him cold—offering him a mode of understanding that is not
his. It means rather that if Maximus is to find his mode of understanding in
Gregory, he has to work for it. Gregory’s rhetorical flights have to be nailed down.
What I am trying to do by drawing out the different forms of difficulty that
Maximus finds with Gregory is to suggest that there is no easy answer to the ques-
tion of the nature of Gregory’s influence on Maximus. Gregory speaks to Maximus
over a gulf that can be indicated in various ways: the gulf between a learned lay
culture and a monastic culture (that Maximus may have spanned in his own life,
if the Greek life is right in suggesting that he had risen high in the imperial civil
service before becoming a monk), the gulf separating the fourth from the seventh
century, the gulf separating the rhetor from the philosopher. Gregory’s voice
crosses this gulf not least because it is a voice that has been conceded authority,
which means, in part, that it is a voice that had shaped the culture of the hearer,
the culture of Maximus and his monastic contemporaries.
But can we say anything to answer what may once have seemed a simple
enough question: how Cappadocian is Maximus, how much does he owe to the
Cappadocians? It is usually said that the Evagrian or the Dionysian heritage is
much more important to Maximus than the Cappadocian, and that seems to me
to be broadly true. It is easy to give an indication of how this manifests itself in
the Book of Difficulties. All the difficulties but one are concerned with passages
from Gregory’s works: and in all these cases where the explanation advances
beyond the merely ‘contingent’, what Maximus almost invariably does is to inter-
pret Gregory in Evagrian or Dionysian categories or language. In the one diffi-
culty drawn from the Corpus Areopagiticum (Amb. 5), Maximus’ explanation
seems to me to be nothing more than a Dionysian paraphrase. The Dionysian
language is, as it were, Maximus’ own language: Gregorian rhetoric is not.
There are, however, two areas where we might press this question somewhat
harder, and these areas are Christology and Trinitarian theology. In both these
areas the Cappadocian Fathers—and St Gregory Nazianzen in particular—shaped
decisively the dogmatic language of the Church.
The principal Difficulties to raise Christological issues are to be found, not in
the earlier Difficulties, but in the later ones: Difficulties 2–5 all raise Christological
issues, though the fifth is occasioned by a passage from Denys, not Gregory.10
What we have in these three difficulties raised by passages from Gregory is really
a paraphrase of Gregory’s condensed and oxymoronic language. At first sight it is
difficult to see anything other than useful paraphrase. But these passages are
meant to be difficulties, and Maximus’ responses are meant to clear up problems
raised by these passages. If we ask why they are difficult, it quickly becomes clear
that it is because they make statements that, while relatively unproblematic in the
categories of Gregory’s thought, are problematic within another Christological
tradition, that of Maximus. And that tradition is what Meyendorff has called
‘Cyrilline Chalcedonianism’ (what used to be dubbed ‘Neo-Chalcedonianism’).
Take Difficulty 2: the passage from Gregory that is causing difficulty is this:
And, in a word, what is exalted is to be ascribed to the Godhead, to that nature

which is superior to sufferings and the body, what is lowly is to be ascribed to
the composite that for your sake emptied himself and took flesh and—it is no
worse to say—became a man.
In Gregory’s Third Theological Oration this is his response to the Arian argument
that one who is God cannot be said to hunger, sleep, fear, and so Christ cannot be
God: it ushers in Gregory’s brilliant oxymoronic celebration of the Incarnate One
as a coincidence of opposites. What makes it a difficulty for Maximus and other
Cyrilline Chalcedonians is the way it suggests a separation between the divine
and human attributes of Christ, that might imply something like two subjects in
Christ (though I do not think that Gregory suggests that at all), and certainly
seems to keep suffering away from the Godhead. Maximus’ response is a para-
phrase of Gregory that emphasizes the unity of subject in Christ and, in particu-
lar, expressly justifies theopaschite language by using, and repeating, an expression
from Gregory’s Fourth Theological Oration—‘God passible’.11 In the fourth
Difficulty, Maximus is similarly concerned to justify theopaschite language:
‘therefore he was also truly a suffering God, and the very same was truly a
10 Amb. 41, though on a Christological passage from Gregory’s sermons, is really much wider
in scope.
11 That Maximus is consciously alluding to Gregory’s use of the term theos pathetos seems to be
clear, since the first time he uses it he quotes the whole phrase: ‘God passible to overcome sin’
(Orat. 30.1).
wonderworking man, because also there was a true hypostasis of the natures
according to an ineffable union’ (1045A). I would suggest then that Maximus is
not happy with Cappadocian Christological language and ‘corrects’ it with a the-
opaschite emphasis more typical of the Cyrilline tradition.
In the case of Trinitarian theology there are two difficulties I want to look at,
both of which discuss the same passage from Gregory’s sermons. The Difficulties
are no. 23, from the earlier set, and no. 1, from the later. Both are concerned with
the passage from the Third Theological Oration which runs thus: ‘Therefore, the
monad, having moved from the beginning towards the dyad, rests in the triad.’
The difficulty this poses for Maximus is the way Gregory seems to speak of move-
ment in God. Difficulty 23—the earlier one—starts off by proving that God can-
not be said to move. His conclusion is uncompromising: ‘If therefore what is
without cause is certainly without motion, then the divine is without motion, as
having no cause of being at all, but being rather the cause of all beings.’ Maximus
then discusses the way in which something that causes movement (or change)
might be said itself to be moved (or changed), even though in reality it is motion-
less (or changeless): for example, light makes it possible for eyes to see, it might be
said to move sight to vision, and might be spoken of as being moved, though
properly it occasions movement, rather than being moved itself. Maximus then
invokes Denys and his discussion of how God can be called desire (eros) and love
(agapē), and summarizes the Areopagite’s teaching in these terms: ‘as desire and
love the Divine is moved, as desired and loved the Divine moves towards itself
everything that is capable of desire and love.’ Maximus is now in a position to
interpret Gregory’s statement:
‘The monad, moved from the beginning towards the dyad, rests in the triad’: it is
moved in the mind that is receptive of this, whether it be angelic or human, and
through it and in it makes inquiries about it, and to speak more plainly, it teaches
the mind, to begin with, the thought about the monad, lest separation be intro-
duced into the first cause, and immediately leads it on to receive its divine and
ineffable fecundity, saying secretly and hiddenly to it that it must not think that
it is in any way barren, this good of reason and wisdom and sanctifying power,
of consubstantial and enhypostatic beings, lest the Divine be taken to be com-
posite of these, as of things accidental, and not believed to be these eternally. The
Godhead is therefore said to be moved as the source of the inquiry as to the way
it exists. (12660D)
For Maximus the movement spoken of by Gregory is really a movement in the

mind—whether angelic or human—that seeks to understand God; such a mind
passes from the thought of unity and rests in that of the triad. Difficulty 1 dis-
cusses this same passage, together with another similar passage from elsewhere in
Gregory’s work, in very similar terms. In this difficulty Maximus ventures further
in explaining the language of monad and triad:
There is therefore no explanation of the transcendent cause of beings, but rather

a setting out of pious thought concerning it, if it is said that the Godhead is
monad but not dyad, triad but not multitude, as being without beginning, bodi-
less and free from rivalry. For the monad is truly monad; for it is not the begin-
ning of beings alongside it, by expansion and contraction, so that it is naturally
poured out leading to multitude, but it is the enhypostatic reality of the consub-
stantial Triad. And the triad is truly triad, not made up of perishable number
(for it is not a composition of monads, so that it suffers division), but is the real
existence of a trihypostatic monad. For the triad is truly the monad, for it is so,
and the monad is truly the triad, for thus it exists. There is then one Godhead, in
monadic being and triadic existence. (1036BC)
Such analysis of the language of monad and triad is not characteristic of Gregory,
for whom the language of monad and triad is an occasionally used rhetorical
antithesis;12 it seems to me that it is suggested rather by some of Denys’ trinitar-
ian discussion.13 Maximus then goes on to make the same point as in Ambiguum
23, that movement in God means movement in the mind contemplating God.
There seem to be two points about Maximus’ engagement with the trinitarian
thought of Gregory. First, he reaches for Denys as he tries to understand it; and
second, his understanding of movement in God is really quite different from
Gregory’s. Gregory is clearly thinking of something within the divine being itself:
a kind of eternal movement, and if eternal then beyond any experience we might
have of movement.14 Maximus’ understanding is explicitly subjective: movement
in this context really refers to something going on in the mind of one who seeks
to understand the Trinity.
This discussion of the relationship between Gregory the Theologian and
Maximus the Confessor shows that even the formation of Orthodox tradition is
not an unproblematic matter. It would be difficult to find two such revered pillars
12 In the Orations, Gregory only seems to use monad and triad antithetically at 20.2 and 23.8 (the
two passages discussed by Maximus in Amb. 1) and 25.17. Such language occurs, too, in his carmina,
but his usual way of referring to the Trinity is to use triad alone.
13 See, in particular, Divine Names, 13.3. It seems to me very likely that Denys has taken the juxta-
position of monad and triad from the passages in Gregory cited above. But what was an occasional
theme in Gregory becomes something more settled in Denys, if we can rely on his few discussions of
the Trinity, and it is Denys’ settled use of the antithesis that Maximus reflects.
14 The next sentence after the one commented on by Maximus reads: ‘In a serene, non-temporal,
incorporeal way, the Father is parent of the “offspring” and the originator of the “emanation” . . .’
(Wickham’s translation in Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning). This is a comment on the phrase
about how the monad moving to triad must mean that there is some kind of ‘serene, non-temporal,
incorporeal’ movement in the Godhead itself.
of Orthodoxy as Gregory and Maximus. But if Gregory is to be seen as part of the

making of classical patristic doctrine, then what Maximus is doing in refining
what I suppose would be called the Byzantine theological tradition must be seen
as some kind of remaking of doctrine. For interpretation is a necessary part of
receiving tradition and understanding it: interpretation encounters difficulties
such as we have explored, and difficulties cannot be resolved simply by repeating
the deliverances of tradition. Maximus’ remaking of doctrine involves some
rethinking. Engagement with tradition is, however, more than a matter for the
intellect. In concentrating on Maximus’ Book of Difficulties it is intellectual diffi-
culties of one sort or another that we have mainly encountered. In Steiner’s tax-
onomy of difficulty there is one category not so far mentioned: that is what he
calls ‘ontological difficulty’. ‘Ontological’ difficulty is a difficulty in reading that
calls into question what it is to read at all (Steiner’s examples are the poems of
Mallarmé or Celan).15 This category is not perhaps particularly illuminating for
trying to understand Maximus’ reading of Gregory, but it might be relevant were
we to look at the way in which phrases and expressions of Gregory’s sermons have
fertilized the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church. For transposed into
that context they suggest a very different kind of reading, and it may be that it is
there—in the liturgical poetry of the Church—that Gregory the rhetor most truly
becomes St Gregory the Theologian.
15 It is interesting in this context to note that Henri-Irenée Marrou’s positive evaluation of
Augustine in his Retractatio published in 1949 also draws upon the example of Mallarmé. See Henri-
Irenée Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture, 4th edn. (E. de Boccard, 1958), 649: ‘saint
Augustine nous invite à retrouver dans l’Écriture une conception mallarméenne de la poésie’.
6
St Gregory the Theologian and
Byzantine Theology
In the Byzantine tradition, St Gregory of Nazianzus was “the Theologian”; in later

Byzantine tradition he appears together with St Basil of Caesarea and St John of
Constantinople as one of the “ecumenical teachers,” celebrated together on 30
January, each of whom has his epithet: St Basil the ‘Great’, St Gregory the
“Theologian,” and St John the “Golden-mouthed” (Chrysostom, Χρυσόστομος).
It seems clear that Gregory’s title is derived from the five orations, Orations 27–31,
dubbed by modern editors the “theological orations,” a designation that has
ancient support (though the list is not entirely stable: Oration 28 seems to have
been inserted in its present position, probably by the Theologian himself), the
group being understood to be περὶ θεολογίας, about “theology,” in the sense that
this word generally bears in the Greek fathers, namely the doctrine of God in
himself, that is, the Trinity.1 It was to these homilies that Fred Norris devoted his
detailed commentary, published as Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning.2
St Gregory’s title of “Theologian” therefore refers to him pre-eminently as an
exponent of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is found relatively early—in the Acts of
the Council of Chalcedon in 4513—and is well established by the sixth century;
the eighth-century Vita by Gregory the Presbyter identifies Gregory as “the
Theologian.”4 As a title it conferred authority: already in the sixth century,
Gregory’s words were cited as authoritative.5 Gregory was not alone in being
regarded as authoritative; he formed part of the witness of the fathers, who were
to be followed in matters of theology, the emergence of which we can trace in the
fifth century, especially in conjunction with the developing Christological contro-
versy that led to the councils of Ephesos and Chalcedon.6 But in the array of
1 See Paul Gallay’s introduction to his edition of Gregory’s Theological Orations: SC 250:7–10.
2 Frederick W. Norris, intro, commentary, and trans., and Lionel Wickham, trans., Faith Gives
Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations (Brill, 1991).
3 ACO 3:114.
4 Gregorius Presbyter, Gregorii Presbyteri vita sancti Gregorii Theologii, ed. Xavier Lequeux, CCSG
44 (Leuven, 2001), 119.
5 See Caroline Macé, ‘Gregory of Nazianzus as the Authoritative Voice of Orthodoxy in the Sixth
Century’. In Byzantine Orthodoxies: Papers from the Thirty-Sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine
Studies, University of Durham, 23‒25 March 2002, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday, 27‒34,
Publications for the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 12 (Ashgate, 2002).
6 For the development of patristic authority, manifest in the creation of florilegia, see Aloys
Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 2: From the Council of Chalcedon (451) to Gregory the
Great (590–604), trans. Pauline Allen and John Cawte (Mowbrays, 1987), 51–78.
fathers, he came to be regarded as of signal importance—an authority par excellence.7

Authorities need interpretation, and the extent to which this was true of Gregory
the Theologian is manifest in the fact that, in Maurice Geerard’s Clavis Patrum
Graecorum, Gregory is almost unique in having listed after his works collections
of scholia,8 some of these major works of Byzantine theology: the Ambigua of
St Maximos the Confessor,9 for example, and several of the Opuscula of Michael
Psellos10 (one could also include many of the Amphilochia of Photios, not listed
by Geerard).
There were various reasons Gregory needed such commentary. Some of his
sermons displayed his classical learning, not least in allusions to classical myth
ology, and by the sixth century these allusions had become sufficiently obscure
for it to be necessary to provide an explanatory commentary. The earliest and
most extensive of these is a commentary, falsely ascribed to the probably Christian
poet Nonnos of Panopolis—the fifth-century author of a kind of compendium of
Greek mythology called the Dionysiaca, as well as a paraphrase of the Fourth
Gospel, both in Greek hexameters—devoted to Gregory’s lengthy attack (in Or. 4
and 5) on Julian the Apostate and his edict forbidding Christians from teaching
classical literature, in the course of which Gregory displays his own extensive
command of classical mythology, and, more briefly (though they are shorter
homilies), to his homily on the Feast of Lights (Τὰ Φῶτα: Theophany or
Epiphany—Or. 39) and his funeral homily for St Basil (Or. 43).11
Much of the commentary Gregory needed, however, was due to the fact that by
the sixth century, at the latest, the theological climate had changed from the
fourth century in which Gregory had lived. The “thunder of dogmas,”12 to give
him one of his many names, sometimes seemed to be sounding with a discordant
note. The sixth century was a period of Christological controversy—leading to
the “Three Chapters” and the refinement of Christological orthodoxy attempted
by Justinian at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. Gregory’s Christology was
expressed in a terminology innocent of the clarifications of terminology intro-
duced by Chalcedon; his discussions needed commentary to bring them more
clearly into line with what became established terminology. Several of Maximos’
Ambigua ad Thomam, especially, are concerned with clarifying Gregory’s
7 For the notion of the authority of the fathers, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A
History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700)
(University of Chicago Press, 1974), ch. 1.
8 CPG, 2:3011–31 (on the Or.), 3042–51 (on the Carm.).
9 CPG, 2:3020, 3041. 10 CPG, 2:3026.
11 Jennifer Nimmo Smith, ed., Pseudo-Nonniani in IV Orationes Gregorii Nazianzeni Commentarii,
CCSG, 27 (Brepols, 1992); and further discussion in Jennifer Nimmo Smith, trans., A Christian’s
Guide to Greek Culture. The Pseudo-Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of
Nazianzus, with intro. and commentary, Translated Texts for Historians 37 (Liverpool University
Press, 2001).
12 βροντὴ των δογμάτων: see Macé, ‘Authoritative Voice’, 34.
St Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology 65
utterances on Christology and Trinitarian theology. Alongside the Christological

controversy, and perhaps entangled with it in some way, was the continued attrac-
tion of Origen, especially in monastic circles. It was in connection with Origenism
that we first find appeals to Gregory’s authority. Gregory himself had been an
enthusiast for Origen, and in the early 360s had drawn up, with his friend Basil of
Caesarea, an anthology of passages from Origen, on subjects such as scriptural
interpretation and providence and human self- determination, called the
Philokalia. Such enthusiasm for Origen was not unusual in the fourth century, but
whereas many enthusiasts, such as Basil himself and Jerome, who, as a young
man, had visited Gregory in Constantinople, turned against Origen, or at least
expressed critical caution, Gregory himself never seems to have publicly dis-
tanced himself from Origen. He could be and was cited by the more intellectually
daring monks in support of their fondness for speculative theology—especially
about the original state of the created order and its final destiny: the issues on
which Origen had been most controversial. For instance, in one of the letters
addressed to the “Great Old Man,” Barsanouphios, we read of monks who appeal
to the authority of St Gregory over the question of the pre- existence of
human souls:
Father, those who have these opinions on preexistence do not hesitate to say that
St. Gregory the Theologian has himself held forth on preexistence in the hom
ilies which he preached on the Feast of the Lord’s Nativity and the Day of
Pascha.13 They interpret certain expressions that conform to their views and
pass over what he clearly said there about the creation of the first man, body and
soul, in conformity with the tradition of the Church. For this is what he said:
“Wishing to manifest this, the craftsman, the Word, created man, one living
being from two [elements], I mean the invisible and the visible natures; and tak-
ing the body from preexistent matter, he inserted life from himself (which rea-
son recognizes as the intelligent soul and the image of God).”14
The (non-Origenist) monk who wrote this letter clearly thinks that the Origenist
appeal to Gregory is unfounded (though the variant reading—“breath” instead of
“life”15—might have been intended to make this clear beyond a peradventure).
Barsanouphios, in his reply, condemns such speculation as pointless.
13 That is, Or. 38 and 45. Or. 38.7–15 corresponds virtually word for word with Or. 45.3–9 and
26–7. The passage appealed to is: Or. 38.11 = Or. 45.7.
14 Barsanouphios and John of Gaza, Ep. 604 (SC, 451:814–16). On reading life rather than breath,
see Macé, ‘Authoritative Voice’, 29 (the Sources Chrétiennes edition reads ζωὴν, but translates “souffle”).
15 These variant readings are attested in the manuscripts both of Or. 38 (SC, 358:124) and of
Barsanouphios and John (SC, 451:816). There is no critical edition of Or. 45, but Justinian’s quotation
from this homily, quoted by Macé from ACO, reads ζωὴν, instead of Migne’s πνοὴν (PG 36:632B), so it
is likely that these variants occur in that homily, too.
Cyril of Skythopolis, in his Life of Kyriakos, represents himself as a young man

asking Abba Kyriakos about the appeal made by some monks to Gregory in sup-
port of their continued reflection on the matters such as pre-existence of souls
and the final restoration:
I asked him, “Father, what of the view they advocate? They themselves affirm
that the doctrines of preexistence and restoration are indifferent and without
danger, citing the words of Saint Gregory, ‘Philosophize about the world, matter,
the soul, the good and evil rational natures, the Resurrection and the Passion of
Christ; for in these matters hitting on the truth is not without profit and error is
without danger’.”16
Abba Kyriakos replies that the doctrines of pre-existence and final restoration are
far from being matters indifferent, and attacks what he regards as Origenist errors:
errors such as the denial that Christ is one of the Holy Trinity, or that the Holy
Trinity created the world, and the assertion that the resurrection body will be
spherical and pass to destruction, and that at the restoration we shall be equal to
Christ (views condemned as “Origenist” in 543 and at—or before—the Fifth
Ecumenical Council of 553). He concludes:
I am amazed what vain and futile labours they have expended on such harmful
and laborious vanities, and how in this way they have armed their tongues
against piety. Should they not rather have praised and glorified brotherly love,
hospitality, virginity, care of the poor, psalmody, all-night vigils, and tears of
compunction? Should they not be disciplining the body by fasts, ascending to
God in prayer, making this life a rehearsal for death, rather than meditating such
sophistries?17
As Macé points out, Abba Kyriakos is represented as quoting Gregory against

Gregory, for in suggesting how they might profitably spend their time, he is para-
phrasing an earlier passage in Gregory’s Or. 27, from which the earlier quotation
had come.18 Macé also quotes a passage from the Emperor Justinian’s edict against
Origen in which he continues the quotation from the “homily on holy Pascha”
(that is, Or. 45) with the intent of making it clear that there is no support for the
doctrine of pre-existence in Gregory.19
16 Cyril of Skythopolis, Vita Cyriaci 229, 25–31, in The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans.
R. M. Price, intro. and notes John Binns (Cistercian, 1991), 253; quoting from Gregory Nazianzen,
Or. 27.10.
17 Cyril of Skythopolis, Vita Cyriaci 230, 15–23, in Lives of the Monks, 253–4.
18 Or. 27.7: see Macé, ‘Authoritative Voice’, 31.
19 For further discussion of the Palestinian monks and sixth-century Origenism, see Lorenzo
Perrone, ‘Palestinian Monasticism, the Bible, and Theology in the Wake of the Second Origenist
The involvement of Gregory the Theologian in the Origenist controversy—

cited, as we have seen, on both sides—reaches its climax (though not its end; one
can still detect echoes in later writers such as Anastasios of Sinai) in the writings
of St Maximos the Confessor, especially in his Ambigua, devoted to the discussion
of difficulties (ἀπορίαι, ambigua) in Gregory the Theologian (plus one difficult
passage from Dionysios the Areopagite), not least those to which appeal had been
made by Origenist monks. As Dom Polycarp Sherwood famously remarked,
“These Ambigua are a refutation of Origenism, especially of the doctrine of the
henad, with a full understanding and will to retain what is good in the
Alexandrian’s doctrine— a refutation perhaps unique in Greek patristic
literature.”20 These Ambigua are also something else: a way of theological reflec-
tion that takes as its starting point the difficulties found in the works of one
regarded as an authority, and in that they mark an early stage in a tradition that
was to continue throughout the Byzantine period. This was a form of theological
reflection that takes for granted the pattern of Orthodoxy and seeks to probe its
depths by a form of theological meditation that relates different insights to one
another and thereby attains a deeper understanding. Difficulty is seen as a spur to
deeper reflection, much as difficulties and apparent contradictions in the
Scriptures had long been seen as signs that the truth of the Scriptures was not
something to be revealed without effort; difficulties and contradictions jolted one
out of complacency and forced one to further and more considered reflection.21
What I want to do in the rest of this chapter is to look at the way in which the
kind of theology that we find in Maximos—focusing on consideration of difficult
passages in Gregory—continues in the Byzantine tradition, and especially in the
works of two theologians, Photios and Michael Psellos, whose theological works,
although now available in fine critical editions, have so far attracted very little
attention. In those works we can, in particular, detect a thread that leads to the
theological controversies of the twelfth century that became, for political reasons,
a feature of the reign of the Emperor Manuel Komnenos, and I shall argue that
this thread leads back to Gregory himself. And then there is something else, but
let us leave that until later.
Both Photios and Michael Psellos were exceptional men; in looking at them we
are hardly looking at anything in any way typical. However, their fame rests less
on their theological works (which are generally ignored) than on their role in
history, and also the reputation both had for phenomenal learning, especially in
Controversy’. In The Sabaïte Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present,
Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 5, ed. Joseph Patrich, 245–59 (Peeters, 2001).
20 Dom Polycarp Sherwood, An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, Studia
Anselmiana 30 (Orbis Catholicus and Herder, 1952), 3.
21 For some consideration of the different kinds of difficulties that such an approach to theology
might envisage, see my ‘St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor’, Chapter 5 in
this volume.
classical literature (and, in the case of Psellos, Greek philosophy). Nonetheless, in

both cases, a great deal of their writing was devoted to theological matters, more
than one might suppose given their reputation nowadays.
Both of them conform to the model of theology that we have noticed in con-
nection with Maximos’ meditations on difficulties posed by Gregory’s writings.
With Photios, the parallel with Maximos is quite striking. Both of them were
occasional theologians in that their theological reflection is presented as responses
to questions put to them by others. The vast bulk of Maximos’ writings take the
form of such responses, either in letters or in responses to a series of questions,
the genre known as erotapokriseis (“questions and answers”): there is a body of
Maximos’ letters, and many of the Opuscula are letters or extracts from letters; the
Ambigua, the Quaestiones ad Thalassium, and the so-called Quaestiones et Dubia
(“Questions and Answers,” i.e. Erotapokriseis, would be more accurate) are all ero-
tapokriseis. Photios wrote a few treatises, e.g. the Mystagogia (if it is indeed his),
but most of his theology is found in his letters (some of which are virtual treatises,
e.g., Letter 1, addressed to Michael/Boris, the newly converted tsar of the
Bulgarians, Letter 2, an encyclical letter to the Eastern patriarchs about the dan-
gers of Latin theology, and—longer than either of these—Letter 284, addressed to
Ašot, the Armenian sovereign, and dealing with the possible reconciliation of
Byzantine and Armenian theology), many of which are responses to questions
put to him by correspondents, and his collection of 329 Amphilochia, many of
which are drawn from his correspondence.22 The problems about the formation
of the Amphilochia cannot be addressed here;23 what we are now concerned with
is the role of Gregory the Theologian in Photios’ theology. In contrast with both
Maximos and Michael Psellos (as we shall see), St Gregory the Theologian is not
an especial favourite of Photios’. Only one of the Amphilochia (78) directly dis-
cusses difficult passages in Gregory (two, in fact), and Photios discusses no works
of the Theologian in his Bibliotheca (though, given that we have no real evidence
for the principles of inclusion in the Bibliotheca, nor have we for any omissions).
There are, in fact, notorious omissions from the Bibliotheca—Plato, Aristotle, the
Greek poets—though I cannot think of any other Greek theologian of note omit-
ted other than Didymos the Blind.24 It is not, however, that he does not know
Gregory: there are plenty of references to, and quotations from, Gregory in the
Bibliotheca (in contrast with the case of Didymos), as well as in the Letters and
Amphilochia. Many of these are passing allusions, suggesting that Photios knew
22 Photius, Epistulae et Amphilochia, 6 vols., ed. Basil Laourdas and Leendert Gerrit Westerink
(Tuebner, 1983–8).
23 For these, see Andrew Louth, ‘Photios as a Theologian’. In Byzantine Style and Civilization: In
Honour of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, 206–23, esp. 210–12 (Cambridge University
Press, 2006), printed as Chapter 35 in this volume.
24 On the selection of writings in the Bibliotheca, see Nigel Guy Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca
(Duckworth, 1994), 6–13.
Gregory well, and recalls him easily. He also recalls important passages from the
Theologian: for example, in Amphilochia 24, when he quotes an important pas-
sage from the last oration, the Second on Easter, on the sacrifice of Christ, which
was offered neither to the devil nor to the Father, but is rather the means by which
death is overthrown and humanity rescued (here, as elsewhere, the quotation is
not exact: Photios is quoting from memory, and the MSS tradition shows that
later scribes supplemented the inexactness of Photios’ memory); or in
Amphilochia 36, a long discussion of the meaning of the image of God, Photios
deploys Gregory’s account of the formation of the human in Oration 45.7, to sup-
port his view that the image and “according to the image” are identical. In
Amphilochia 78, the only one directly dealing with problems in the text of the
Theologian, Photios clarifies one of Gregory’s responses to a difficulty (rather
than a difficulty in Gregory’s text as such): the Incarnate Word is spoken of as
having both God and Father, but how can the Word, as God, have a God? Photios
simply repeats at greater length what Gregory had already said: that strictly
speaking the Father is the Father of the Word, and God only of the human aspect
of Christ (“the one seen” in Gregory, the “addition,” πρόσλημμα, in Photios).
A last example from Photios is more important for what is to follow. In Letter
176, which reappears as Amphilochia 95, Photios discusses the meaning of John
14.28: “the Father is greater than I.” This verse had played a major role in the
Arian controversy,25 and it is against that background that Gregory’s words find
their primary meaning, but in the context of the developed Trinitarian theology
of later centuries, they continued to puzzle. That later Trinitarian theology owed
much to Gregory, so it is no surprise that what Gregory had said about the exe
gesis of this verse continued to attract attention. There is no mention of Gregory
in the apparatus to Westerink’s text, but I think that Gregory is probably in the
back of Photios’ mind here. Photios makes a number of suggestions. First, per-
haps the Father is greater τῷ αἰτίῳ, by virtue of being the cause, αἴτιος, of the Son.
Second, perhaps “greater” is to be taken κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον, as referring to
Christ’s humanity, that is, to τὸ πρόσλημμα, not to ὁ Λόγος. Third, it might refer to
Christ’s “extreme self-emptying and humiliation” (ἄκρα κένωσις καὶ ταπείνωσις).
Photios adds a few other suggestions: it might refer to the imperfect thoughts of
the disciples, or to the Word’s condescension to the human condition, his
συγκατάβασις, in which state he both accommodates himself to the disciples’
understanding and speaks of the Father as higher than him, one to whom he
prays and gives thanks. What is striking about this list of suggestions is the way
the discussion seems to follow Gregory’s own discussion in Oration 29.15 ff.
There Gregory starts by offering the suggestion that the Father is greater as being
cause, partly to fend off the objection that, if cause, he must be cause by nature,
25 On which, see Manlio Simonetti, ‘Giovanni 14:28 nella controversia ariana’. In Kyriakon. Festschrift
Johannes Quasten, ed. Patrick Granfield and Josef A. Jungmann, I:151–61 (Aschendorff, 1970).
and so greater than the Son by nature. Then, after dealing with the objection that
“Father” designates either a nature or an activity, rather than a relationship
(σχέσις), Gregory goes on to distinguish between the Son’s “great and sublime
names,” which refer to his Godhead, and his humbler names, which refer to the
compound, σύνθετον, of divine and human—the Incarnate One, among which is
included what Gregory laconically lists as “greater,” that is, the assertion that the
Father is “greater” than the Son. Photios seems to me to be following Gregory
here: first, the interpretation involving ‘cause’, second, the interpretation involving
the Incarnation, the πρόσλημμα. His other suggestions are variants on that start-
ing from the Incarnation, but without the authority of the Theologian. But it is
striking how closely Photios’ discussion corresponds to the list of interpretations
given to the Johannine verse in the theological controversy during the time of
Emperor Manuel Komnenos, the results of which came to be incorporated in the
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. In the Komnene list, the first two interpretations are
approved, the third condemned, and the others either condemned or ignored.26 It
seems to me not implausible that Photios’ discussion represents a stage on the
way to the Komnene controversy.
Now we must turn to discuss Michael Psellos and the nature of the Theologian’s
influence on him. The case is rather different from Photios: whereas Photios
clearly knew Gregory reasonably well, but makes little direct reference to him, in
the case of Psellos, Gregory is very prominent. However, in comparing Photios
and Psellos, we are comparing like with like, for both of them follow Maximos in
being occasional theologians, dealing with difficulties that have been brought to
their attention, using the genre of erotapokriseis. These theological works—the
largest group in Psellos’ œuvre27—are concerned to elucidate difficulties raised by
passages in Scripture—what is meant by Wisdom building a house in Proverbs
9:1 (Opusc. 7), or what is meant by Wisdom being “created” in Proverbs 8:22
(Opusc. 10), difficult verses in the psalms (Opusc. 14, 18, 34‒7, 73, etc.), on the
meaning of arche in John 1:1 (Opusc. 75)—or in the fathers, especially Gregory of
Nazianzus, but also Basil the Great (Opusc. 6) or John Klimakos (Opusc. 30), or in
the liturgical texts—passages in John Damascene’s canon on the Transfiguration
and Cosmas’ canon for Holy Thursday, as well as the Kyrie eleison (Opusc.
11‒13)—or theological problems, for instance why humans can change from evil
to good, but angels, once fallen into sin, cannot (Opusc. 29). The prominence of
Gregory of Nazianzus, or Gregory the Theologian, is striking. Of the 159 Opuscula
in the new editions, seventy-three are explicitly on passages from Gregory hom
ilies; a glance at the indices reveals that there are more references to Gregory than
26 There is a good discussion of the history of the interpretation of this verse in Hilarion Alfeyev,
St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford
University Press, 2000), 143–50.
27 Michael Psellus, Theologica I, ed. Paul Gautier (Tuebner, 1989); Michael Psellus, Theologica II,
ed. Leendert Gerrit Westerink and John M. Duffy (Tuebner, 2002).
to anyone else, even Plato or Psellos’ beloved Proklos. As we have seen, Gregory’s
prominence as “the Theologian” made the clearing up of puzzles and problems in
his homilies (and also his poems, though much less so) imperative. Gregory’s
third Theological Oration (Or. 29) is a recurrent concern for Psellos; there is a
series of problems on this homily (Opusc. 20‒4, but also 16, 107), as is the sermon
on Epiphany, Or. 38 (Opusc. 86‒97, 64), but several other sermons raise problems
(Or. 1, 21, 31, 33, 39‒45). What Psellos very often does is take a problem and elu-
cidate its philosophical background by drawing on his immense knowledge of
those he calls once “the first and blessed philosophers” (Or. 69), by which he
means Plato, Aristotle, the Orphic hymns, the Chaldaean Oracles, and the neo-
Platonists, especially “the philosopher from Lycia,” that is, Proklos. Sometimes it
is not clear what purpose is served by this display of learning, but not infrequently
it leads him to a theological discussion in which he expounds skilfully on the
apophatic nature of theology, or the way in which the Incarnation of the Word of
God brings about the deification of human kind.
Psellos’ reverence for Gregory the Theologian is also manifest in his panegyric
on the Saint.28 Psellos’ first claim for Gregory is that he is a model of all the stylis-
tic virtues. Whereas other orators excel at one style or another—and here Psellos
displays his learning (or perhaps pretensions to learning) by citing various rhetors
of late antiquity—Gregory excels at all. This Psellos puts down to the divine origin
of his gift; it was certainly not achieved by the usual method of imitation. Psellos
explains why Gregory excels:
For my part, every time I read him, and I often have occasion to do so, chiefly
for his teaching but secondarily for his literary charm, I am filled with a beauty
and grace that cannot be expressed. And frequently I abandon my intention, and
neglecting his theological meaning I spend my time as it were among the spring
flowers of his diction and am carried away by my senses. Realizing that I have
been carried off I then love and take delight in my captor. And if I am forced
away from his words back to the meaning, I regret not being carried off once
more and lament the gain as a deprivation. The beauty of his works is not of the
type practised by the duller sophists, epideictic and aimed at an audience, by
which one might be charmed at first and then at the second contact repelled—
for those orators did not smooth the unevenness of their lips and were not afraid
to rely on boldness of diction rather than skill. But his art is not of that kind, far
from it; instead it has the harmony of music.29
Psellos goes on to compare Gregory’s words to precious and semi-precious stones

and their various qualities, arranged by the saint with the skill of the jeweller, and
28 See Nigel Wilson’s discussion in Scholars of Byzantium (Duckworth, 1983), 169‒72.
29 Trans. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium, 169.
compares Gregory to various orators whom he mentions have the gift of selecting
ordinary words and arranging them with other words so as to bring out their
beauty. Gregory does this in a way that seems not in the least artificial:
I cannot trace the means by which his extraordinary beauty of style is regularly
achieved; I merely sense them, the experience cannot be rationally explained.
But when I trace his methods and establish them as the cause of his excellence,
I see other sources from which grace flows into his writings.
These sources include sentence structure and the use of rhythm. The theological
content of Gregory’s sermons is never obscured; the use of rhythm prevents
monotony, what he has to say ornamented by his wide reading. Psellos returns to
Gregory’s ability to adapt his style, claiming for him preeminence in the genre of
panegyric, and closes by wondering why, despite the surpassing clarity of his
style, Gregory seems to need explanation by commentators, amongst whom
Psellos numbers himself.
Psellos raises Gregory’s discussion of the Johannine verse on a number of occa-
sions. Unlike Photios—and unlike those who discussed this in the century after
Psellos—Psellos finds one interpretation of the verse in Gregory, and it is this that
he follows—namely, that the Father is greater than the Son in virtue of being his
cause. Opusculum 3 develops this theme at length, citing in support of his inter
pretation Aristotle’s logical treatises as well as Alexander of Aphrodisias. But he
returns to this on several other occasions. In Opusculum 23, he summarizes his
position as: “Therefore the Father is greater than the Son and not greater; for he is
greater by cause, but equal by nature and authority. Wisely therefore the Son hav-
ing become one of us said that ‘the Father is greater than I”30 (perhaps there is a
suggestion there that a further explanation of the saying is that it was uttered by
the incarnate Son, but it is hardly explicit and not related to Gregory’s homily). In
Opusculum 72, it is rather the passage in Gregory’s Oration 40.43 that Psellos has
in mind, in which Gregory expresses his reservations about saying that the Father
is greater than the Son; in Opusculum 99, the usual position is asserted laconically.
Between Photios and Psellos, the Johannine verse was also the subject of dis-
cussion by Symeon the New Theologian, which has been well discussed by
Alfeyev.31 Symeon starts from, and rejects, the explanation of the Johannine verse
in terms of causality, but there is not enough context to know to whom Symeon is
referring; it is unlikely that he connected this interpretation with the Theologian.
This connection, however, is quite clear with both Photios and Psellos, and sug-
gests that whatever the occasion of the Komnene debate—Kinnamos asserts that
it was a matter of a Latin view that Manuel was keen to see accepted in his
30 Psellos, Opusc. 23.128–31. 31 See n. 26 above.

court32—it bears witness to the long shadow cast by Gregory the Theologian in
the history of Byzantine theology (which in turn suggests that the stimulus pro-
vided by Latin theology can have been no more than the occasion of the debate,
which stirred up an already familiar theological controversy entirely native to
Byzantium).
Whether or not it is the case that this recurrent Byzantine controversy over the
interpretation of the Johannine verse is a matter of the long shadow of Gregory, it
is worth noting that Gregory’s own words pass beyond the discussion of “The
Father is greater than I,” leading to the final paragraphs of the homily in which he
celebrates the union of opposites in Christ, a passage in which, leaving behind
the logical analysis that characterizes most of the homily, Gregory celebrates
the paradox of the Incarnation; as Fred Norris put it in his commentary, the
Theologian passes from “his logical case” to his “moving confessions.”33 For the
most profound influence Gregory had on Byzantine theology in the broadest
sense—that is, not just in the relatively narrow world of theological controversy,
but in the way theological dogma was received and expressed by believers
generally—was, arguably, less through the seemingly endless scholia, interpreting
and justifying what he had said in his riddling language, but through the way in
which his homilies, with their clashing paradoxes and intoxicating rhythmic prose,
provided material for the developing tradition of Byzantine liturgical poetry.
Already in the first part of the sixth century, we know from the Instructions of
Dorotheos of Gaza that passages from Gregory’s homilies were being turned into
hymns. In Instruction 16, Dorotheos comments on an Easter hymn, the text of
which he gives as:
The Day of the Resurrection! Let us offer ourselves as fruits, God’s most precious
possession, the one closest to him, let us restore to the image that which is
according to the image, let us recognize our worth, let us reverence the archetype,
let us know the power of the mystery, and what it was for whom Christ died.34
These are simply words taken from Gregory’s first homily on Easter: “The Day of
Resurrection” being the opening words, and the rest the closing words of para-
graph 4. In the current Byzantine office there are two troparia that begin with
the words “the day of Resurrection,” Ἀναστάσεως ἡμέρα: the first troparion of the
Easter canon, ascribed to St John Damascene, which adds to the opening words the
32 For brief discussions, which, however, shed little theological light on the controversy, see
Joan M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (Clarendon Press, 1986), 152–3; Paul
Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos 1143–1180 (Cambridge University Press, 1993),
279–90; and Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081–1261
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83–6.
33 Norris and Wickham, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning, 158.
34 Dorotheos of Gaza, Spir. Instr. 16 (SC 92:458–72).
closely following “let us be radiant” and then continues with words from Gregory’s
other Easter homily—“Pascha, the Lord’s Pascha”—and goes on to paraphrase
Gregory’s explanation of “pascha” as derived not from the verb πάσχειν, to suffer, but
derived from the Hebrew pesach, indicating ‘the passage from below to above’,
expressed in the words: “for from death unto life, from earth unto heaven, Christ
our God has brought us over” (paraphrasing Or. 45.10).35 The other troparion
beginning “The Day of Resurrection,” sung at Vespers, just takes its words from the
rest of Oration 1.1: “let us be radiant for the feast, and embrace one another. Let us
say to those who hate us: let us forgive all at the Resurrection” and then continues
with the Easter troparion itself: “Christ has risen from the dead, by death trampling
on death, and to those in the graves giving life.”
The next of Dorotheos’ Instructions gives a hymn to the martyrs, drawn from
Gregory’s Or. 33.15: “Living sacred offerings, rational holocausts, perfect sacri-
fices to God, sheep knowing God and known to God, whose fold is inaccessible to
wolves.”36 This text also survives in the current Byzantine office, forming the basis
of the martyrikon (troparion to the martyrs), sung at the Liturgy of the
Presanctified on the Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent.37
This hymnic use of passages from Gregory’s homilies was pursued with enthu-
siasm by later Byzantine hymnographers. It is striking to note, in passing, that it
was Gregory’s prose that was turned into verse, not the extensive verse with which
he occupied his declining years, in some contrast to the bishop of the next gener
ation, Synesios of Kyrene, whose verse seems to have been used liturgically in the
Byzantine world.38
Many more examples could be given of the way Gregory’s homilies were plun-
dered by Byzantine hymnographers for their liturgical verse. Just two must suffice
here. The irmos for Kosmas the Melodist’s canon for the Feast of the Lord’s
Nativity reads:
Christ is born, glorify Him! Christ has come from heaven, go to meet Him!
Christ is on earth, be exalted! Praise the Lord, all the earth, and offer him hymns
with joyfulness, O people, because He has been glorified.39
35 For an analysis of the Easter canon, which owes a good deal to the Theologian, see Andrew
Louth, St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford Early Christian
Studies (Oxford University Press, 2002), 59–68.
36 Dorotheos of Gaza, Spir. Instr. 17 (SC 92: 474–87), presumably ending with some petition to the
martyrs (see 474, n. 1).
37 I owe this identification to my colleague, Dr Krastu Banev, who recalled singing this troparion
during Lent just past (2010).
38 Synesius of Cyrene, Hymnes, vol. 1, ed. Christian Lacombrade (Société d’édition les belles letters,
1978), 11.
39 It is interesting that Photios comments on this passage, asserting that one might have expected it
to read Χριστὸς γεγέννηται, Christ has been born, rather than Χριστὸς γεννᾶται, Christ is born, and
comments: “For he said ‘Christ is born,’ not because he is always being born from the Virgin, but
because the present feast is the day of the Master’s birth”; Photius, Amphil. 227; Photius, Epistulae et
Amphilochia, 6:1, 8.
These are more or less the opening words of Gregory’s Oration 38 on the
Theophany (which then embraced the feast of the Nativity):
Christ is born, glorify Him! Christ has come from heaven, go to meet Him!
Christ is on earth, be exalted! “Praise the Lord, all the earth,” and bringing
together both I say, “Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad,” on account
of the one who is heavenly and then became earthly.
And, for the Feast of Pentecost, the first troparion at vespers reads:
It is Pentecost that we celebrate: the advent of the Spirit, the appointed day of the
promise, and the fulfilment of hope. Such a mystery! So great and venerable!
Therefore we cry out, Creator of all, Lord, glory to you!
In his homily on Pentecost (Or. 41.5), Gregory had exclaimed:
It is Pentecost that we celebrate: the advent of the Spirit, the appointed day of the
promise, and the fulfilment of hope. Such a mystery! So great and venerable!
In this way, Gregory’s exalted rhetoric entered the tradition of song of the Byzantine
Church, and the words that had resounded in the church of the Anastasia in
Constantinople, celebrating the Orthodox faith with his small congregation
faithful to Nicaea, came to resound throughout the Orthodox world—Byzantine,
then Slav, and now further afield—in the liturgical poetry of the services.
It is rather on this note that I want to conclude. Alongside the long shadow that
Gregory cast through his reputation as ‘the Theologian’, and his popularity among
later Byzantine theologians—a popularity at times as much controversial as
inspiring solemn commentary—there is the way in which Gregory’s rhetorical
powers bequeathed to the Byzantine hymnographers sparkling encapsulations of
what is celebrated in the cycle of the Feasts, that were seized on and turned into
song. In that way, Gregory’s influence extended beyond the study, and entered the
hearts of the Orthodox faithful.
7
‘From Beginning to Beginning’
Continuous Spiritual Progress in Gregory of Nyssa
‘En ma fin est mon commencement’: that was the motto of Mary Stuart, ‘Mary,
Queen of Scots’—‘in my end is my beginning’. T. S. Eliot used it in his poem, ‘East
Coker’, the second of Four Quartets, ending the poem with Mary’s motto, but
beginning the poem by reversing it: ‘In my beginning is my end’. Mary’s own
motto seems to have an eschatological meaning, made personally poignant, if we
remember her end: murdered by her cousin, Elizabeth, Queen of England. Her
end, her death, will not be an end, but rather a beginning, whether understood
personally, as she embarks on the afterlife, or historically, predicting that she
would not be forgotten, true in her own time (Elizabeth was haunted, it is said, by
her death), and in the nineteenth century with Schiller’s drama, Maria Stuart,
and, based on it, Donizetti’s opera, Maria Stuarda. At the beginning of ‘East
Coker’, Eliot reverses Mary’s motto: ‘In my beginning is my end’. This suggests
something more fated: my end is implicated in my beginning; it is all there, it has
only to be played out. This fits well with the opening sections of Eliot’s poem,
which depict the imagined traditions of the village from which his ancestors had
set out for the New World in the middle of the seventeenth century, and then
passes, led by citations of St John of the Cross, by way of a recollection of Christ’s
passion, towards a ‘deeper communion’ beyond ‘the dark cold and the empty
desolation’—‘In my end is my beginning’.
Fascinating though it is, I am not here to talk about Eliot’s poem, but about the
notion of spiritual progress in St Gregory of Nyssa, under the title offered me of
‘From Beginning to Beginning’, a phrase taken from his eighth homily on the
Song of Songs. That phrase, however, recalled Mary Stuart’s motto and Eliot’s use
of it, for ‘from beginning to beginning’ seems paradoxical: we expect something
like the sentences Eliot comes up with, linking end and beginning, or beginning
and end. What can be meant by linking beginning and beginning? What has hap
pened to the end, the goal? Famously, as we all know, Gregory quite deliberately
excludes the notion of an end, and in this passage radicalizes what has become
known as his doctrine of epektasis by iterating the beginning: we pass from begin
ning to beginning, maybe? The roots of the doctrine of epektasis I’ll come to in a
minute, but first I want to mention that the term epektasis, as Daniélou notes, is
only used only once in Gregory’s work, when he refers to ‘stretching forward and
Continuous Spiritual Progress in Gregory of Nyssa 77
leaving what has already been accomplished in oblivion’.1 It is really Daniélou’s

doctrine of epektasis, not Gregory’s, for Gregory almost invariably uses the verb,
taken from ἐπεκτεινόμενος in Phil. 3:13. I don’t want to make too much of it, but
it seems to me there is a danger of reifying what in Gregory is a theme by giving it
an abstract noun. Related to this is a further danger of picking up quotations here
and there from Gregory’s works, and making of them one’s own mosaic, while
passing it off as Gregory’s. This is why this paper is not about Gregory’s ‘doctrine
of spiritual progress’ in any conventional sense, but rather about Gregory’s train
of thought in his eighth homily on the Song of Songs, from which the quotation
has been taken.
But we might well start by briefly recalling the doctrinal context from which
the doctrine of epektasis emerges. Gregory of Nyssa is one of the theologians who
secured the final triumph of the Council of Nicaea and its teaching that the Son of
God, who became incarnate as Christ, is ὁμοούσιος with the Father, and conse
quently utterly distinct from the cosmos, created ex nihilo. Furthermore, in his
writings he works through the implications of this doctrine, seeing in it an affi rm
ation of a fundamental distinction between the Trinity of Persons homoousios
with each other and the created order which is of a different order of being
altogether. This perception that the divine and the mortal belong to a different
order of reality is something already found in pagan philosophy, for example, in
Plutarch’s On the Epsilon at Delphi,2 but with Gregory this distinction is radical
ized so that, as another Gregory—St Gregory Palamas—put it, ‘[God] is not a
being, if the others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not beings’.3
There is then nothing in common at the level of being between God and crea
tures, and consequently, as like knows like, God is unknowable to creatures. The
entailments of this conviction of a radical divide between uncreated and created
are manifold, but include the conviction that God can only be known by making
himself known, and that this knowledge cannot be possessed by the creature.
Knowing God is entering a divine darkness in which God is sensed in some
way—Gregory speaks of a ‘certain sense of his presence’4—but cannot be grasped
or finally comprehended: there is always more to the knowledge of God, and so
for Gregory the soul is constantly reaching out, or stretching out—
ἐπεκτεινόμενος—to what is yet to be revealed, and ‘putting to oblivion what has
already been accomplished’. There is a sense then of continual progress, a constant
reaching forward, a constant enjoyment of further knowledge of God, which will
1 In Cant. 6; Hermannus Langerbeck, ed., GNO VI, 1960, 174, ll. 15–16; Jean Daniélou, Platonisme
et théologie mystique, new edn (Aubier, 1953), 298, n.
2 Plutarch, De E apud Delphos 392A–393A.
3 Gregory Palamas, Capita CL 78, ed. and trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Studies and Texts 83
(Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 173.
4 In Cant. 11; Langerbeck, ed., 324, ll. 10–11.
never, however, be finally satisfied. There is always more, and will be to all eternity.
There is no end. We can discern here the beginnings of a Christian metaphysic,
that sees the fundamental distinction in reality as being between beings, who are
created, and the Uncreated Trinitarian God, who is beyond being, though this
language is not systematic in Gregory of Nyssa. This does not, however, mean—
certainly not for Gregory—that there are no other fundamental ontological dis
tinctions; he maintains that ‘the supreme division of all beings is that between
what is perceived by the intellect and what is perceived by the senses’:5 the
Platonic division between the spiritual or intellectual and the material or sensible
is still important for Gregory, as Hans Boersma has recently argued.6
What I want now to do, for the rest of this paper, is to look at how Gregory
introduces and develops his notion of spiritual progress in the eighth homily on
the Song.7 The homily is prefaced by Cant. 4:8–15, though in fact only verses 8–9
are treated in homily 8, the rest of the verses being dealt with in homily 9.
Gregory begins by recalling the visions of the Apostle Paul as recounted in 2
Cor. 12:1–4—his being caught up to the third heaven and to Paradise—and then
applies to them Phil. 3:13, freely quoted: ‘I do not reckon myself to have attained,
but I still stretch out to what is before, putting to oblivion what has been already
accomplished’. Gregory comments that
this shows that even after the third heaven (of which Moses said nothing in his
account of the creation of the world) and after the ineffable things he had heard
of the mysteries of Paradise, he did not tarry in his ascent, nor at all make the
good that he had attained a limit to his desire, teaching us, in my view, that what
is eternally sought is even more than the blessed nature of the good things,
infinitely transcending what has been grasped. (245, l. 15–246, l. 2)
And he goes on to compare Paul’s experience with the ‘ascents in the heart’ of
which David speaks (Ps 83:6, 8): ‘just as the great David places the good ascents in
the heart and ever leading us from strength to strength, he cries out to God, “You
are the most high forever, Lord” (Ps 91:9). Gregory has here introduced a theme
that he will pick up later on: the notion of ascents in the heart, ascents arising
from the heart. This leads him to a passage, freely quoted from the prophet Isaiah
(52:15, 63:3) in 1 Cor. 2:9—‘what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, and what has
not ascended in the heart of man’—which leads into the passage from which the
title of this lecture has been taken:
5 Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I. 270. d. Jaeger, GNO I, 105, 19–20.

6 Hans Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach (Oxford
7 Text in GNO VI, 244–61.
but the limit of what is found becomes a beginning (ἀρχή) for the discovery of
still higher things for those who are ascending, and neither does he who is
ascending ever stop, taking a beginning from a beginning, nor does the
beginning for what is always greater ever cease for him. For in no way does the
desire of the one ascending remain in the known, but again, through another
greater desire for something transcendent, the soul consequently always ascend
ing travels through what is higher to what is infinite. (247, 10–18)
Ἀρχή: beginning, principle, taken from the passage from the Song of Songs that
Gregory is now going to comment on—ἀπὸ ἀρχῆς πίστεως, from the beginning
of faith (4:8)—but also recalling the beginning of John’s Gospel and the beginning
of Genesis: Ἐν ἀρχῇ, ‘in the beginning’.
Now Gregory turns to the text of the Song and begins to comment on Cant.
4:8: ‘Come from Lebanon, bride, come from Lebanon, you will come and pass
through from the beginning of faith, from the head (or peak) of Sanier and
Hermon, from the lairs of the lions, from the mountains of the leopard’. Gregory
begins to speak about how, with Christ, the bride will drink from the fount of
good things, from Christ himself, quoting John 7:37 (‘if any one thirsts, let him
come to me and drink’), commenting that one who drinks from this fount will
find that neither his thirst nor his desire nor his enjoyment in drinking will ever
have an end, as they taste that the Lord is good (Ps 33:9; cf. 1 Pet. 2:3). Oddly,
Gregory makes no reference to Sirach 24:21 (‘those who eat me [that is, Wisdom]
will hunger for more, and those who drink me will thirst for more’).
To grasp Gregory’s continuing interpretation, we need to note that just a few
verses before (4:6), Gregory had read of the bridegroom going to the mountain of
myrrh (σμύρνης) and the hill of Lebanon to find his bride, and he assimilates
verses 8 to 6, so that the bride is coming from Lebanon and the mountain of
myrrh; furthermore, the Greek for Lebanon, λιβάνον, also means frankincense.
Myrrh recalls death; frankincense recalls God—part of the regular interpretation
of the gifts of the magi—so that Gregory interprets the verse we have just read in
this way:
[It is Christ, the Bridegroom, speaking to his bride]: You came with me to the
mountain of myrrh (for you were buried with me through baptism into death),
you have ascended with me also to the hill of frankincense (for you rose up with
me and were lifted up to the communion with the Godhead, which the name of
frankincense indicates), Ascend with me from those things for other mountains,
making progress and being lifted up through active knowledge, come then from
Lebanon/frankincense, no longer betrothed, but bride. For it is not possible for
you to live with me unless you are changed through the myrrh of death to the
Godhead of frankincense. (249.12–21)
Gregory now begins to ring the changes on ‘beginning’, ἀρχή. ‘From the begin
ning of faith’ stands in apposition to ‘from Lebanon’, so ‘this frankincense has
become the beginning of faith for you, in which you participate through the res
urrection, the beginning of the path to still higher things among the good. From
this beginning which is faith, you will come and pass through’ (250.2–5). ‘You will
come and pass through, from the peaks of Saneir and Hermon’—‘from these
[Gregory says] there can be discerned the mystery of our birth from above’
(250.9–10), for it is the waters of Jordan that flow down from the mountain.
Saneir and Hermon are to be interpreted as two ridges that divide the mountain:
‘the stream that flows down from them [the Jordan] becomes the beginning for us
of our transformation into the divine’ (250.13–15).
Gregory then turns to the lairs of the lions and the mountains of the leopards,
from which the bride is coming. In an interpretation that recalls his treatment in
On the Making of Man, the lion and the leopard indicate the bestialization of
human nature as a result of the Fall.
Gregory now turns to the voice of the bridegroom, the voice of the Word:
But since everywhere the voice of the Word is a voice of power, just as at the first
creation the light shone forth accompanying the command and again the firma
ment was constituted by the commanding word and all the rest of creation was
manifest together with the creative word, in the same way, too, the word com
mands the soul that has become better to come to itself and become, empowered
by the command, such as the bridegroom wished, being changed into the more
divine, being transformed by a good alteration from the glory in which it was to
the higher glory, to become a wonder to the choir of angels that surrounds the
bridegroom and coming forth to the praise of all to this wonderful voice that
proclaims, ‘You have ravished our heart, my sister, my bride’. (253.8–254.1)
We have now gathered a host of references that fill out what Gregory means by
‘taking a beginning from a beginning’: there is the beginning of creation, the
beginning of the new creation—Resurrection and Baptism, which is also the
beginning of faith; there is the beginning of our transformation into the divine,
deification. All these beginnings are established by God himself, the creative and
redeeming Word; to go back to the beginning is to go back to God. If, for Gregory,
the spiritual life is one of unending progress—there is no ‘end’—it is because it is
a matter of retaining, regaining, contact with God, the beginning, the ἀρχή, of
everything authentic and genuine. We take our beginning from our beginning,
because spiritual progress means regaining and renewing contact with God. In
our spiritual progress, we never outlive those beginnings. One of Gregory’s ἀρχαί
is the ‘beginning of faith’, baptism, participation in the death and resurrection of
Christ—and baptism is the sacrament of repentance. It is easy to slip into a way of
thinking that sees spiritual progress as taking us beyond repentance: progress
means developing the virtues—that is certainly the case for Gregory—but this
does not mean leaving repentance behind, as if we became good, without need to
repent. On the contrary, the closer we come to God, the more the virtues are
formed in us, the need for repentance becomes even more insistent. This paradox
lies behind the oxymorons with which Gregory constantly characterizes the spir
itual life: ‘sober drunkenness’, ‘luminous darkness’, ‘watchful sleep’, ‘learned igno
rance’, ‘stationary movement’. We encounter another of these paradoxes here, for
among the ἀρχαί Gregory mentions in this homily, alongside creation, new
creation, faith, there is the transfiguration into the divine, ‘from glory to glory’ of
2 Cor. 3:18, alluded to in our last quotation from Gregory, and used by Jean
Daniélou for the title of his invaluable anthology of Gregorian texts.8 This, too, is
called a beginning, ἀρχή, though one might have thought that it looks more like
an end. We need to dwell on it briefly. For epektasis, constant reaching out to what
is before one, might seem like constant dissatisfaction, unending disappointment.
One only has to read a page of Gregory to realize that this is not so; the oxy
morons like sober drunkenness speak of exhilarating joy, rather than any sense of
being constantly thwarted.9 For the beginning of transformation, transfiguration,
of which Gregory speaks is truly a beginning, the initiation of a process of trans
formation into the divine, which is no less actual, no less transforming, for never
reaching an end.
The rest of the homily moves on to the rest of verse 9—‘You have ravished our
heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished us with one look from your eyes,
with a single glance, with the jewel at your throat’.10 Gregory latches on to ἡμᾶς,
‘us’, which he takes to refer to the principalities and powers of the heavens. As
sister and bride—sister of the bodiless powers through the kinship of apatheia,
and bride through her union with the Word (cf. 254.2–3, 6–8)—she enheartens,
or ravishes, us: the heavenly powers learn something they could not otherwise
know. To understand this, Gregory turns to Ephesians 3:10–12, which speaks of
the ‘manifold wisdom of God’ (ἡ πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ) being made
known to the principalities and powers through the Church, which is, of course,
the bride of Christ.11 We have already seen Gregory using the oppositions
uncreated–created and spiritual–material; here he draws on another such oppos
ition, that between the One and the many. The spiritual powers know God under
the form of the One, but creation brings forth the many (Gregory speaks of God
creating ‘the nature of beings leading them into becoming and making exceed
ingly good [καλὰ λίαν] everything that comes from the source of the good’; 255,
15–17), and it is within that ‘many’, which he sees as a kind of coincidentia
8 Jean Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, Texts from Gregory of Nyssa, selected and intro. Jean
Daniélou, trans. and ed. Herbert Musurillo (John Murray, 1962).
9 As we are reminded by Boersma, Embodiment, 52.
10 This is, I confess, rather an imaginative translation of the Greek, which presents several puzzles.
11 Cf. 2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:32; and esp. Apoc. 21:2, 9, 22:17.
oppositorum,12 that God’s οἰκονομία according to Christ is worked out among

human beings, something it is the business of the Church to declare, not least to
the powers of heaven. For the Church declares ‘how life comes to be through
death, and righteousness through sin, and blessing through a curse, and glory
through dishonour, and power through weakness’ (255, 7–9). Through the
Incarnation and Christ’s death and resurrection, something new has happened in
the created order of the manifold, something unknown to the powers of heaven,
who by nature behold under the form of the One, and who have to learn this from
the proclamation of the Church, the bride of Christ.
This manifold form of wisdom, constituted from the weaving together of oppos
ites, now is taught through the Church: how the Word became flesh, how life is
mixed with death, how he healed our disease through his own wound, for he
fought against the power of the adversary through the weakness of the cross,
how the invisible is manifest in the flesh, how the same who was purchased and
himself became material [or currency, χρῆμα] (for he gave himself as a ransom
to death for our sake) redeemed the captives, how he came into death and ceases
from life, how also he mingles with slavery and remains sovereign. For all these
works, manifold and not simple works of wisdom, the friends of the bridegroom
learn through the Church and are heartened, grasping another character of
divine wisdom in the mystery. And if it is not too bold to say, perhaps those,
seeing the beauty of the Bridegroom through the bride, wonder at what is invis
ible and beyond the grasp of all beings. (255, 17–256, 12).
We might seem to be passing beyond our subject of spiritual progress, but I think
not, for here two further important points are made. First, that what is wrought in
the divine economy is something new, so that ‘taking the beginning from the
beginning’ is not to enter into a familiar cycle that comes back on itself but to
embark on something new and creative, but second, that, when we are thinking
about coming to know God and advancing in that knowledge, we are not consid
ering something simply individual but something ecclesial, for it is only as we see
the bride as the Church that we come to realize who she really is, and the nature
of our own identity in her.
12 A pre-echo of Nicolas of Cusa, like the docta ignorantia we have already encountered.
8
St Makrina
The Fourth Cappadocian?
In his book, Christianity and Classical Culture, after introducing the three
Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Gregory of
Nyssa, Jaroslav Pelikan continues:
To the three Cappadocians should be added, as ‘the Fourth Cappadocian’,

Makrina (the Younger), the oldest sister of Basil and of Gregory of Nyssa, named
for their grandmother, Makrina the Elder. Not only was she, according to
Gregory’s accounts a Christian role model for both of them by her profound and
ascetic spirituality, but at the death of her parents she became the educator of the
entire family, and that in both Christianity and Classical culture. Through her
philosophy and theology, Makrina was even the teacher of both of her brothers,
who were bishops and theologians, ‘sister and teacher at the same time [ἡ ἀδελφὴ
καὶ διδάσκαλος]’, as Gregory called her in the opening sentence of the dialogue
On the Soul and the Resurrection (as he elsewhere referred to Basil, his brother,
as ‘our common father and teacher’). Adolf von Harnack once characterized the
Life of Makrina by Gregory of Nyssa as ‘perhaps the clearest and purest expres-
sion of the spirituality of the Greek Church’, which anyone looking for an epit-
ome of Greek Orthodoxy should consult at the outset. Its author did intend it to
be an authentic portrait of this saint who was his sister, of whom he said else-
where that she was the only one on whom, in her final hours, he could rely to
answer the objections of unbelievers to the resurrection. Although various
scholars have pointed out the parallels between the statement by Gregory of
Nyssa about Makrina and Plato’s description of the disciples of Socrates in the
Phaedo, that literary device does not necessarily take away from its historical
verisimilitude, any more than it does from that of Plato’s accounts of the public
defence and the final hours of Socrates. But without reopening here the entire
quest for the historical Socrates, it does seem to be at least permissible, if per-
haps not obligatory, to take Gregory of Nyssa at his word about Makrina’s philo-
sophical learning and about her doctrinal orthodoxy, and therefore to link her
name with those of her two brothers and Gregory of Nazianzus as the Fourth
Cappadocian.1
1 Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (New Haven and London, 1993), 9.
If one consults the index to the book to find out what Pelikan makes of Makrina,
we read that ‘The names of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of
Nyssa, and Makrina appear on almost every page of the book . . . and therefore
they are not listed separately in the index’:2 that may well be true of the three
men, but it is certainly not true of Makrina, so without very great effort it is not
possible to work out what exactly he ascribes to Makrina by way of thought and
teaching. The paragraph just quoted really contains all that he has to say, and,
even if only in outline, it is impressive. It also points us to the sources we have for
Makrina, which are little more than the two treatises by her young brother
Gregory, and also raises one of the greatest problems about interpreting them, viz.
the difficulty of being sure whom we are reading in these treatises—Gregory him-
self or his sister. Particularly in the case of On the Soul and the Resurrection, it is
certainly Gregory’s literary art that models the scene of Makrina’s deathbed on
the conversations Socrates had with his disciples in the hours before drinking the
hemlock. It is, as we say, a literary topos, though in this case an extended one, but
it has been observed that a literary topos is often used because it is appropriate to
the situation being described, and so, most certainly, here. Apart from these two
treatises—On the Soul and the Resurrection, called, significantly in some MSS, τὰ
Μακρίνια, maybe ‘Makrina’s [thoughts]’, and the Life of St Makrina—we should
know almost nothing about her.3 She is not mentioned by Gregory the Theologian
in his Panegyric Homily on St Basil, despite the important role she played in his
life, so the other Gregory tells us, though the Theologian did dedicate an epigram
to her, preserved in the Greek Anthology:
The earth holds the glorious virgin Makrina, if you ever heard her name, the
first-born child of great Emmelia. She let herself be seen by no man, but is now
on the tongues of all, and has glory greater than any.4
Basil never mentions her (so far as I can see).5 There is, however, no question that
she played an important role in the life of her family.
She was the oldest of the nine children (Tillemont says ten, because Peter is
described as the ‘tithe’, ἐπιδέκατος, but Gregory’s life says ‘four sons and five
2 Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 357.

3 Critical texts and translations of these two treatises: Vita S. Makrinae, by V. Woods Callahan in
Gregorii Nysseni Opera Ascetica, Gregorii Nysseni Opera VIII/1 (Leiden, 1963), 347–414;
Joan M. Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord: Holy Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle
Ages, Cistercian Studies Series, 143 (1996); De Anima et Resurrectione, by Andreas Spira, brought to
completion by Ekkehard Mühlenberg in Gregorii Nysseni Opera Dogmatica Minora part 3, Gregorii
Nysseni Opera III/3 (Leiden, 2014); Catharine P. Roth, trans., On the Soul and the Resurrection
(Crestwood, NY, 1993).
4 Greek Anthology, bk VIII, epigram 163, Loeb edition, 470; trans. (slightly modified), 471).
5 The index to the Loeb edition of the letters of Basil gives the impression that he refers to her three
times; on each occasion, the reference is to his grandmother.
St Makrina: The Fourth Cappadocian? 85
daughters’; 556), born to her parents, Basil and Emmelia, and was named after
her paternal grandmother, Makrina the Elder, a disciple of St Gregory the
Wonderworker. However, while she was still carrying her first- born child,
Emmelia had a dream in which she saw herself carrying her baby, which was
addressed by a being ‘of greater than human magnificence’ as Thekla, the great
saint and companion of St Paul, called ‘Equal to the Apostles’, whose cult was
widespread throughout Asia Minor in late antiquity.7 Although known publicly
as Makrina, her secret name was Thekla; Gregory regarded the name as prophetic
of the life she was to follow. The next child Emmelia bore was Basil, and seven (or
eight) more children followed, three boys and four girls (plus maybe one who
died in infancy). We know the names of the boys: Naukratios, who became an
ascetic beside the river Iris, near the family estate at Annisa, at the age of 22, and
five years later died in a hunting accident, or, according to Gregory of Nazianzos,8
a fishing accident, as his net was caught in a whirlpool and dragged him down to
his death (he was attempting to provide food for the men he looked after),
Gregory, later bishop of Nyssa, and Peter, who was the Benjamin, the last-born,
who became bishop of Sebaste. Of the girls we are much less well informed: one
was called Theosebeia—it is likely that she lived with her brother Gregory after
the death of his wife, and is the companion on whose death Gregory the
Theologian consoled his namesake.9 They seem to have been found satisfactory
husbands by their elder sister. Makrina was clearly very close to Gregory—
everything he writes about her breathes warm affection—and according to
Gregory’s Life Makrina was also very close to the youngest child, Peter (whose
father died shortly after his birth): he tells us that she ‘became everything for
the little boy: father, teacher, tutor, mother, counsellor in all that was good;
thus even before he left the age of childhood, he flourished with the gentle
charm of an adolescent boy and was being raised up towards the high goal of
philosophy’ (61).
Gregory’s picture of his sister presents us with a formidable, rather determined
figure. She was educated by her mother, and Gregory emphasizes that her educa-
tion was undertaken through reading and interpreting the Scriptures, not through
studying the classical poets; she knew the Psalter by heart, and other parts of the
Scriptures, too, for example, the Wisdom of Solomon. She was a clever and culti-
vated girl, and also beautiful: she quickly became betrothed to a suitable young
man, a lawyer. He died before they could be married, but Makrina regarded their
betrothal as marriage, and thereafter refused to consider remarriage, as she
thought of it, and insisted on devoting herself to a life of virginity (fulfilling the
6 Page reference to Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord.

7 See Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St Thekla (Oxford, 2001).
8 Greek Anthology, bk VIII, epigrams 156–8 (Loeb, 468).
9 See Gregory Nazianzen, ep. 197, and epigram 164 (on the death of Theosebeia, sister of Basil).
prophecy, as her brother saw it, of her secret name), or, from another point of
view, widowhood: as Anna Silvas puts it, ‘[c]asting her social role as that of a
“widow”, that is, a socially respected form of being an unattached woman, she
secured her commitment to virginity’.10 She became a close companion to her
mother, Gregory remarking that ‘she even frequently prepared bread for her
mother with her own hands’ (55). This is often taken as a reference to making
prosphora, bread for the Eucharist, but that is not stated; what is more to the point
is to notice that such a manual task would have been quite unusual for an edu-
cated girl of a wealthy family: spinning and weaving were ladylike occupations,
not cooking and housework.11 Next, Gregory tells us of Makrina’s influence over
her brother, the great Basil, for it was she who persuaded him, when he returned
from his studies in Athens, to abandon a secular career and embrace a life of
asceticism. As we know, Basil visited monastic sites, following in the tracks of
Eustathius of Sebaste, before returning home and beginning his ascetic life on the
family estate at Annisa, to which he invited his close friend from his student days,
Gregory the Theologian. It was there that they collaborated on the anthology
drawn from Origen’s works, which they called the Philokalia. If it is true that
Makrina was instrumental in persuading him to embrace the ascetic life, it is odd
that Basil nowhere mentions her; though, on the other hand, it may explain his
initial flight from home in pursuit of the ascetic life.
The monastic community to which Basil invited his friend was only partly his
initiative—if that—for it was about this time that Makrina persuaded her mother
that they should turn their home in Annisa into an ascetic community. What
grew from this, so far as Basil was concerned, is something we know (or can
glean) a good deal about. What it meant for Makrina is something we shall come
back to. It was in this ascetic family community that Emmelia finally died, in the
arms of her children, Makrina and Peter—‘her first-fruits and her tithe’—in about
371. Basil died at the end of the decade, on 1 January 379, and it was shortly after
this that Makrina herself died. The death of Basil, just after the death of the
Emperor Valens, took place just before the triumph of the Nicene Orthodoxy for
which Basil had fought. This change of fortune enabled Gregory, who had been in
exile, to visit home and see his sister. He found her bedridden and dying, and
with his account of her death and the following events, including the funeral and
accounts of two miracles associated with Makrina, the Vita ends.
Such is the bare outline of what we know about Makrina. Is there any way in
which we can glean some more about her? Maybe not, so far as more facts are
concerned, but perhaps if we probe we can begin to discern a fuller picture. There
are three areas where I propose to probe a little: first, the matter of her education;
10 Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford University Press, 2005), 61.
11 See Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord, 83, n. 10.
second, the nature of her ascetic/monastic commitment; and third, the account of
her last prayer and her death as Gregory presents it in the Vita.
Gregory presents Makrina as educated, a learned woman capable of being a
teacher—a position that would not have been open to her publicly. On the Soul
and the Resurrection has Makrina teaching Gregory about the nature of the soul
and the hope of the resurrection. He relates to her as his teacher, addressing her
‘διδάσκαλε’. In the arguments she puts forward in the dialogue, she clearly under-
stands the ideas of the philosophers, though she does not quote from them
directly; she argues from Scripture (the same, however, could be said of Gregory
himself and indeed many of the Fathers). When Gregory speaks of her education,
at the hands of her mother Emmelia, he emphasizes that she did not undertake
the traditional secular education, focused on the classics and in the initial stages
through the works of the poets, and comments that his mother
thought it degrading and altogether improper that either the passions of tragedy,
or the indecencies of comedy, or the causes of the misfortunes at Troy should be
expounded to a girl whose character was gentle and easily influenced and would
in some way be polluted by these ignoble stories about women. (53)
I wonder how unusual this was, not just for girls, but for the children of Christian
parents in general? Perhaps our view of the education of Christians in the fourth
century is unduly influenced by the shrill reaction of educated Christians to the
rescript issued by the Emperor Julian the Apostate in 362, forbidding Christians
to teach the pagan classics on essentially moral grounds: Christians did not
believe in the gods of classical antiquity and so should not teach the poets and
philosophers who believed in them, any attempt to do so being dishonest. Julian’s
rescript back-fired spectacularly: two of the most distinguished professors in
the empire resigned—Victorinus at Rome and Prohaeresius at Athens, both
Christians—and most pagans seem to have thought it regrettable. As I have men-
tioned, the Christian response was one of appalled shock: Basil, Gregory
Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria all wrote against Julian, all keen to preserve clas
sical culture, even as they baptized it. The reasons for this may not have been their
cultivated appreciation of classical culture; for this education was indispensable
for participation in the ruling elite of the empire. Denying Christians access to
education would have handicapped their influence in the empire, presumably
part of the emperor’s intention. We are told that Apollinaris and his father rewrote
parts of the Bible in classical forms—epic poems, tragedies, philosophical dia-
logues, and so on—to be used as a basis for education. None of this survives,
because after his death the following year, Julian’s rescript became a dead letter.
But was the Christian reaction to Julian so uniformly negative? Might there not
have been Christians who already refrained from teaching the classics for moral
reasons, essentially the same as those that Julian put forward? Surely when we
read Gregory telling us about his sister’s education we are not to read this as his
telling us about a deficiency in her learning, for he is unstinting in his praise of his
sister, he must, actually, be commending the purity of the education she received,
and approving her not being exposed to the classical poets. He insists on the bib-
lical grounding of her education; this doesn’t exclude that at some stage she might
not have encountered the philosophers, doubtless in excerpted form, very much
the form in which they would have been presented to those who went on to the
higher levels of education. The place of philosophy in ancient education seems to
have been marginal anyway. In the enkyklikos paideia, essentially a rhetorical
training, one would have learnt something about the philosophers, just as one
would have learnt some geography, some medicine, and so forth, so as to be able
to deal convincingly with these matters in constructing speeches. Serious study of
the philosophers themselves, however, was advanced study, probably beyond
what either Basil or Gregory Nazianzen would have encountered at Athens. It is
worth remembering too that, later on in the West, education was based on the
Scriptures. Indeed it has been argued recently—this is part of the thrust of the
Swedish research project, ‘Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia’, led by Samuel
Rubenson of Lund University—that monasticism came very soon to incorporate
a form of Greek paideia as part of monastic training, required, not least, by the
need for monks able to read and write to enable their increasingly elaborate wor-
ship to function. This would make a lot more sense if already, in devout Christian
households of sufficient means (and Makrina and Basil’s family is presented as
extremely wealthy), something along the lines of a kind of Scriptural paideia
already existed.
This leads naturally to the second topic I want to explore in relation to Makrina:
the kind of ascetic community and regimen she established with her mother
Emmelia after the death of the elder Basil, Emmelia’s husband and Makrina’s
father. Here we might say that we are on the fringe of a fringe. Traditional
accounts of monasticism see the fourth century as the period of the beginnings of
the monastic movement: the traditional account sees monasticism originating in
the Egyptian desert and spreading to Palestine, Syria, and then to the West. This
account is strengthened by the fact that the word μοναχός is a fourth-century
coinage, for without the term it is indeed difficult to talk about ‘monks’ with any
confidence.12 I have argued elsewhere that what we are really looking at in the
fourth century is not the origins of monasticism, but rather a movement of
monastic or ascetic reform, that sought to control an already existing ascetic
movement, and in particular bring it under the developing authority of the
12 See the classic study, E. A. Judge, ‘The Earliest Use of Monachos for “Monk” (P. Coll. Youtie 77)
and the Origins of Monasticism’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1977), 72–89; but Judge’s
account has been the subject of much debate.
ishops: both monasticism in its defined forms and the power of the bishops are a
b
product of the freedom of the Church with the end of persecution and the
increasing favour in which the Church was held in the empire.13 I developed this
idea more fully when I found myself wondering why Basil the Great is so often
ignored in discussions of monasticism in the fourth century.14 If Basil seems to be
marginal in discussions of early monasticism, then Makrina must be even more
marginal—on the margins of the marginal.
In thinking about Basil, I started by wondering why Basil is so marginal to
discussions of monasticism in the fourth century. The extent to which he is left in
the shadows by scholarly accounts of monasticism is amazing. He is not men-
tioned at all in the classic work on early Eastern monasticism—Derwas Chitty’s
The Desert a City15—or in the much more recent ‘Introduction to the Literature of
Early Monasticism’—William Harmless’ Desert Christians.16 But what we find in
Basil’s writings is contemporary reflection on early attempts at pursuing the
monastic life among Christians. I put this neglect down to the spell cast by the
legend of the Golden Age of the Egyptian Desert, pointing out that, in contrast
with Basil, who provides genuine contemporary evidence for fourth-century
monasticism, the evidence for the Egyptian Desert is mostly later— the
Apophthegmata, which belong to the late fifth century, even the Pachomian
Corpus which we have in a form edited by Shenouda and the monks of the White
Monastery—or unusual in one way or another—Athanasios’ Life of St Antony,
which tells us as much about Athanasios as it does about Antony, or the Evagrian
corpus, which is too exceptional to be typical. The historical evidence for Egyptian
monasticism, then, does not consist of a kind of direct eyewitness core, presented
by the sayings and lives of the Fathers, around which we can group various
attempts, more distanced from direct experience, to appropriate and assimilate
their teaching and example. Rather—partly because of, and partly creative of—
the sense of the Egyptian Desert as a Golden Age, a return to paradise, there is the
paradoxical sense that the closer we seem to come to the living words of the
desert Fathers, the less we can actually hear.
With St Basil, however, we can hear his own voice. Of course, it is true that the
Basilian Great Asketikon exists in a later edited form, maybe associated with the
Studite Reform of the late seventh century, but Rufinus’ Latin translation of what
he called Basil’s Rule is now generally regarded as a translation of an early form of
the Asketikon, and even if it is no more reliable than Rufinus’ other translation
13 See my chapter, ‘The Literature of the Monastic Movement’, in the Cambridge History of Early
Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 373–81.
14 Andrew Louth, ‘On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great between the Desert
and the City’, Chapter 4, this volume.
15 Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Basil Blackwell, 1966).
16 William Harmless SJ, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism
(Rufinus is astonishingly candid about his translation technique), comparison

with the Greek of the Great Asketikon can enable us to get close to Basil’s early
thoughts, and besides Basil left a body of undoubtedly authentic works—letters
and treatises—that enable us to get close to his early reflections on the ascetic
life.17 So, unlike the historical evidence there is for the Egyptian monastic desert,
we can find in Basil’s writings contemporary reflection on early attempts at pursu-
ing the monastic life among Christians.
Not that Basil himself was entirely free from the lure of Egypt. When, after his
return from Athens—regarded by St Gregory Nazianzen as a betrayal of their
friendship—he set off on what Gregory refers to as his ‘voyages’, it seems that he
was—in company with, or perhaps better in pursuit of, Eustathios of Sebaste—
making a tour of the monastic centres of the mid-fourth century: not just Egypt,
but Coele-Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, as is apparent from later references
in his letters.18 (It is actually possible that Basil never made it to Egypt, in which
case Egypt remained for him a place of report only.)19 Basil was, then, well aware
of contemporary monastic movements, and the places—Egypt, Palestine, Syria—
that occupy a central role in traditional accounts of the rise of monasticism, but
there were other influences. It is worth exploring, even if briefly, these influences,
for they alert us to other aspects of the Christian monastic story, obscured by the
traditional account. These aspects are twofold. First, there is the question of
Christian pre-monastic asceticism. It is striking that in Athanasios’ Life, when
Antony finally responds to the call to leave all and devote himself to a life of
asceticism, he places his sister with ‘known and trusted virgins’, and he himself
soon finds an ‘old man, who had lived the ascetic life in solitude from his youth’.20
So in a Life, which is often read as the account of the first monk, though the Life
itself makes no such unambiguous claim,21 there are clear references to earlier
forms of Christian asceticism: in particular, groups of virgins (or widows), of
whom we know from other sources, such as the Didascalia Apostolorum, and soli-
tary ascetics in villages. We can trace this background in Basil’s own life. Whatever
it was that Basil developed, there already existed a kind of ascetic family commu-
nity in which his sister Makrina—according to his brother Gregory of Nyssa, an
important influence on Basil himself, though, as we have seen, never mentioned
by him—played a leading role.22 But second, the traditional literature on early
monasticism sets it in the context of withdrawal—ἀποτάγη—from human soci-
ety. If, for Athanasios, as he praises Antony’s success, ‘the desert became a city’, he
17 On this, see Silvas, Asketikon, esp. 102–45.

18 See Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (University of California Press, 1994), 73.
19 See Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea , 73, n. 53. 20 Athanasios, Life of St Antony, 3.
21 It is perhaps in Jerome that we first find the idea that Antony was claimed as the first monk, for
in his Life of St Paul of Thebes Jerome contests this claim and puts forward the—largely fictional—Paul
as the true candidate for the title.
22 On Makrina, see Silvas, Asketikon, 60–83.
is conscious of the paradox he has uttered, for the monasticism of withdrawal

meant withdrawal from human society. But such monasticism of withdrawal was
not the only kind of monasticism to emerge, it is just that the sources for the
ascetic communities that remained in the city are much less evident and much
more difficult to interpret. However, after the research of such as David Brakke
and Peter Hatlie, we can form a much better picture of city (or town) monasti-
cism. Brakke has shown how much effort Athanasios devoted to fostering ascetic
groups in the towns and villages of Egypt, alongside his better known attempt to
secure the support of the desert monks;23 while Hatlie has built up a picture—
from an array of sources: hints in historians, canonical material, and evidence
from hagiography— of the development of monasticism in the city of
Constantinople, which, though scarcely typical, was far removed from the asceti-
cism of the desert.24 In 370, Basil became archbishop of Caesarea, and much of
his later reflection on the monastic state concerned the group, or groups, of
ascetics he established under his own authority in Caesarea of Cappadocia.
Gregory’s Life of St Makrina is maddening when it comes to dates, and indeed
it is clear that he is not much interested in the chronological dimension of
Makrina’s life. Nevertheless, it seems that the decision by Makrina and her mother
Emmelia to establish an ascetic community at Annisa was occasioned by the
death of Naukratios, which can be dated to the spring of 356.25 And it has been
argued, by Anna Silvas, that it was in the wake of that tragic event that, on the one
hand, the ascetic community at Annisa was established, and, on the other, that
Basil returned from Athens, passing quickly through Constantinople, finishing
his studies at Caesarea, before returning home. Once home, Makrina persuaded
him to abandon his plans for a secular career and accept baptism and embark on
an ascetic life. His monastic tour followed quickly on this decision, and he even-
tually returned home to invite Gregory (who had been hurt by his being aban-
doned in Athens) to join him at Annisa. If this chronology is right, however, the
community, whose praises he sang, was the one set up by his sister, Makrina, to
which he had returned, though he doesn’t breathe a word of this.
For Basil was very enthusiastic about his ascetic retreat in Pontos, by the river
Iris, as we learn from the letter numbered as second in the collection of his letters,
which he sent to his friend, Gregory of Nazianzos, in about 359. The date and the
recipient of the letter are significant; Basil had a little earlier written to Gregory
praising the physical setting of his retreat in Pontos, to which he invites his friend
Gregory whom he had abandoned in Athens:
23 See, especially, David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Clarendon Press, 1995).
24 Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca.350–850 (Cambridge University
Press, 2007).
25 See Silvas, Asketikon, 67.
There is a high mountain, covered with a thick forest, watered on its northerly
side by cool and transparent streams. At its base is outstretched an evenly
sloping plain, ever enriched by the moisture from the mountain. A forest of
many-coloured and multifarious trees, a spontaneous growth surrounding the
place, acts almost as a hedge to enclose it, so that even Kalypso’s isle, which
Homer seems to have admired above all others for its beauty, is insignificant as
compared to this.26
And so on. Gregory eventually overcame his scruples and joined Basil in Pontos,
but before joining his friend in Pontos, he had replied to Basil’s letter and received
a response, which is preserved in Basil’s correspondence as the second letter.
Gregory’s response to Basil’s account of the beauty of the place had been guarded;
he had apparently said (Gregory’s letter is lost) that he would rather learn some-
thing about Basil and his companions’ ‘habits and mode of life’ than the beauty of
the place—he wants to know about their τρόπος rather than their τόπος. Basil, in
his reply, commends Gregory for this, remarking that, though he could leave
behind his life in the city, he has not yet been able ‘to leave himself behind’
(ep. 2.1). What is needed is separation from the world altogether, but what this
means is not so much bodily separation, as separation from sympathy, fellow feel-
ing, with the body and its concerns, which include home, possessions, love of
friends, social relations, and even knowledge derived from human teaching. To
this end solitude (ἐρημία) is very valuable, as it calms the passions and affords the
reason leisure (σχολή) (cf. ep. 2.2). Basil goes on to speak of the purifying of the
soul, when it is deprived in solitude of the constant distraction of civil and family
life. The soul is enabled to relinquish this world and ‘to imitate on earth the
anthems of angels’ choirs; to hasten to prayer at the very break of the day, and to
worship our Creator with hymns and songs’ (ep. 2.2). The beginning of this puri-
fication of the soul is tranquillity (ἡσυχία), which enables the soul to withdraw
into itself and by itself to ascend to contemplation of God. For this, the reading of
and meditation on the Scriptures is valuable, for they contain not just precepts to
follow, but examples to imitate. Prayer is stimulated by reading the Scriptures; it
engenders in the soul a distinct conception of God, but more than that brings
about the indwelling of God in the soul, for ‘the indwelling of God is this—to
hold God ever in memory, His shrine established within us’ (ep. 2.3). There then
follow reflections on the way of life that is conducive to this: reflections on the
way we are to behave one towards another, with respect and courtesy, neither
harsh towards others nor withdrawn; reflections on clothing, utilitarian, not
26 Basil, Ep. 14.2, trans. Roy F. Deffarari (St Basil, The Letters, vol. I (Heinemann / Harvard
University Press, 1926), 107). I have used the text found in Basilio de Cesarea, Le lettere, vol. I, ed.
Marcella Forlin Patrucco, Società Editrice Internazionale (Corona Patrum, 1983), with its valuable
commentary.
ostentatious; food is to be simple and adequate, preceded and followed by prayer;

sleep to be light.
There are several things that are striking about this. First of all, most of it could
have been said by a pagan philosopher, talking about the higher life of thought:27
the emphasis on tranquillity, the sense of distance from the world ushering in
proximity to heaven and heavenly beings; again, Basil’s account of appropriate
dress for the Christian ascetic recalls the accounts of the cynic philosophers. But,
second, the classical style and allusions are shot through with language that is
distinctively Christian. In the Italian edition of Basil’s letters, the fascinating com-
mentary by the editor, Marcella Forlin Patrucco, reveals, for example, that just
after describing the Christian monk’s dress in terms of the cynic philosopher,
when he describes them as ‘mourners’, or ‘those who grieve’ (οἱ πενθοῦντες), he is
employing a word that had became a technical term for an ascetic in the Syrian
tradition.28 A more obvious example occurs right at the beginning of the letter,
when Basil agrees with Gregory that solitude on its own is useless, because our
minds remain cluttered, and says that we need ‘to keep close to the footsteps of
Him who pointed the way to salvation’, and goes on to quote Matt. 16:24, about
following Christ by denying oneself and taking up one’s cross. Basil, then, seems
to stand, quite unselfconsciously at the interface between classical culture and the
message of the Gospel. But having said that, we must add: Basil is certainly facing
in one direction—towards the Scriptures; there is a kind of turning-point in the
letter when he says, ‘But the best way to the discovery of what is needed is medita-
tion on the Scriptures inspired by God’ (ep. 2.3). It has recently been argued that
it was his elder sister Makrina who, as well as turning Basil to the ascetic life,
brought home to him the crowning significance of the Scriptures.29 Finally, how-
ever, we find something else that is to become characteristic of Basil: viz., the way
in which our relationships with one another become themselves an ascetic way.
For Basil, though the ascetic way involves an inward transformation, it is some-
thing that involves others, something that is tested and furthered by our relation-
ships with other people. In this letter it is very striking, for however much the
language recalls the ideal of the ‘alone returning to the alone’, the letter closes with
several pages concerned with how we are to live together, how we are to behave
one towards another.
In that account, I have noticed a few places where, it has been argued by Anna
Silvas that the influence of Makrina is to be found. But maybe, we can go much
further than this, and say that what Basil is describing is the community life that
he joined after his search for the ‘true monastic life’; he is talking about the com-
munity set up by Emmelia and Makrina. The ascetic life that Basil is extolling to
27 See especially, Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford University Press, 1995).
28 See Basilio di Cesare, Le lettere, I, 272. 29 Silvas, Asketikon, 70.
his friend is something he discovered, not something he established. The features

of this experiment in family-based ascetic life, as described by Gregory of Nyssa
in his Life of his sister, are strikingly similar to what Basil describes in ep. 2 to
Gregory: the communal life of these ‘virgins’ (as they are described), called ‘phi-
losophy’, enabled them to be free from the cares of life and from worldly trivial
ities, and brought them into harmony with the life of the angels. They possessed
nothing; their life was occupied with ‘attention to the things of God, prayer with-
out ceasing, and the uninterrupted chanting of the Psalms, which was extended
equally in time through night and day, so that for the virgins it was both work and
rest from work’.30 We learn, too, that within the community of virgins, ‘all differ-
ences of rank were removed’.31 The nature of their life of prayer is described here
only in general terms—continuous repetition of the Psalter is mentioned; at one
point there is allusion to orientation, facing East, for prayer—elsewhere we learn
that there was an evening office at the lighting of the lamp,32 and we can presume
there were other offices throughout the day. Although there is no direct reference,
it is clear that the account of this life is meant to recall the apostolic community in
Acts 2:42–7, in which the apostles held all in common and shared in a life of
prayer. So, we find that the account in Gregory’s Vita Macrinae of the ascetic
community Makrina and her mother had established is full of echoes of what we
can read in Basil’s second letter. Or, perhaps it is the other way about: it is Basil’s
letter that is echoing the ascetic, communal life that Gregory describes in
the Life.33
There are perhaps a few more touches that we can add to our account of
Makrina’s ascetic community. Stephen J. Davis, in his study of the cult of St
Thekla, put Makrina’s community in the context of communities of virgins and
widows, inspired by the example of St Thekla, and gives another example, one
Marthana, mentioned by Egeria in her account of her pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, who may have fostered another such community.34 The idea that Makrina
could have been the dominant figure at Annisa was suggested long ago by Susanna
Elm, and her book, ‘Virgins of God’, an exploration of female asceticism in the
fourth century, gives us a glimpse, and sometimes more than a glimpse, of forms
of Christian asceticism that antedate the ‘rise of the monastic movement’.35
Once we alter the focus of our lenses, so that the ‘rise of monasticism’ is no
longer the event in sharp focus, we can maybe discern a picture of communal
asceticism, often among women, in which Makrina is a significant figure. This
could be put another way: once we stop looking at the history of Christianity as a
30 Vita 382:15–19; Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord, 60.

31 Vita 381:26–7; Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord, 59. 32 Vita 399:1–3.
33 Vita 381, l. 15–383, l. 8. 34 Davis, Cult of St Thekla, 62–4, 56.
35 Susanna Elm, ‘Virgins of God’: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1994); on
Makrina, see 104.
history of men, the picture of the early Church becomes significantly different,
and women like Makrina can step from the shadows.
I want to close by looking very briefly at the scene of Makrina’s deathbed. As
she is about to die, we are told that she stretched out her hands to God and prayed
‘in a gentle undertone, so that we could scarcely hear her words’: words that
Gregory goes on to quote. She prayed:
It is you, Lord, who have freed us from the fear of death. You have made our life
here the beginning of our true life. You grant our bodies to rest in sleep for a
season and you rouse our bodies again at the last trumpet.
You have given in trust to the earth our earthly bodies, which you have
formed with your own hands, and you have restored what you have given, by
transforming our mortality and ugliness by your immortality and your grace.
You have delivered us from the curse of the law and from sin, by being made
both on our behalf. You have broken the dragon’s head—that dragon who has
seized man by the throat and dragged him through the yawning gulf of dis
obedience. You have opened for us the way of the resurrection, after breaking
the gates of hell, and have destroyed him that had the power of death.
You have given as a token to those who fear you the image of the holy cross, to
destroy the adversary and to bring stability to our lives.
Eternal God, for whom I was snatched from my mother’s womb, whom my
soul loved with all its strength, to whom I consecrated my flesh from my youth
until now, entrust to me an angel of light, who will lead me by the hand to the
place of refreshment, where the ‘water of repose’ is, in the bosom of the holy
patriarchs.
May you, who cut through the fire of the flaming sword and assigned to para-
dise him who was crucified with you and entrusted to your pity, remember me
too in your kingdom, because I too have been crucified with you; from fear of
you I have nailed down my flesh and have been in fear of your judgments.
May the terrible gulf not separate me from those whom you have chosen,
nor may the malignant Enemy set himself across my path, nor may my sin be
discovered in your sight, if having error through the weakness of our human
nature, I have committed any sin in word or in deed.
May you who have power on earth to forgive sins, forgive me, that I may
draw breath and that I be found in your presence, ‘having shed my body and
without spot or wrinkle’ in the form of my soul, and that my soul may be inno-
cent and spotless and may be received into your hands like incense in your
presence. (70–1)
While she was thus praying, Gregory tells us, ‘she made the sign of the cross on
her eyes, on her face, and on her heart’. Evening fell and the lamp was brought in.
Makrina opened her eyes and gazed at the light. Gregory saw that she wanted to
recite the evening office of thanksgiving, which she did, though her voice failed
her and she prayed only in her heart and by gesture. After making the sign of the
cross at the close of the office, ‘she gave a great deep sigh and ended her life and
her prayers at the same time’ (72).
Scholars comment that it is unlikely that Makrina could have prayed such a
prayer as she lay dying, but I wonder. For the prayer is a tissue of Scriptural allu-
sions, especially to the Psalter, which we know she knew by heart. It seems to me
entirely plausible that she prayed in these words, or words like them; indeed, one
might reflect that Gregory, having been brought up in the household led by his
mother and sister, would have had much the same mental tapestry of Scriptural
passages, so that much would be familiar, and easily recalled. The prayer itself is
carefully, though simply, constructed, falling into two parts, the former concerned
with what God has done for us, pre-eminently in the Death and Resurrection of
Christ, the latter consisting of a series of petitions that she, Makrina, be brought
to enjoy the fruits of that victory.
It is a prayer that is in no way false to what we know about Makrina, and we
can be confident that her prayer was heard, and that she is now among those on
whose prayers we can rely.
9
Evagrios
The ‘Noetic’ Language of Prayer
‘If you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you will be a
theologian.’ This quotation from Evagrios is perhaps familiar; it is one of his most
quoted remarks. It is found in his treatise, On Prayer 61, in the enumeration I am using
(that of the Philokalia of the Holy Ascetics, an anthology of hesychast texts com-
piled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, first
published in Venice in 1782, where it appears under the name of St Neilos). But as
this lecture is to revolve around a close reading of this passage, it might be as well
to say a few words about Evagrios himself.
Evagrios lived in the fourth century, and earlier on in his life was associated
with the Cappadocian Fathers, St Basil the Great and St Gregory of Nazianzus. He
eventually found his way to the Egyptian Desert, where he lived as one of the
‘desert fathers’ for almost two decades, until his death in 399. Among these
ascetics he proved to be both influential and controversial. He is often and rightly
regarded as the great theorist of the monastic asceticism of the Egyptian Desert,
for he distilled the ascetic wisdom of the desert fathers into something like a sys-
tematic structure. But he achieved that by using categories drawn from earlier
Christian thinkers who were deeply indebted to Platonism, notably the two
‘Christian Platonists of Alexandria’: Clement and Origen.
Christian monasticism has always been deeply ambivalent about Platonism: on
the one hand, making use of its philosophical categories, not least those con-
cerned with human psychology, and, on the other hand, rejecting it as ‘outer
learning’ opposed to the ‘inner learning’ of the Gospel and the Christian way of
life. Evagrios’ fate is emblematic of this ambivalence. Already in his lifetime he
was controversial. In the very year he died his views were condemned by
Theophilos, pope of Alexandria.1 Evagrios was anathematized as an Origenist,
along with Origen and Didymos, at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553. And the
fundamental reason for that condemnation was his affinity to the ‘outer wisdom’
of the Platonists. Nevertheless, his ascetic theology lost nothing of its influence; it
1 For this stage of the Origenist controversy, see Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy:
The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton University Press, 1992). For the
sixth-century controversy, see Antoine Guillaumont, Les ‘Kephalaia Gnostica’ d’Évagre le Pontique,
Patristica Sorbonensia 5 (Editions du Seuil, 1962).
was so compelling that one cannot begin to understand the monastic and ascetic
theology of the Byzantines without a good grounding in the ideas of Evagrios.
And it is precisely his skillful use of Platonist categories that made him so popular.
Let me give an example of the way he uses Platonic categories to elucidate the
Christian way of prayer. Perhaps the most fundamental element of Platonism
made use of by Evagrios is the tripartition of the soul into the intellect (the nous),
and the two lower parts of the soul: the psychic energy of the soul or the incensive
part (to use a useful translation, for it is in being incensed that this part of the soul
manifests itself), and the desiring part. Prayer, as we shall see in more detail later, is
an activity of the intellect, for it is in prayer that we know God; but this intellectual
activity can be hindered by the lower parts of the soul: desire distracting the intel-
lect, and the incensive part occluding or darkening the intellect. Either way, the
intellect is prevented from prayer, and Evagrios develops this analysis or diagnosis
which distinguishes between distraction (which is tiresome, but not fundamental)
and occlusion (which is fundamental) with the skill of an experienced spiritual
father (or spiritual director, to use a nomenclature more familiar in the West).
Already I have introduced a subordinate theme of my lecture: the place of
Platonism within Christianity. This topic, I maintain, is often approached in a way
that makes for misunderstanding. It often appears in modern scholarly circles as
part of a dualism between the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ and the ‘Greek’, an opposition
presented in dualist terms as between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. But I am more interested in
exploring how and why Platonism was so attractive to early Christianity, and why
the attraction is such a recurrent feature of Christian intellectual history; one
needs only to think of the Renaissance, the Cambridge Platonists, the place of
Plato in nineteenth-century Romanticism, and so on.2
But if that is my subordinate theme, what of my main theme? For that, let
me return to our quotation from On Prayer. It is, as I have already asserted, the
second half of one of the 153 short sayings that are grouped together to make
the treatise. The whole saying reads, ‘If you are a theologian, you will pray
truly, and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian’. But its familiarity is,
it seems to me, quite deceptive, and almost every term in that short saying
needs close scrutiny. Indeed, most words we use in this context - spirituality,
for instance - need looking at carefully. We can perhaps let the pronouns pass,
and the verb ‘to be’, but not much else; even the word ‘if ’ might invite scrutiny
were it not for the fact that the whole saying makes it clear that we are dealing with
what logicians call strict implication or entailment. Certainly ‘pray’, ‘theologian’,
2 For a brief exposition of this, see my contribution to the article on Plato/Platonismus,

‘III. Christlicher Platonismus’, in the Theologische Realenzyklopadie, ed. Gerhard Müller et al., vol. 26
(Walter de Gruyter, 1996), 702–7.
Evagrios 99
and ‘noetic’ require careful attention. But there is another problem. ‘Patristics’
or ‘the early Christian Fathers (and rarely Mothers)’ has in recent decades been
overtaken, as a term of historical periodization, by ‘late antiquity’, thus confining
the universe of discourse to a limited period—a period of history between
classical antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This usage threatens to rob us of
the claim to authority implicit in the term ‘patristics’ (already diluted by ‘the
early Christian Fathers’). Used in this way, ‘late antiquity’ conveys a limitation
of sense that I really want to resist, for in the Orthodox tradition, to which I belong,
‘patristic’ refers to the period between the apostolic period and now; it refers
to our fathers, and mothers, who have handed on to us the faith. The Fathers
(and Mothers, perhaps no less important for being largely unknown by name)
of late antiquity are hugely important, almost definitive of what came after, but
they do not exhaust the meaning of the term ‘patristic’ by limiting its connotation
to a historical period.
Furthermore, the now commonly-used term ‘spirituality’ is also problematic,
although the problem is almost the inverse of that raised by the use of ‘late
antiquity’. Instead of being a term that consigns to the past, it is a term defined by
the concerns of modernity and post-modernity to rid religious practice and
religious belief of any of the distractions that for most Christians, and many of
those who belong to other religious traditions, used to be the heart of the matter:
things like ritual, belief, dogma, which are understood as distracting from the
heart of ‘spirituality’. What that ‘heart of spirituality’ amounts to is something
like the reaching out of the human heart or spirit after the ultimate, something
that, it is maintained, all religions are ‘about’, but which they clothe in essentially
secondary and, in principle, distracting concerns such as ritual, belief, and
dogma. Ritual, belief, and dogma vary from religion to religion and, indeed,
within religions; therefore, they divide one religion from another, and express
divisions within religions. But the heart of the matter—spirituality—is something
that all religions have in common; it is an ecumenism of the spirit. And its
claims, in what we are encouraged to think of nowadays as a ‘global village’, press
hard on us because, whereas religions divide, spirituality unites and can be the
bearer of harmony and peace. Of this ideal of ‘spirituality’, all I want to say at the
moment is that it is a category that fits ill with the concerns of the men and
women of late antiquity, and equally with the fathers (and mothers) as I have
defined them above.
If we stick to late antiquity—which is what I shall do in this lecture, though
please note my caveat above—we must first observe that the men and women of
late antiquity had no word in either Latin or Greek, and still less in Syriac or
Coptic, for what we call ‘spirituality’. Spiritualitas is a late form; the earlier form
spiritalitas is rare and means either ‘immateriality’, or the state of one endowed
with supernatural grace (and thus no longer psychikos but pneumatikos, in

St Paul’s language), something that no Christian of the first millennium, at least,
could have explained without reference to baptism. There seems to be no
Greek word at all. If they had no word, then we should beware of supposing
they knew the thing. To talk of late antiquity as ‘the Age of Spirituality’ (to recall
the title of a famous, and wonderful, exhibition) is to impose on the men and
women of late antiquity categories they did not have and would not have
understood. In particular, it involves seeing continuities where they saw discon
tinuity, and maybe imposing discontinuity in what for them were continuities.
This applies, especially, I think, to my subordinate theme and one of the most
fascinating problems of the period, namely the relationship between Christianity
and Platonism.
But let us return to Evagrios and his dictum, ‘If you are a theologian, you will
pray truly, and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian’. Most discussions of this
that I have come across take for granted that we know what Evagrios meant by
‘theologian’ and ‘prayer’, so that this dictum is about the union of ‘theology’ and
‘spirituality’. Within this supposed union, theology is deprived of its intellectual
edge, and becomes a kind of soft-centred resource for striking ideas that can
become food, or pabulum, for meditation; meditation, mark you, for, in this ecu-
menism of the spirit, that is what prayer is assumed to amount to—meditation, or
contemplation. But all this runs across the grain of what the words ‘theologian’
and ‘prayer’—theologos and proseuchē—are likely to have meant for Evagrios and
his disciples.
Let us start with prayer—proseuchē. Both Origen and Gregory of Nyssa—two
of the Fathers to whom Evagrios was indebted—have explicit, and closely similar,
discussions of what this word can mean. Both make the point—in their treatises
on prayer, or the Lord’s Prayer—that in the Bible this word is one of a pair, euchē
and proseuchē, or, in the verbal forms, euchomai and proseuchomai, that are used
in closely similar ways, though Gregory is more inclined to impose a formal dis-
tinction between euchē, vow, and proseuchē, prayer or invocation. ‘A vow’, he says,
‘is a promise of something hallowed in accordance with piety; a prayer is a request
for good things made to God with supplication’, and a little later on, ‘converse
[with God] will not be in boldness (parrhēsia), unless an approach has been made
through a vow made beforehand and the offering of gifts; vow must necessarily
precede prayer’.3 Origen has a somewhat longer discussion and is less prescriptive
about biblical usage.4 But what is important, it seems to me, about both these
discussions is that prayer, in either sense, presupposes, and takes place within, a
3 Gregory of Nyssa, De Oratione Dominica II, ed. J. F. Callahan, Gregorii Nysseni Opera VII.II
(Brill, 1992), 21, ll. 20–2; 22, ll. 13–15.
4 Origen, De Orat. Dom. 3–4.
Evagrios 101
relationship to God; it is asking God for things or promising God things. For
Gregory, the promise comes first. It is only within a relationship already estab-
lished that we can presume to ask God for anything, though a more detailed dis-
cussion would reveal that for Gregory it is only because God has made us the
kind of beings who can relate to God, by making us in his own image and likeness
that we can promise anything to God at all. But praying entails God, and entails
belief in God. There is no hint that prayer could be merely a self-orientation
towards simplicity. Generally speaking, I think it is true to say that for the Fathers
prayer means asking God for things, and thanking him and praising him. Nor do
they avoid the problems that this raises: problems of prayer and providence, what
is meant by an answer to prayer, and so on. Both the treatises I have mentioned go
on to discuss such matters.
It is, however, true to say that Gregory, at least, goes on to speak of prayer in a
much more exalted vein; but it is prayer as invocation of God, not some more
exalted kind of prayer. This comes out clearly in the first, introductory homily on
the Lord’s Prayer. In that homily, he speaks of the necessity of prayer—something
he says that most people have not grasped—and talks about the tradesman, the
craftsman, the lawyer, the farmer, the judge. All of them need to ask God for help
for the things they have in hand, otherwise they will fail even in what they are
devoting themselves to; they will let sin intrude and be swayed from their tasks by
their passions. It is into that context—and not as a separate issue—that Gregory
introduces an encomium of prayer:
Prayer is converse with God, contemplation of things invisible, the assurance of

things longed for, being of equal honour with the angels, advance in good things,
and turning away from evil things, putting right where one has failed, the enjoy-
ment of things present, and the basis of things hoped for.5
Prayer is all this, because, since it is converse with God—theou homilia—it is

access to another world, a world more real, more powerful, more lasting than this
one. And through such access this world, and our life in this world, is transformed.
This, it seems to me, is an appropriate moment to consider further my subor
dinate theme in this lecture; that is the theme of the relationship between
Christianity and Platonism. It comes in here, because Christian language of two
worlds invites it. This idea is both thoroughly biblical, with its contrast between
heaven and earth, and also one very close to the experience of the early Christians
(and indeed of any Christians who take note of the language of their prayers) and
especially to their experience of the Eucharist, where the earthly liturgy is seen as
being part of the heavenly liturgy of ‘thousands of Archangels and tens of
5 Gregory of Nyssa, De Orat. Dom. 1 (8, l. 30–9, l. 4).

thousands of Angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-winged and many-
eyed, soaring aloft upon their wings’, to use the language with which the Sanctus
is introduced in the liturgy of St John Chrysostom. So, when Christians came to
talk of these two worlds, they eagerly adopted the language of the Platonists, their
language of a sensible world and an intelligible world—kosmos aisthētos and kos-
mos noētos. One speaks of a ‘Platonic influence’, which is fair enough; however,
this influence should not be construed as the impact of one collection of ideas on
another collection of ideas (of Platonism on the Bible), but rather as the way
Christians who spoke and thought in Greek, who were Greek, drew upon ideas
familiar to them to answer problems that were problems for them.6 Here the
problem was that of conceptualizing the contrast between the world understood
apart from prayer, a world limited to what we perceive through the senses, limited
to our daily concerns, and the world opened up by prayer, a world immediately
present to God, a world transfigured by his grace and power, a world so real that
the world of our daily concerns seems unreal or insubstantial in comparison.
Plato’s two worlds seemed to express much of that contrast, and allegories that he
used to explain the contrast between the two worlds—especially the parable of
the Sun and the allegory of the Cave—seemed allegories valid for Christians, too.
So, to express the reality of the world revealed in prayer, a reality, however, con-
cealed to our daily concerns, we find Christians using the language of intelligible
reality, borrowed from the Platonic tradition.
Evagrios develops such an approach to prayer, and the saying we are consider-
ing is part of that development. That development, we know, was controversial,
but what we find in his treatise, On Prayer, which was preserved as a work by his
considerably younger contemporary, St Neilos, was clearly regarded by tradition
as entirely acceptable. But it is a development, not a fresh start; proseuchē, for
Evagrios, still has the primary meaning of invocation of God. There are, for
example, a series of sayings in his treatise, On Prayer7 about praying for things
(31–4). We need to pray for good things, but we often do not know what is good
for us; if we persist in asking for what we think will be good for us when it is
contrary to God’s will, then we may find that God grants it to us. ‘And after all,
when I got what I was asking for, I bitterly regretted that I had chosen to ask for
6 I would like to quote the wise words of Michael McCormick speaking of the question of ‘influ-
ence’ of Byzantium on the West in the ninth century: ‘the conceptual connotations of “influence” sup-
ply a metaphor which misleads historical analysis. To speak of Byzantine “influence” is implicitly to
suggest that Constantinople was a kind of medieval volcano actively spewing forth its culture across
thousands of miles onto an inert, passive Frankish West. Yet historical observation suggests that just
the opposite is true: when one culture encounters another, the receiving culture takes the initiative of
appropriating something from the donor culture’. From ‘Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter
with Byzantium down to the Accession of Charles the Bald’. In Eriugena: East and West, ed. Bernard
McGinn and Willemien Otten, Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies, 5 (University of Notre
Dame Press, 1994), 15–48, at 19.
7 References in parentheses: I have used (with minor modifications) the translation by Simon
Tugwell OP, published by the Faculty of Theology, Oxford, 1987.
Evagrios 103
my own will to be done, because the thing did not tum out as I had expected’ (32).
Nonetheless, we must ask from God without doubting, for ‘what is more exalted
than conversing with God and being occupied in consorting with him’ (34)?
However, in such invocation of God the Christian discovers within himself the
activity of what Evagrios calls the intellect, or nous; prayer is defined, not just as
‘conversation with God’, as we have heard from Gregory, but more precisely, ‘con-
versation of the intellect with God’ (35). Evagrios goes on to make the link between
prayer and the intellect, or nous, still more precise:
Undistracted prayer is the highest intellectual activity of the intellect (35).

Prayer is the ascent of the intellect to God (36).
Prayer is the activity which befits the dignity of the intellect; in other words, it is
the best and most uncontaminated activity and use of the intellect (84).
Prayer is the essential activity of the intellect. It is, however, an activity that the
intellect only rarely attains; only an intellect attentive to God is able to pray—
Evagrios is fond of the play on words between prosochē and proseuchē, attentive-
ness and prayer (see especially 149). And the opposite of prosochē is distraction. It
is undistracted prayer that is the height of intellectual activity. I have already sug-
gested that the main reason for Evagrios’ huge popularity in Byzantine monasti-
cism was the shrewd insight and psychological wisdom of his analysis of the
forms of distraction (and even more what he calls a darkening or occlusion of the
intellect that destroys any capacity for prayer). But if the intellect can rise above
distraction to the state that Evagrios called apatheia, a kind of dispassionate
serenity, then it attains its natural state which is the state of prayer. State—
katastasis—is the word Evagrios uses, not so much something that you do, rather
it is something that you are; in this state ‘the philosophical and spiritual mind is
snatched up on high in the most intense love’ (53). The use of the word ‘philo-
sophical’ ought not to surprise now: but if it still does, let me remind you that by
the time of Evagrios such was the penetration of Platonic themes into Christian
consciousness that the word ‘philosopher’ had come in Christian parlance to
mean a monk, and ‘philosophy’ to be the equivalent of a life of prayer.
To pray truly, then, is to have attained that state of parrhēsia, of openness, with
God, in which prayer is a true account of our relationship with God: a state of
communication, or communion, which is entry to that other world in the imme-
diacy of God’s presence that transfigures the world in which we live our ordin
ary lives.
But to pray truly is, according to Evagrios, to be a theologian, a theologos. Our
biggest problem in understanding Evagrios here is our failure to realize the
awesomeness of this claim. We are familiar with theologians (I suppose I might
describe myself as a theologian); there are perhaps fewer of them than in the past,
but we are familiar with the breed. Not so for Evagrios: theologos was a word with
a quite restricted use. Generally speaking, until well into the Byzantine period,
the Christian use of the word is restricted to the human authors of the Sacred
Scriptures. Gradually it is applied to a few of the Fathers—the two friends, Basil of
Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, two of the so-called Cappadocian Fathers—
and there also evolved a use of the word that envisaged only three named theolo-
gians: St John the Theologian, that is the Evangelist and author of the Apocalypse
(the ‘Divine’, in the now rather old-fashioned sense of that word as a noun),
St Gregory the Theologian, that is the Nazianzen, and St Symeon the New
Theologian, a controversial monastic figure at the turn of the millennium. The
word theologia also had a much more restricted sense in the fourth century than
the modern word ‘theology’, which can mean any kind of systematic study based
on religious premises (as in ‘theology of society’, for example), not to mention the
modern secular use to mean a system of irrelevant ideas. The Greek word theolo-
gia means strictly knowledge of God. By the fourth century in Christian thought
there is a fairly clear distinction between theologia and oikonomia, the latter being
concerned with the created order and God’s dealings with it. The doctrine of the
Incarnation, in this sense, belongs not so much to theology as to oikonomia. So
theology is concerned with knowledge of God himself. This develops in two ways.
The first pursues the insight that we cannot find any concepts that measure up to
the divine reality; in fact we come closer to God by denying that any concepts can
apply to him. This leads to what came to be called apophatic theology, the the
ology of denial. The second way develops the realization that it is, strictly speak-
ing, inappropriate to apply any concepts to God as we would to any other object,
even by way of apophasis. We should not predicate terms or names of God, but
rather praise him with such names. Further, theologia can be regarded as having a
narrower sense: not knowledge of God by tracing his activities in the world back
to their source, which is God himself, but knowledge of God’s very being by
using, in some mysterious way, the words God has given us in his revelation of
himself in Scripture—theologia as meaning simply the doctrine of the Trinity.
That is a bald summary of some of the ways in which the term ‘theology’ is
used by Evagrios’ contemporaries. But Evagrios himself mostly uses the term in a
rather different way. Instead of referring to what we know of God, however highly
qualified, it refers to our actual knowing of God, a knowing which is deeply mys-
terious; for, although the intellect in this state attains its highest activity, it is an
activity that is really a passivity, a being known, rather than a coming to know,
and very different from any kind of finding out. For Evagrios, it is a state in which
the intellect becomes naked, no longer entertaining concepts, but utterly empty
before the overwhelming reality of God. Those in this state (a state in the psycho-
logical peculiarities of which Evagrios displays no interest whatever) can be called
theologians for they have attained that state in which their intellects are entirely
receptive to God, and to nothing else (see 56‒61).
Evagrios 105
But throughout this exposition of the term ‘theology’ we have, in fact, been
using language that has been borrowed by the Fathers from Plato and the
Platonists. To quote Werner Jaeger:
Plato is the greatest of all classical theologians. Without him, neither the name
nor the subject of theology would exist . . . Theology—the study of the highest
problems of the universe by means of philosophical reason—is a specifically
Greek creation. It is the loftiest and most daring venture of the high matters.
They could not appeal to the authority intellect; and Plato’s pupils had to combat
the widespread Greek feeling (really a prejudice) that the jealousy of the gods
forbade men to understand such a divine revelation which they possessed, but
to the knowledge of good which Plato had taught them, good whose nature can-
not admit jealousy.8
But theology, for Plato, was more than the ascertaining of facts about the divine; it
entailed a whole moral reformation—the long and painful passage from the
shadows of the Cave to the daylight reality of the world outside. Moral virtue was
the indispensable basis for intellectual virtue, and neither could be achieved with-
out struggle and perseverance. Philosophy described this whole process. It was a
preparation for passing beyond this world to the world of intelligible reality;
Socrates frankly described it as a preparation for (or training in) death, meletē
thanatou (see the Phaedo). It also involved a purification of love, for nothing less
than love could inspire anyone to endure the difficulties and trials of such an
endeavour (see the Symposium and the Phaedrus). Given this background, it is
not surprising that the term was understood to describe the life of monastic
contemplation.
But Plato spoke of theologia and not, so far as I am aware of, theologoi, theolo-
gians. Theologia was the study of the ultimate principles of reality; the pursuit of
this he called philosophy, love of wisdom, and those engaged in this pursuit were
philosophers. The term theologos has a different background: it has a religious,
rather than a philosophical, significance and refers to those who sing of the gods,
or to those who speak with divine authority, that is, prophets and diviners. The
use of theologia and theologos within the same universe of discourse is not authen-
tically Platonic, but it is found in Christian writers and their pagan contemporar-
ies, the later Neoplatonists. The precursor of both groups, perhaps, is Philo, who
describes Moses as theologos,9 and of course embraces the Platonic idea of theolo-
gia. All these associations cluster around Evagrios, who speaks of the mind attain-
ing a state of pure prayer as becoming ‘philosophical’, as we have seen, but goes
8 W. Jaegar, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Basil Blackwell, 1944), II, 285, 298.
9 According to H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S Jones, A Greek English Lexicon (Clarendon Press,
1968), 790 s.v.
beyond his contemporaries, so far as I have been able to determine, by claiming

for the one who attains pure prayer, or true prayer, the exalted title of theologos.
What are we to make of this or, rather, you may be asking, what do I want to
make of all this? The thing that strikes me most is what I would call a concern for
reality, a transcendent reality that can be known or, better, admits of knowledge,
and can be expressed in terms of doctrines or dogmas. (It is the latter word I pre-
fer, not so much what is taught, as what seems to be the case; dogma derives from
dokēo, to seem.) Prayer is meaningless without the reality of God, and to admit
the reality of God is to admit something—or better, someone—whom, if we can-
not exactly understand him, we can easily enough misunderstand. It is to enter a
world where the intellect is engaged, the intellect whose activity is knowing, both
the kind of knowing where we need to argue and define, and a kind of knowing
that is a matter of being open to the pressure of a reality beyond definition, but
nonetheless a form of knowing, an apprehension of something that masters us,
not something we can master and control. That is why, it seems to me, the Fathers
move from interpretation of events and texts—in a variety of ways—to arguments
about dogma, to addressing the One who is our source and our goal, to a kind of
attention, in which prayer passes beyond the busy-ness of mental activity. This is
why the Fathers move across all these forms of what they think of as intellectual
activity without any sense of crossing impassable gulfs or confusing utterly differ-
ent kinds of activity.
But another thing that strikes me is how these early Christian thinkers, our
Fathers in the faith, relate to the philosophical world of Platonism that, at one
level, they seem to take for granted. Running through the whole of Greek
Christian history there is, I have suggested, an ambivalence towards ‘Platonism’,
an ambivalence made clear by the example of Evagrios, both the founding father
of much Byzantine ascetical theology and a condemned and reviled heretic. The
way to understand this is to realize that ‘Platonism’ represented for the Christian
fathers a body of dogmas that, as a whole, they rejected; for they rejected the
doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the idea of an eternal cycle in which
everything would eventually be restored to unity (an idea more characteristic,
perhaps, of Neoplatonism than of Plato himself), Plato’s ambivalence about
creation, as they saw it, in the Timaeus, and much else. But there were ideas in
Platonism they found they agreed with: the conviction of a single transcendent
deity, a cosmos ruled by providence, the idea of a moral order, the idea that true
reality was elsewhere, though disclosed by the world of everyday experience that
owed whatever reality it possessed to that other world.
In our exploration of Evagrios in this lecture we have seen little of this: little of
those Platonic ideas embraced by Evagrios that he shared with most of his con-
temporaries, or those ideas—mostly concerned with the primordial human state
and its final state of union with God—in which his contemporaries (and many
later Greek Christians) found evidence of his profound error. But what we have
Evagrios 107
seen is something that pervades the whole world of Byzantine ascetical theology,
and that is the sense that in prayer we are engaged with the reality of God, and
that this can be expressed by the language of intellect and intellection, of nous and
noēsis. This both unites and divides Christian from Platonist. They are united in
that they both believe they are concerned with a transcendent intelligible reality
that might be called divine (both early Christians and Platonists included in the
category of divine more than the ultimate and transcendent One), but they are
divided in that they delineated that reality in different ways and thought that
difference mattered. We fail to do them justice if, from our lofty perspective, we
elide those differences by seeking to find in them some common ‘spirituality’,
expressive of the common age in which they lived, or the common humanity
constructed by that age.
10
Evagrios on Anger
Perhaps about a quarter of a century ago, there took place an interdisciplinary

seminar, organized in Oxford by Michael Carrithers, now my colleague in
Durham, on monasticism in the world religions. At one point, after a series of
seminars on Christian monasticism, an Indian, or maybe Sinhalese, gentleman,
who had hitherto been quietly attentive, suddenly interjected with some passion
that he could not understand the enormous attention paid to sex and sexual
temptation in Christian monasticism; in Buddhism, he continued, sex is scarcely
an issue—rejection of sex is taken for granted in the monastic life—the real prob-
lem the monk has to struggle with is anger. The passionate indignation with
which he made this point curiously mirrored the point that he was making.
I remember thinking at the time that Evagrios would have understood the point
that was being made about Buddhism, and indeed would largely have agreed with
it, for while Evagrios does have things to say about sexual temptation and the
demon of fornication, he has much more to say about anger. Evagrios’ concern
with anger has been noticed by others, notably by Fr Gabriel Bunge in his fairly
recent book, Drachenwein und Engelsbrot,1 and also, in a very different vein, by
Philip Rousseau in his contribution to the last Australian ‘Prayer and Spirituality’
Conference, held in Melbourne in 2005.2 Nevertheless, there is perhaps still
something to say, though I shan’t match up to the comprehensiveness and ele-
gance of Fr Bunge’s presentation in his book.
We might, however, start with one of Fr Gabriel’s remarks.
If anyone had asked Evagrios, what in his opinion, is the worst of all the vices,
which has the most far-reaching consequences for the spiritual life, he would
most likely have unhesitatingly answered: anger. And certainly for a single rea-
son: ‘No other evil so turns one into a demon as anger’. (Ep. 56.4)3
That, at least, confirms my suspicion of a quarter-of-a-century ago. What I would

like to do in this paper is to explore why this is so, why anger is the worst of the
1 Gabriel Bunge, Drachenwein und Engelsbrot. Die Lehre des Evagrios Pontikos von Zorn und
Sanftmut (Der Christliche Osten, 1999).
2 Philip Rousseau, ‘Ancient Ascetics and Modern Virtue: The Case of Anger’. In Prayer and
Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 4: Spiritual Life, ed. Wendy Mayer, Pauline Allen, and Lawrence
Cross (St Paul’s Publications, 2006), 213–31.
3 Bunge, Drachenwein, 19.
Evagrios on Anger 109
vices, or passions, for Evagrios. I shall stick mostly to the Greek corpus of
Evagrios, because this preserves most of Evagrios’ ascetic wisdom, which is what
we are concerned with.
Let us start with Evagrios’ presentation of the eight logismoi in his treatise,
Praktikos or ‘The Monk’. As we all know, Evagrios lists what he calls the vices, or
temptations, or, most usually, ‘thoughts’, logismoi under eight headings: gluttony,
fornication, avarice, anger, grief, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. The way in
which he presents them in Praktikos makes clear why he calls them ‘thoughts’, for
he seems to be concerned, for the most part, not with the actual vices themselves,
as with trains of thought sparked off by what these vices are concerned with. This
is what he says about gluttony, the first in the list:
The thought of gluttony suggests to the monk the rapid demise of his asceticism.
It describes for his him stomach, his liver and spleen, dropsy and lengthy illness,
the scarcity of necessities and the absence of doctors. Frequently it brings him to
recall certain of his brethren who have fallen prey to these sufferings. Sometimes
it even persuades those who have suffered such maladies to visit those who are
practising abstinence and to tell them of their misfortunes and how they came
about as a result of the asceticism. (P 7)4
The logismos of gluttony is not at all gluttonous thoughts (though elsewhere

Evagrios does consider such thoughts); it is rather a train of thoughts (often,
I think, a good way of translating logismos) that play on diet and health. The ascetic
starts to think that he is ruining his health with his meagre diet, and is led, on the
one hand, to consider giving up his ascetic regime altogether and, on the other, to
get obsessed about his health, and that of others, and effectively to abandon his
life of prayer by wandering around talking to others about his health and theirs.
The same goes for the logismos of fornication: the logismos itself is not so much
thought of sexual desire and fulfilment, as the thought it leads to that if living an
ascetic life does not mean the extinction of such thoughts, then ‘they [should]
give it up, convinced that they are accomplishing nothing’ (P 8). So, too, with
avarice—not thoughts of wealth and luxury, but rather of the reality of poverty,
and the inability to see how one will cope with ‘lengthy old age, inability to per-
form manual labour, famines that will come along, diseases that will arise’ (P 9),
without depending on others, and the shame that that entails—and with acedia/
4 Translations taken from Robert E. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus,
Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2003). The following abbreviations have
been used in references: F = Foundations of the Monastic Life (pp. 1–11); Eul.= To Eulogios (pp. 12–59);
V = On Vices opposed to the Virtues (pp. 60–5); 8Th = On the Eight Thoughts (pp. 66–90); P = Praktikos
or The Monk: A Treatise on the Practical Life (pp. 91–114); Monks = To Monks in Monasteries and
Communities and Exhortation to a Virgin (pp. 115–35); Th = On Thoughts (pp. 136–82); O = Chapters
on Prayer (pp. 183–209); Exhort. = Exhortations 1–2 to Monks (pp. 217–23).
listlessness and vainglory: all of these are concerned with trains of thought that
lead to despair about the monastic life, or, in the case of vainglory, to day-
dreaming about the good one could do by sharing one’s undoubted spiritual gifts
with others (see Th 28). With the logismoi of anger and pride, Evagrios’ approach
seems to be different. Pride is essentially the refusal ‘to acknowledge that God is
[one’s] helper’ and to ascribe one’s virtue and ascetic prowess to oneself and
despise one’s brothers who do not share one’s high opinion of oneself. Anger he
describes like this:
Anger is a passion that arises very quickly. Indeed, it is referred to as a boiling

over of the irascible part and a movement directed against one who has done
injury or is thought to have done so. It renders the soul furious all day long, but
especially during prayers it seizes the mind and represents to it the face of the
one who has hurt it. Sometimes when this goes on for a while and turns into
resentment, it provokes disturbances at night accompanied by wasting and
pallor of the body, as well as the attacks of venomous wild beasts. One could
find these four signs that follow upon resentment accompanying numerous
thoughts. (P 11)
In this case, the logismos is somehow much more direct: we have a picture of how
anger takes over, becomes obsessive, blocks out any other kind of thought, even
prayer, how it can even drain the body of its strength, and reduce one to a state of
haunted madness. Elsewhere, we find the same kind of account of anger:
Anger is a plundering of prudence, a destruction of one’s state, a confusion of

nature, a form turned savage, a furnace for the heart, an eruption of flames, a
law of irascibility, a wrath of insults, a mother of wild beasts, a silent battle, an
impediment to prayer. (V 5)
It is a kind of state of inner insurgency, so that one can no longer exercise control
over oneself. The irascible or ‘incensive’ part of the soul, the thumos, in Plato’s tri-
partite analysis of the soul which Evagrios adopts, is ungovernably aroused when
one is angry. Evagrios, to be sure, allows for a proper exercise of anger, a proper
use of the thumos: it is to be directed against the demons, to be directed against
passions that have established themselves in the desiring part of the soul—‘the
usage of irascibility lies in this, namely, in fighting against the serpent with
enmity . . . Do not turn the usage of irascibility instead to one that is contrary to
nature, so as to become irascible with your brother . . .’ (Eul. 11.10); ‘The nature of
the irascible part is to fight against the demons . . .’ (P 24). Evagrios emphasizes
here, and elsewhere, that it is only against the demons that one should direct one’s
anger, not against ‘one of your own race’. And even in this case, such anger is to be
deployed ‘gently’: one is ‘to be gentle and also a fighter’ (Eul. 11.10). This kind of
anger does not stir up oneself, as in the case of anger directed against other people.
So anger is different from most of the other logismoi, less a train of thought
than the impossibility of thinking at all. It is, crucially, an ‘impediment to prayer’,
as we have just heard. That is true of all the logismoi, but for Evagrios anger is
worse. It is not difficult to see why: trains of thought can be pushed aside, at least
temporarily, but the kind of inner confusion that Evagrios depicts in the case of
anger is something before which the monk is powerless, at least immediately.
When Evagrios talks about the effect of anger, he talks about darkening,
thickening, rattling (as a lion in a cage), troubling (as in troubled waters), smoke
from chaff irritating the eyes (8 Th 4.5, 6, 7, 15, 16). These are a bit different from
the way he thinks of distraction in prayer, where the mind is distracted by images
presented to the mind or noises (see F 3, 6; Eul. 12.11; and esp. P 63, which seems
to associate distraction with the desiring part of the soul), which diminish the
soul’s attentiveness. Metaphors of darkening, thickening, rattling, troubling, and
smoke rather suggest that the soul or intellect is blinded rather than distracted.
Particularly interesting is the imagery of thickening or darkening:
The forming of a mist thickens the air; the movement of irascibility thickens the
intellect of the angry person. A passing cloud darkens the sun; a thought of
resentment darkens the mind. (8Th 4.5‒6)
‘Leave your gift before the altar,’ scripture says, ‘and go; first be reconciled with
your brother, then come’ (Matt. 5:24) and pray without disturbance. For resent-
ment darkens the ruling faculty of the one who prays and leaves his prayer in
obscurity. (O 21)
This ‘thickening’ is also ascribed to excessive sleep (Monks 48; Exhort. 1.8); some-
times it is not just anger, but all the passions that thicken the soul:
Why do the demons want to produce in us gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger,

and resentment, and the other passions? So that the mind becomes thickened by
them and unable to pray as it ought; for when the passions of the irrational part
have arisen, they do not allow it to be moved in a rational manner and to seek
the Word of God. (O 50)
There are two aspects to this metaphor of thickening or darkening. The first, and
most important, I’ve already indicated: such darkening of the intellect, or thicken
ing, does not just hinder the intellect’s natural state, which is prayer (O 47), it
prevents it altogether by blinding it. This metaphor expresses the conviction that
anger does not just distract the intellect from prayer, but occludes the intellect
itself. But thickening—παχύνειν—is a peculiarly significant word in this context.
Origen envisaged rational beings, logikoi, existing in different states in accord-

ance with the depth of their sin in turning away from God; to that depth of sin
corresponded the density of their substance—humans are denser than angels,
demons than humans.5 If this lies in the background of Evagrios’ metaphor here,
then the implication of its use is that anger thickens the human intellect and
makes it demonic. To repeat the quotation adduced by Fr Bunge at the beginning
of this paper: ‘no other evil so turns one into a demon than anger’.
That may be rather a shaky bridge—the passage on which one depends for this
account of Origen’s demonology is one of the more daring insertions by Koetschau
into the text of Origen’s De Principiis—but it leads us to a fairly secure bank on
the other side, for Evagrios’ picture of the demons is very much of beings pos-
sessed by an undying hatred of those who are drawn to God and anger towards
them; he speaks of them as being ‘very jealous of the person at prayer’ (O 46), or
‘taking revenge’ on him (O 47), and being far worse than any human could be:
‘For there is not to be found on earth any human beings more embittered than the
demons or who could undertake all at once the totality of their malevolence’ (P 5).
If anger is so bad, what is the monk to do about it? I used to think, and even
now think this is not wholly false, that Evagrios’ treatment of the passions was
characterized by seeing them as essentially ailments of the individual monk. He is
mostly concerned about the effect they have on the monk himself, rather than on
anyone else. This may well be because he is mostly giving instructions to solitar-
ies. So when he thinks about anger, he talks almost entirely about the effect on the
monk himself—as we have seen—rather than, say, the effect such anger might
have on others, the damage that one can do to others by giving in to anger. So far
that seems to be the case. But Evagrios’ remedies for anger often involve accepting
and taking part in the disciplines of a communal life. He even sees how the call to
solitude can be a ruse on the part of the demons to prevent our taking steps to
heal our anger:
When, having seized on a pretext, the irascible part of our soul is troubled, then at
the same moment the demons suggest to us that anachoresis is a fine thing, lest we
resolve the causes of our sadness and free ourselves from the disturbance. (O 22)
If at all possible, the first way to lance our anger is to encounter the one who has
disturbed us and ask forgiveness. ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath’:
Evagrios invokes this apostolic injunction not only in On Prayer, just before the
passage we have cited, but also in the Antirrhetikos:
Against the thoughts of anger that do not permit us to be reconciled to the

brothers because they depict before our eyes pretexts that are ‘suitable’ yet actu-
ally are shame, fear, and pride—‘Did he not fall into the very same offences as
5 Origen, De Principiis I 8.4, ed. Koetschau, GCS 22 (1913), 101–5.

earlier, he who transgressed in this matter?’—this is an indication of the crafti-

ness of the demon, which does not want to let the intellect become free of
resentment . . . [and there follows Eph. 4:26–7]. (Antirr. V 49)6
This letting-go of our memory of offences done to us is fundamental. It is, in pass-

ing, striking how often Evagrios moves from talking about anger to mention of
resentment, μῆνις, a dwelling on wrong done to one, or imagined so: the very
opposite of lancing the anger by encounter with the one who has aroused it.
I don’t know whether Evagrios made the link St Maximos does between μῆνις
and μνημή, memory,7 but he does seem to see memory as a source of danger in
prayer.8
Other remedies that Evagrios suggests are the offering of gifts:
Gifts extinguish resentment: let the example of Jacob convince you of this, for he
beguiled Esau with gifts when he was coming out to meet him with four hun-
dred men (Gen. 32:7). But since we are poor, let us make up for our poverty by
the hospitality of the table. (P 26)
The example of Jacob is the first given in chapter 5 of the Antirrhetikos, which
deals with anger. More generally Evagrios recommends ‘psalmody, patience and
mercy’ to calm the inflamed incensive part of the soul. The place of psalmody in
Evagrian asceticism has recently been illuminated— along with much else
Evagrian—by Fr Luke Dysinger,9 but let us remind ourselves how Evagrios sees
the singing, or quiet recitation, of the psalms as ‘putting the passions to sleep and
working to calm the incontinence of the body’, while prayer prepares the intellect
for its own proper activity (O 83), and regards psalmody as introducing us to the
‘manifold wisdom of God’, πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ Θεοῦ, while prayer introduces
us to a single and imageless wisdom (O 85). A further remedy, mentioned in To
Monks in Monasteries and Communities, is to pray for those who regard them-
selves as our enemies: ‘The person who prays for his enemies will be free of
resentment; one who is sparing with his tongue will do his neighbour no injury’
(Monks 14).
The latter half of that proverb introduces our final consideration. Mostly,
Evagrios is concerned not to deal with anger once it has done its damage, but
prevent anger. It is all perhaps rather obvious, though not for that reason at all
easy. To anger Evagrios opposes various other dispositions: love, gentleness,
6 Translation from the Syriac version of the Antirrhetikos, from an electronic version that I believe
is by David Brakke.
7 See Maximos, Ambiguum 10.44 (PG 91:1197C).
8 See my Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: from Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press,
1981), 127.
9 In Fr Luke Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford University
Press, 2005).
guarding one’s tongue, and indeed guarding one’s intellect or heart, patience, free-
dom from resentment, almsgiving. Despite what Evagrios says about the natural
use of the incensive part of the soul in combatting the demons, what we find in
Evagrios is a much greater stress on avoidance of anger altogether. It is only in the
context of an abiding gentleness that anger can be exercised at all. Evagrios’ great
exemplars of gentleness are Moses and David (the latter depending on the LXX
text of Psalm 131:1):
If someone has mastered irascibility, he has mastered the demons, but if some-
one is a slave to this passion, he is a complete foreigner to the monastic life and a
stranger to the ways of our Saviour, since the Lord himself is said to teach the
gentle his ways (cf. Ps. 24:9). Thus, the mind of anchorites becomes difficult to
capture when it flees to the plain of gentleness. For hardly any of the virtues do
the demons fear as they fear gentleness. The great Moses possessed this virtue,
for he was called ‘gentle beyond all men’ (Num. 12:3); and the holy David
claimed that it is worthy of the memory of God, saying, ‘Remember David and
all his gentleness’ (Ps. 131:1); moreover the Saviour himself commanded us to
be imitators of his gentleness, saying, ‘Learn from me, for I am gentle and hum-
ble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls’ (Matt. 11:29). And if someone
abstains from food and drink but rouses his irascible part to anger by means of
evil thoughts, he is like a ship sailing the high seas with a demon for a pilot. (Th 13)
It is a warning Evagrios often repeats, for instance in another passage from

Thoughts:
Thus it is necessary not to provoke [the irascible part] over either just or unjust
things, nor to give an evil sword to the authors of suggestions. I know many
people who often do so, and more than is necessary, when they get inflamed
with anger over trivial pretexts. Over what, pray tell me, ‘do you fall to fighting
so quickly’ (cf. Prov. 25:8), if indeed you have scorned food, riches and esteem?
And why do you feed this dog, if you claim to own nothing? If it barks and
attacks people, it is obvious that it has possessions inside and wants to guard
them. But I am convinced that such a person is far from pure prayer, for I know
that irascibility is the destroyer of such prayer . . . And why can they not learn
from the mysterious and ancient custom that people have of chasing the dogs
out of houses during the time of prayer? This is a veiled allusion to the fact that
there must be no irascibility present in those who practise prayer. And again,
‘Their wine is the wrath of dragons’ (Deut. 32:33); and the Nazirites abstained
from wine (cf. Num. 6:3). One of the pagan sages declared that ‘the gall-bladder
and the loin are inedible to the gods’—not knowing, I think, what he was saying:
I take the former to be a symbol of anger and the latter to be a symbol of
irrational desire. (Th 5)
11
Augustine on Language
The obvious place to begin a discussion of St Augustine’s ideas on language is his

discussion of signs at the beginning of de doctrina christiana, book II.1 There he
picks up the distinction he made between res and signum—thing and sign—at the
beginning of book I and sketches an understanding of language as significant dis-
course, the signs used in discourse being words, verba. Very briefly, Augustine
distinguishes between things and signs—or rather, within the realm of things,
between things per se, which are just themselves, and things used as signs, that is,
to refer to other things-and, he says, res per signa discuntur, things are learnt by
signs. Book I is devoted to things and turns out to be a treatise on love: what we
are to do with things is to love them, so to speak, with a properly ordered love
(see especially I.35.39). Book II then turns to signs. Again a distinction, between
signa naturalia and signa data, natural signs and given signs (usually translated
‘conventional signs’): natural signs signify automatically (smoke as a sign of fire),
given signs only signify because they are given meaning, given it by rational,
intending beings. ‘A sign’, as Augustine puts it, ‘causes us to think of something
beyond the impression made’; and that movement beyond the immediate impres-
sion is either in the nature of things (smoke rising from a fire) or is intended by
the one who gives the sign (using a fire to make smoke-signals: not an example
Augustine uses). Either way signs only function if they are understood. But with
signa data what is understood is not inherent in the sign, but given it by some
intelligent being. Such signa data can, in principle, be given by means of any of
the senses, but in practice it is a matter of things seen and heard, and signs heard,
words, are pre-eminent, though sight reasserts its traditional primacy when
Augustine considers the advantages of permanence provided by recording aural
words in writing.
There are two striking things that Augustine says about this system of signs
that we call human speech or language. First, it is a way of communicating
between mind and mind. The first thing he says about signa data is that they are
those signs
which living creatures show one to another for the purpose of conveying, in so
far as they are able, the motions of their spirits or something which they have
sensed or understood. Nor is there any other reason for signifying, or giving
1 Text ed. J. Martin in CSEL 32; trans. (usually used) D. W. Robertson (Bobbs-Merrill, 1958).
signs, except for bringing forth and transferring to another mind the action of
the mind in the person who makes the sign (ad depromendum et traiciendum in
alterius animum id, quod animo gerit, qui signum dat). (II.2.3)
Second, it is wholly a matter of convention, wholly a matter of presumed agree-

ment between minds that are attempting to communicate with one another, as to
what significant words mean. This agreement is enshrined in human societies
(which seem, therefore, to depend on some kind of ‘social contract’). Augustine
makes this clear in a slightly odd context, when he is talking about signs used in
divination. There he states as a principle that ‘all of these significations move
men’s minds in accordance with the consent of their societies, and because this
consent varies, they move them differently, nor do men agree upon them because
of an innate value, but they have value because they are agreed upon’ (II.24.37).
Hence the danger of divination: it involves making a compact with the demons
who make divination possible, entering into a perniciosa societas with them. Even
though Augustine recognizes that words often have some kind of natural resem-
blance to the things they signify (by onomatopoeia, say), this is still a matter of
convention so far as the word used is concerned, not something natural, for ‘since
one thing may resemble another in a great variety of ways, signs are not valid
among men except by common consent’ (II.25.38). This idea of language as a way
of communicating between minds by using a system of signs which are wholly
arbitrary and derive their authority from a kind of contract that makes society:
this, combined with Augustine’s assertion that ‘things are learnt by signs’, might
suggest an understanding of language that sounds strikingly modern, an under-
standing in which our use of language determines the concepts by which we grasp
reality. But I am not at all sure that this is really what Augustine is getting at.
It seems to me that we can further our understanding of Augustine’s notion of
language by investigating various elements that are, I would suggest, not as clear
as Augustine’s summary treatment in de doctrina christiana seems to make them.
The first point is the relationship between things and signs.
Res per signa discuntur, says Augustine in de doctrina christiana. But in his
somewhat earlier dialogue de magistro2 we find Augustine saying that ‘if we con-
sider this matter more diligently, perhaps we shall find that nothing is learnt by its
sign. For if a sign is given me and it finds me ignorant as to what thing it is a sign
of, it can teach nothing; but if I know already, what do I learn by the sign?’ (X.33).
And he concludes that paragraph by saying that it is rather the case that signs are
learnt from things known than things themselves from signs given: I learn to
associate caput with that part of animal anatomy rather than anything about
heads from the word. A little later he suggests that the value of words, to put it at
its best, is ‘that they bid us look for things, they do not display them for our
knowledge’ (Xl.36: admonent tantum, ut quaeramus res, non exhibent ut norimus).
2 See, G. Madec, ed., Oeuvres de S. Augustin, 6 (Desclée de Brouwer, 1976).

Augustine on Language 117
This leads Augustine to stress the indispensable role of the interior Master who
teaches within without the use of language: even when it appears that a human
being teaches another something, if something is truly learnt it is because of the
activity of the One who teaches within: docetur enim non verbis meis, sed ipsis
rebus Deo intus pandente manifestis (‘something is taught not by my word, but by
the things themselves manifest by God’s inward revelation’; XII.40). Adeodatus,
Augustine’s son and partner in the dialogue, sums up what he has learnt by saying
that ‘words do no more than prompt man to learn, and what appears to be the
thought of the speaker expressing himself really amounts to extremely little’
(XIV.46). So, on the one hand, signs only signify if we know the reality they sig-
nify, which renders such signification otiose; and, on the other, since we have no
access to the mind of another, we have no way of interpreting the signs which are
meant to express what is in his mind—what the speaker sees interiorly. It is con-
siderations such as these, deepened by theological considerations that we have
still to come to, that lead Augustine almost to despair of the possibility of human
communication and to see the human condition as consisting of solitary monads,
closed off from one another. ‘Man’s heart is an abyss’, says Augustine; and else-
where, ‘in the sojourning of this carnal life each one carries his own heart, and
every heart is closed to every other heart’ (Enar. in Ps. 41.13; 55.9).
Res per signa discuntur: but in de musica3 we find still further qualification of
this dictum. Here the qualification emerges in the way in which Augustine often
distinguishes fairly sharply between things, reality, which are to be investigated by
reason (ratio) and are thus accessible to all rational beings, and words and their
meaning (nomina) which are a matter of custom (consuetudo) determined by
authority (auctoritas)—customs which differ from one society to another. So we
find Augustine talking like this:
Specialized knowledge, disciplina, a knowledge not capricious but dependent on

logical analysis, ratio, is required to determine what feet, in what numbers, can
be combined to form a verse. If authority alone had determined what is and
what is not a verse, we should now have been admitting as a verse anything
which was in fact regarded as a verse by the old poets . . . we might indeed
have been admitting what may yet be regarded as a verse by any new
poet . . . . (II.7.14)
Or elsewhere, apropos whether all metre is also verse:
This cannot be decided by reason alone, since the true meanings of words are
involved. Things are equally accessible to the comprehension of us all. But the
3 See G. Finaert and F.-J. Thonnard, eds., Oeuvres de S. Augustin, 7 (Desclee de Brouwer, 1947), and
also W. F. Jackson Knight’s very useful paraphrase of St Augustine’s De Musica (The Orthological
Institute, n.d.), of which I have often made use.
meaning of words depends on authority and tradition, which are both rather
arbitrary than predictable; this is why so many different languages exist. Verbal
meanings are in contrast with things, which are founded on truth, and exist in a
single unvarying order. (III.2.3)
Reason seems to have a direct grasp of res, reality. This is not simply a matter of a
distinction between abstract truth, which is clear and simple, and concrete truth,
which is messy: in fact in de musica it is not really a matter of this at all. It is a
matter of a distinction between words used in the discussion and analysis of verse
(the subject of de musica)—words like iamb, dactyl, trochee for the various feet
(any other names would do as well, these are just the conventional ones: ‘they
deserve some respect and there is a natural reluctance to abandon tradition if it is
not opposed by reason’; II.8.15)—and the realities of rhythm, beat, etc., to which
they refer. These realities are accessible to all directly (res omnium mentibus com-
muniter sunt insitae), and Augustine often supports his discussion by saying that
if one beats out a line of verse one will both perceive the rhythmic structure and
appreciate its pleasing or displeasing nature. In this case Augustine’s appeal to
experience is an appeal to directly experienced reality. The reason being, one can
pretty confidently suppose, because the reality manifest in the form of poetry is
reality in the form of number, and Augustine, following the Pythagorean strain in
Platonism, sees the presence of number in sensible reality as a direct presence of
the intelligible in the sensible.
It begins to look a bit as if what we are finding in Augustine is a firmly Platonic
undertow in his thought. Two dichotomies inform his thought here: the dichot-
omy between the intelligible and the sensible, and that between the internal and
the external. Communication, by language preeminently, is communication
across the external by means of the sensible, and the Platonist in Augustine deeply
distrusts it.
But now, I think, we should introduce some theological factors. In his com-
mentary on Genesis against the Manichees (II.5), Augustine says that it was the
Fall of man that made necessary communication by means of signs. Whereas in
de doctrina christiana Augustine puts the diversity of language down to sin
(II.4.5), this rather suggests that language itself is a fruit of the Fall. In de musica
Vl.13.41, Augustine further suggests that the very indirectness of communication
by signs—the only way in which souls can affect other souls—provides a provi-
dential limitation on the power that one soul can have over another. Pride seeks
to subjugate other souls: the indirectness of language frustrates pride’s endeavour.
Language (along with political society) is, for Augustine, a symptom of man’s
fallen state, but itself functions so as to limit the worst consequences of that state.
Or perhaps we might say that language as such is a fractured form of communica-
tion, and it is that fractured state that reveals its nature, both positively and nega-
tively. It is indirect, it operates by signifying, by gesturing, so it should come as no
surprise that for Augustine the use of language in Scripture is governed by this
signifying potentiality so that what is important is not the truth that the language
of Scripture enshrines (for it cannot strictly speaking enshrine anything), rather
the language of Scripture points, and the further reaches of such pointing we call
allegory, which is thus seen to be a natural and expected dimension of language.
But such seemingly arbitrary pointing (though all linguistic pointing is arbitrary
for Augustine, it could not be natural) is not in any ultimate sense arbitrary (in
the sense of whimsical), for the faith of the Church effects a knowledge of that to
which the sign language of Scripture points: so the first book of de doctrina christi-
ana as well as being a treatise on love is an exposition of the creed.
That line, however, inviting though it is, is not the line I want to pursue here.
Rather I want to look at how Augustine understands communication through
language and how he sees the possibility of communication as at all possible.
Augustine, as we have seen, sees communication through signs, through lan-
guage, as a way in principle of conveying something from one mind to another.
Because of the Fall this cannot be done directly. So what happens is something
like this: the speaker shapes his thought which he grasps with his mind into a
word which he still conceives mentally (i.e., independently of language) and then
utters by means of speaking, or writing. Thus is effected a translation from res to
signa, publicly available signs. These signs are perceived by the one with whom he
wishes to communicate, the sign is understood (understood to be a sign, that is,
rather than just a noise or a squiggle) and then translated into a res grasped by the
mind. It is a doubly, or even manifoldly, indirect process; the possibilities of mis-
understanding seem endless. I may express myself badly, articulate unclearly, be
misheard, and even then the understanding of what is heard seemed to the
Augustine of de magistro to be a matter rather of divination than of understand-
ing: the other’s words prompt me to investigate what I already know, rather than
convey meaning as such. But so far we have been following Augustine’s under-
standing of the latter half of this process: language as something understood (or
not). Augustine gave a great deal of thought, too, to the first stage of the process:
the production of an uttered word. One place in particular where he discusses
this is in his de trinitate4 and there he makes quite explicit the way in which
directly theological considerations shape his analysis, for behind his understand-
ing of the production of a human word, there lies his understanding of the eternal
generation of the Word from the Father, and the temporal manifestation of the
Word or Son in the Incarnation. And this is important because the latter cannot
be intrinsically ineffective; it thus points the way for Augustine to work out a more
positive understanding of communication.
4 See of books VIII‒XV (all that concerns us here) by P. Agaesse and J. Moingt, eds., Oeuvres de
S. Augustin, 16 (Desclée de Brouwer, 1955).
‘The word which sounds without is a sign of the word that shines within, which
is much more worthy of the name “word” ’ (XV.11.20). The word within is the
word uttered by the heart, the thought that has been formed; the word without is
an expression of that word, just as the Word Incarnate is an expression of the
Eternal Word. The word within, the verbum cordis, is prior to language; language
is the clothing, or better, the body, of the verbum vocis. Augustine works out a
considerable parallelism between the human and the divine word. For example,
as the Word made flesh was not changed into flesh when incarnate but remains in
the bosom of the Father, so the human word abides in the mind of the speaker
when uttered and is not changed into a sound:
When, therefore, we speak to others, the word remaining within, we use the
ministry of a sound, or some other corporeal sign, so that by some kind of sens
ible evocation something similar comes to be in the soul of the hearer to that
which remains in the soul of the one who speaks. (IX.7.12)
What can it be that justifies the qualification of Augustine’s scepticism about

the possibility of communication? It is, it seems to me, the deeper level of inten-
tion that gives the clue here: the intention that underlies both the utterance of the
divine Word in eternity and Incarnation, and the utterance of the human word
that seeks genuine communication, rather than deeper discord. And that level of
intention, as I have rather awkwardly put it, is love. It is because of love that the
Word or Son is eternally begotten from the bosom of the Father, and because of
love that he became incarnate (see, e.g., XV.19.37 and XIll.9.12‒11.15). And the
kind of communication that matters to Augustine is also sought out of love.
This—the possibility of genuine, loving communication—is something he often
alludes to in his sermons as he shares with his congregation the difficulty he has,
is having, in attempting to communicate to them the mysteries of the Gospel, but
there is one place where he discusses this expressly and that is in the short treatise
he wrote to a priest Deogratias, De catechizandis rudibus,5 On teaching the faith
to beginners.
A good deal of the first part of this treatise concerns the dissatisfaction
Augustine says he virtually always felt when he tried to explain the faith to
others—in preaching, one imagines, just as much as in catechizing.
For with me, too, my speaking almost always displeases me. I am avid for some-
thing better, for that which I often find delight in inwardly before I begin to
express it m spoken words. And when I discern that what I utter is inferior to
what I know in myself, I am sad that my language does not measure up to my
5 See G. Combes and J. Farges, eds., Oeuvres de S. Augustin, 11 (Desclée de Brouwer, 1949).

heart. For I want him who hears me to understand everything that I have under-
stood and I sense that I cannot so speak as to bring this about. Mainly this is
because the understanding that floods the soul is like a rapid flash of lightning,
while my discourse is slow and drawn out, and so quite unlike my thought.
While my discourse unfolds, my thought has already retreated into the hidden
parts of my soul. However, in a wonderful way it leaves certain traces in my
memory, which last while I speak, and from these traces we can produce signs in
the form of words . . . . (II.3)
Augustine gives us a vivid picture of the contrast between the brilliant play of
ideas and the limitations imposed by a discourse which begins, proceeds, and, at
last, comes to an end. It is a very Platonic contrast between the immediate pres-
ence of truth to the intellect and indirect, discursive explanation in words, and
this contrast is deepened when he goes on to explain the difficulty of perhaps
having to speak slowly, in simple words, to those who find understanding difficult.
Augustine seeks to analyse this distaste he feels for his performance in the task
of teaching and preaching. First (really a restatement of what we have just heard),
‘the thoughts, which our mind perceives in silence, charm and captivate us’
(X.14), and we do not want to turn from them to explain them in words. Second,
it is much more interesting to read other people than to have to go to the trouble
of composing something oneself. Third, often the ideas we have to teach are ideas
that have become familiar with us, ideas that we have outgrown, and we find it
boring. Fourth, sometimes those listening seemed bored. Fifth, we sometimes feel
distaste for catechizing because it is taking us from something else we would
rather be doing. And finally, we ourselves may be upset, and then our speech goes
‘languidly and roughly along a troubled and tormented vein of the heart’ (langui-
dus et insuavis . . . per venam cordis aestuantem fumantemque trajectus). All of
these reasons for feeling dissatisfied with one’s attempt to communicate the faith
arise from failures of love: they are mainly forms of self-centredness. To examine
Augustine’s treatment of each point would be beyond our scope here, but one of
his responses is quite immediately relevant. To the complaint that it is boring and
dissatisfying to catechize because it is all so elementary, Augustine directly incul-
cates an attitude of love:
let us put ourselves on the level of our hearers with a love, brotherly, fatherly,
motherly, and when we have become united to their hearts the things we are
speaking of will seem new. For so great is the influence of the compassionate
soul (tantum enim valet animi compatientis affectus), that when they are affected
by us in our speaking and we by those who are learning, we dwell in one another;
and thus it is as if they are speaking in us what they hear, and in a certain way we
learn in them what we teach. (XII.17)
Love effects that presence one to another that has been sundered by the Fall and is
only equivocally bridged by language. And yet it is language that expresses that
love and makes possible the communication that language seeks to effect. The
notion of knowledge by presence, in contrast with which communication by signs
seemed so inevitably inadequate, is restored by his understanding of the effect of
love. Love produces a presence of the one to the other so that we are both present
to that which the speaker knows, and the hearer can thus know too. The Platonic
theme reappears, but in a very different garb.
This somewhat curious appreciation of language is reinforced by what
Augustine says elsewhere. At the beginning of de doctrina christiana Augustine
responds to those Christians who thought learning unnecessary and appealed to
the example of those desert fathers who were quite without learning. Augustine’s
anxiety is the danger of pride in those who claim miraculous understanding, a
pride that separates man from his fellow (though he does admit in book I that the
Scriptures in themselves are dispensable: ‘thus a man supported by faith, hope
and charity, with an unshaken hold on them, does not need the Scriptures, except
for the instruction of others’; I.39.43). Teaching itself is a work of love, and
requires humility in those who seek understanding, so Augustine’s decisive point
in defence of his enterprise in de doctrina is that ‘charity itself, which holds men
together in a knot of unity, would not have a means of infusing souls and almost
mixing them together, if men could teach nothing to men’ (Prol. 6). Communication
must be possible, because of the nature of love.
Augustine’s scepticism about language is overcome by his grasp of the reality of
redemption through the Word—the Word Incarnate and the word preached.
Language itself is fractured and of itself frustrates communication, producing an
illusory community of meaning, to some extent fortunately, given the nature of
fallen man. But it can also be a means of redemption, and then in some mysteri-
ous way language is healed and healing. Not, however, because of any intrinsic
power. Speaking of St Paul’s preaching, Augustine observes that his prayer was
more important: for
he knew that all these things that he was doing openly in the way of planting and
watering [i.e., his preaching and exhortation] would be of no avail unless he who
gives the increase in secret should give heed to his prayer on their behalf.6 And
there will be no language in heaven, for there there will be no need: there pate-
bunt etiam cogitationes nostrae invicem nobis (‘our thoughts too will lie open one
to another’. (De civitate dei XXII.29.6)
6 de correptione et gratia II.3. Note the contrast between the inefficacy of what takes place in aperto
and the efficacy of what takes place in occulto.
12
St Augustine’s Interpretation of
the Transfiguration of Christ
In the East, the account of the Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke
9:28–36) has, at various times, assumed central significance, perhaps most
famously in the hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century, though the hesy
chasts were in this, as in much else, only developing already established trad
ition.1 But what I wish to do in this paper is look at St Augustine’s interpretation
of the Transfiguration, setting it against the tradition of interpretation in the East
as established by Origen, whose influence on the Greek understanding of the
Transfiguration was profound and enduring.
In his exegesis of the Transfiguration Origen develops several themes. We can
perhaps summarize them by assigning them to details in the Gospel story, as
Origen discusses them in his extended discussion of the Transfiguration in his
Commentary on Matthew 12:36–43.
First, the Transfiguration took place after ‘six days’ (according to Matthew and
Mark) or ‘eight days’ (according to Luke). Origen makes no attempt here to har
monize the different accounts,2 but like many of the Fathers, Origen turns to
numerology. He offers the ideas that six is a perfect number, but also that six is
the number of the days of creation: ‘after six days’, then, suggests that the
Transfiguration took place to those who had passed beyond the created order.
This supreme revelation of the Godhead can only be grasped by those who have
passed beyond created things and turned their minds to God alone. The implied
limitation of the experience of beholding the Transfiguration to a spiritual élite is
explicitly developed by Origen as he reflects on the fact that the Transfigured
Lord was only revealed to three disciples.
This Origen develops from the words ‘before them’: Jesus was not just transfig
ured, he was transfigured ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῶν (Matt. 17:2). That implies a limitation:
there is a spiritual ascent indicated here. At the bottom are those who know Jesus
1 See the collection of translated texts on the Transfiguration gathered in Joie de la Transfiguration
d’après les Père d’Orient, Dom Michel Coune OSB ed., Spiritualité Orientale 39 (Bégrolles-eu-Mauges,
1985). See also the monograph by J. A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and
Tradition, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity, 9 (Lewiston-Queenston, 1986), which contains a
collection of translated texts form both the Greek and Latin traditions.
2 See, however, fragments 138–9 in Rauer’s edition of Origen’s Homilies on St Luke, Griechische
Christliche Schriftsteller, Origenes 9 (Berlin, 1959), 282–3.
‘according to the flesh’, at the top are those (the three disciples) who know him
according to the form of God. Origen relates this to the fact that the face of the
transfigured Lord ‘shined like the sun’ and is thus revealed to the children of light
(cf. Luke 16:8; John 12:36; etc.).
But not only did Jesus’ face shine like the sun; his garments ‘became white like
the light’. Origen interprets the whitened garments as the ‘sayings and letters of
the Gospel’, and with them he associates the ‘sayings in the Apostles’: in other
words the whitened garments symbolize the New Testament.
This leads Origen to explain the significance of the presence of Moses and
Elijah, side by side the transfigured Jesus as meaning that to one who sees Jesus’
transfigured face and his whitened garments there will appear Moses and Elijah,
that is the Law and the Prophets; in other words, the harmony of the Old and
New Testaments is manifest in Christ.
In Origen’s interpretation of Peter’s words ‘It is good for us to be here, if you
like, I will make here three tents . . .’, we perhaps encounter something a bit sur
prising. Mark and Luke comment that he did not know what to say, or did not
know what he was saying, in other words, Origen argues, he was in a trance. This
trance could not be the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Origen asserts, referring to
John 7:39 (‘the Spirit was not yet given, for Jesus was not yet glorified’), so it must
have been a trance induced by an evil spirit; Origen refers back to Matt. l6:23,
when Jesus had called Peter a ‘stumbling block’ for trying to dissuade him from
the Passion. For Origen, Peter’ s words at the Transfiguration hark back to his
earlier attempt to dissuade Jesus from his mission; for once again Peter is trying
to keep Jesus from the passion, or perhaps separate him from Moses and Elijah
(by putting them in separate tents!). Origen is conscious of the difficulty of sug
gesting such an interpretation so detrimental to the honour of the apostle; he
remarks that before the Resurrection the apostles were far from perfect. He sug
gests another possible interpretation: perhaps Peter’s words are to be interpreted
of his desire for the contemplative life; but if so, then we are to realize that even
such a desire can be a temptation, Jesus is to descend the mountain to those who
could not ascend, and show himself to them, and indeed to go on and suffer the
passion.
The Cloud descends: perhaps here is an answer to the problem we have raised
over Peter, for the cloud is the cloud (the Shekinah) that descended on the tent of
the covenant—it is better than the three Peter spoke of, and, in its brightness, is a
pattern of the resurrection. Origen goes on to give a trinitarian interpretation of
the descent of the cloud and the hearing of the voice: the voice is the Father’s, the
cloud is the Spirit overshadowing Jesus, the Son. But he is tentative about this
suggestion, and perhaps rather spoils it by suggesting that maybe ‘Our Saviour is
the bright cloud’.
As the cloud descended and the apostles heard the voice, they could not bear
the glory and ‘fell on their faces and prayed to God, for they were exceedingly
St Augustine ’ s Interpretation of the Transfiguration 125
afraid at the paradox of the vision and what was spoken from out of the vision’.
Origen emphasizes the awe felt by the apostles, and mentions the prohibition in
the Old Testament of seeing God and living; Origen leaves the impression that the
disciples may have seen nothing at all: certainly some of Origen’s disciples took
his interpretation in that way.3
Origen’s interpretation of the Transfiguration is so rich that in reading later
sermons in the Greek tradition we are apt to feel that we are simply finding echos
of the great Alexandrian. There are changes—the derogatory interpretation of
Peter’s words quickly falls away, rather more surprisingly Origen’s Trinitarian
interpretation is rarely found—but the only real addition to themes already devel
oped by Origen is in seeing the transfigured body a prefiguration of the resurrec
tion body, both of the Lord and of all faithful Christians. Until, that is, St Maximos
the Confessor develops his own reworking of Origen’s themes into a pattern
that is richly celebrated in later Byzantine sermons, beginning with St John
Damascene’s famous homily.
Before we turn to consider St Augustine, who is unlikely to have had direct
access to Origen’s interpretation of the Transfiguration,4 let us look briefly at two
Latin Fathers, St Ambrose and St Jerome, both of whom certainly knew the
Alexandrian exegete well.
Ambrose’s longest treatment of the Transfiguration can be found in his
Expositio in Lucam, ch. 7. Unlike Origen, he begins his pericope of the
Transfiguration with the preceding verse (Luke 9:27), which contains Jesus’ sol
emn prophecy that ‘there are those standing here who will not taste death until
they see the kingdom of God’,5 and takes the Transfiguration to be the fulfilment
of this prophecy for the three disciples (7:1). The lapse of ‘eight days’, then, signi
fies the resurrection: for in the Transfiguration the disciples beheld Christ’s risen
glory (7:6). Ambrose then gives an alternative interpretation based on Matthew
and Mark’s ‘six days’, and follows Origen in seeing this as meaning that the future
3 This is the line taken by Eusebius of Caesarea, the proud inheritor of Origen’s tradition, in his
letter to Constantia Augusta, the Emperor Constantine’s half-sister, who had requested a picture of
Jesus. Eusebius’ reply is that the different forms in which Jesus appeared during his earthly ministry
belong to the past, while his present glorified form was prefigured by the Transfiguration, in which his
appearance was so transformed that the apostles could not look upon him because of the splendour
that, in its ineffability, surpasses the measure of any eye or ear, and consequently cannot be depicted
by lifeless colours and shades (paraphrase of Eusebius’ letter to Constantia, in Der byzantinische
Bilderstreit, ed. H.-J. Greischer, Texte zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte 9 (Gütersloh, 1968),
15–17. This letter is preserved because it was cited by eighth-century Iconoclasts in a patristic florile
gium, and thus preserved in the Acta of the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Fr Georges Florovsky saw in
this letter evidence of an Origenist tradition, native to Greek theology and hostile to icons: see his
article, ‘Origen, Eusebius, and the Iconoclast Controversy’, Church History 19 (1950), 77–96; reprinted
in his Collected Works, 2 (Belmont, MA, 1974), 101–21, notes on 236–40).
4 Origen’s commentary on Matthew remained untranslated, and Jerome’s translation of thirty-nine
homilies on St Luke do not include that on the Transfiguration (though a few fragments survive in the
catenae).
5 Matthew 16:28, reads ‘the Son of man coming in his kingdom’; Mark, 9:1, ‘the kingdom of God
coming in power’.
resurrection belongs to a time that transcends the works of creation (7:7–8), The
number of the chosen disciples, three, is then considered and various significa
tions are offered (7:9); none of these follows Origen with his idea of the disciples
as an élite: the three either signify the whole human race (after the three sons of
Noah) or all believers (in the Trinity), Moses and Elijah signify the Law and
Prophecy (7:10). The disciples saw Moses and Elijah in bodily glory, but we can
today see them standing beside the Son of God, when we read the Scriptures con
taining the Law and the Prophets. They speak with Jesus about his death, which
leads Ambrose to comment how the Law and Prophets point us to the mystery of
the death of Christ, which is the mystery we behold, if, with the disciples, we
ascend the mount and seek to gaze on the glory of God and be refashioned in his
image (7:11–12). But he ends this remarkable section by recalling Origen’s inter
pretation of the garments of Christ: for Ambrose they are perhaps the ‘words of
scripture’, rendered clear by their relationship to Christ. Peter’s sleep and his rap
ture are interpreted in terms of the incomprehensibility of the divine (7:17). In
interpreting Peter’s words about making three tabernacles, Ambrose seems aware
of Origen’s interpretation and concerned to resist it: his words are to be regarded
as ‘not a reckless impudence, hut a premature devotion’ (7:18). The overshadow
ing of the cloud is the revelation of the Holy Spirit, for it is a cloud of light illu
minating the mind, rather than a darkness that obscures (7:20). The voice from
the cloud points to Jesus as the Son: neither Moses nor Elijah is addressed like
this. The passing of the cloud reveals Jesus alone: ‘and so, where there were three,
there is made one. There are three in the beginning, one in the end, for being
made perfect in the end they are one’ (7:21), and Ambrose refers to John 17:21. In
his interpretation, Ambrose seems well aware of Origen’s earlier interpretation,
but his thoughts follow a rather different course.
Jerome’s lengthiest discussion of the Transfiguration comes in his commentary
on St Matthew (3:17). Like Ambrose he begins with the preceding verse about
those who will not taste death, and sees the Transfiguration as a fulfilment of this
prophecy. As with Ambrose, he sees this as placing the Transfiguration in the
eschaton: it is a foreshadowing of the final judgement. Jerome’s relation to Origen
in his comments is, as we might expect, ambivalent. On the one hand, he goes to
great pains to emphasize the reality of Christ’s transfigured (and therefore risen)
body: it is not spiritual or ethereal, but something that can be perceived by the
senses, even in its transfigured state. The fact that Christ’s garments also are said
to have been transfigured demonstrates this (Jerome has nothing of Origen’s
interpretation of the garments, also found in Ambrose, that sees them as signify
ing the words of the Gospel or the scriptures). On the other hand, there is more
than a trace of Origen’s rebuke of Peter for his wish to make three tabernacles: he
should not look for three tabernacles, rather for one, of the Gospel, in which the
Law and the Prophets are fulfilled. Jerome makes little of the cloud, save that it
interrupts Peter’s words, and focuses the attention of the disciples on Jesus. The
voice from the cloud singles out Jesus as the only Son, in comparison with whom
all, even Moses and Elijah, are merely slaves. The cloud inspires fear in the dis
ciples, as they fall on their faces. As he is commenting on Matthew, Jerome can
and does make something of Jesus’ touching his terrified disciples and telling
them not to be afraid: he ‘drives out fear and then instils his teaching’. Jerome
ends by commenting on Jesus’ command to his disciples not to reveal what they
had seen until after the resurrection, in this way underlining the eschatological
significance of the Transfiguration.
We can perhaps see in both Ambrose and Jerome the forming of a specifically
Latin tradition of interpretation of the Transfiguration, which is seen in the light
of the verse about those who will not taste of death (an approach not found in
Origen, nor anywhere else in the Greek tradition, to my knowledge, before St
Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century): this approach underlines the
eschatological dimension of the Transfiguration.
Now, at last, let us turn to St Augustine, who discusses the Transfiguration
directly in Sermo 78. Following the lead of the two Latin Fathers we have dis
cussed, Augustine sets his interpretation in the context of the prophecy about
those who will not taste death before seeing the Son of man coming in his king
dom. This verse is taken to refer to the three disciples who, in the Transfiguration,
saw ‘the Son of man coming in his kingdom’. This poses for Augustine a particular
difficulty, for how could the mountain be understood as the kingdom? Augustine
rapidly finds a solution by identifying ‘his kingdom’ with the kingdom of heaven
(regnum caelorum), and that with the kingdom of the saints (regnum sanctorum);
the heavens will reign with him who made the heavens.
This takes Augustine directly to the transfigured Lord himself, he passes over
both the temporal indication of ‘after six days’, and also the number of the dis
ciples, who have become simply those in whom Jesus’ prophecy is fulfilled. Jesus
himself (so Augustine: Dominus ipse Jesus, not his face, facies eius) shone like the
sun, and his garments became white like snow. Jesus’ shining like the sun
Augustine explains thus:
Ipse Jesus quidem, ipse splenduit sicut sol, se lumen esse significans quod illuminat
omnem hominem venientum in hunc mundum. Quod est iste sol oculis carnis, hoc
ille oculis cordis; et quod iste carnibus, hoc ille cordibus
(Jesus himself, indeed, he shone like the sun, signifying that he is himself the
light that enlightens every human being coming into this world. What this sun is
to our eyes of flesh, he is to the eyes of the heart; what it is to the flesh of humans,
he is to their hearts).
The comparison between the sun in the physical world and Christ in the spiritual
world recalls Plato’s simile of the sun in the Republic, which Augustine had
already transposed in his teaching about Christ as the magister interior, though
note that here Augustine substitutes for the Platonist opposition of sensible and
intelligible (αἰσθητός–νοητός) the Biblical opposition of flesh and heart (caro–cor).
As to his garments, Augustine is categorical (completely discarding already estab
lished exegetical tradition): vestimenta autem eius, ecclesia eius (‘his garments are
his church’); and he comments that unless garments clothe someone, they col
lapse. So, he implies, with the Church: unless Christ is in its midst, the Church
will not stand. He then goes on to explore with similar spontaneity the idea of
garments which have an edge, which he compares to St Paul, the last and least of
the Apostles, but an edge or fringe that is instinct with divine power, as the
woman with the issue of blood discovered: added together these comparisons
speak of the Church that reached the Gentiles with healing power, through the
preaching of St Paul. The whiteness of the garments is the cleanness imparted by
the forgiveness of sin. This then leads quickly to a brief comment on the presence
of Moses and Elijah, representing the Old Testament and the Law, which reveals
the knowledge of sin, which itself is cleansed by the splendour of the sun of
righteousness.
Then Peter’s words: ‘it is good, Lord, to be here’, here on the mountain with
Christ as the bread of the mind (panem mentis), away from the weariness of the
crowd, and the labours and sorrows of the world. And the three tabernacles: Peter
asks the Lord about setting them up, but receives a reply, not from the Lord, but
from the descent of the cloud which obscures the three men (perhaps here an
echo of Jerome?), reducing what is humanly perceived to one. Verbum Dei
Christus, Verbum Dei in Lege, Verbum in Prophetis. What do you seek to divide,
Peter? It is necessary rather for you to join them. Tria quaeris: intellige et unum.
The voice from the cloud proclaims, ‘This is my beloved Son’. Nothing is said of
Moses and Elijah; for Jesus is the Only-begotten Son, they are simply adopted
sons. ‘Hear Him’: ‘because in the prophets you have heard him, and in the Law
you have heard him. And where have you not heard him? Having heard this, they
fell to the ground. Now it is demonstrated to us that in the Church is the kingdom
of God.’ Moses and Elijah stand in relation to Jesus as servants or ministers to the
Lord (a point made by Jerome, and hinted at by Ambrose), as vessels to the foun
tain: ‘Moses and the Prophets spoke and wrote, but when they poured out they
had been filled from Him.’
Jesus then put out his hand and raised up the fallen disciples, and ‘they saw no
one, but Jesus alone’. By way of quotations from 1 Cor. 13 with its contrast between
seeing per speculum in aenigmate and facie ad faciem, and a contrast between the
earth from which we come and to which we shall return (Gen. 3:19), together
with the resurrection of the body, signified by Jesus raising them up, Augustine
focuses on what is meant by Jesus alone: beyond the Law, beyond the prophets,
‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was
God’, where ‘God is all in all’. The final paragraph calls on Peter to descend from
the mountain, to his apostolic labours, and not to seek something for himself on
the mountain, but to follow the way of love, that seeks not its own (1 Cor 13:5).
Noli tua quaerere. Habe caritatem, praedica veritatem; tunc pervenies ad veritatem,
ubi invenies securitatem.
What strikes me about this extraordinary sermon is how personal it is to
Augustine: christocentric, ecclesial, allusive to the deeper mysteries of the Trinity
and the lncarnation, which belong to the realm of the heart, not to the world of
external reality, and undergirding all this, a powerful sense of the apostolic charge
to fulfil the Dominical command of love. Frequently, Augustine’s interpretation
seems to me original—Christ as the inner sun, his garments as the church (with a
typically Augustinian detail that clothes do not stand up by themselves)—and
even when he takes up themes already developed in the Christian (and especially
Latin) tradition—beginning the Transfiguration account with the verse about
those who will not taste death before seeing the Son of man in his kingdom, or
the contrast between Moses and Elijah and the true Sonship of Jesus, both of
which are found in Jerome and Ambrose—Augustine makes these themes part of
a tissue of interpretation that is authentically Augustinian. I am tempted to refer
to T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,6 and suggest
that in Augustine’s exegesis of the Transfiguration we find tradition so assimilated
to individual talent that we can only speak of it in terms of genius.
6 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays (London, 1951), 13–22.
13
Love and the Trinity
Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers
It is generally recognized that one of the most distinctive, even unique, elements
in St Augustine’s treatment of the Trinity is his thinking together the doctrine of
the Trinity and his doctrine of love. Indeed this claim can be enhanced by a fur-
ther claim: that it is to Augustine that we owe the emphasis on the twofold com-
mandment to love as summing up the essence of the Christian life.1 What I want
to do in this lecture is to look at the way in which Augustine uses his doctrine of
love in thinking about the Trinity, and use this as a way of comparing Augustine’s
approach to the Trinity with that found in the Greek East. Comparison between
Greek and Latin doctrines of the Trinity inevitably always gives Augustine’s doc-
trine a central part, and this seems to me justified, for his doctrine of the Trinity
(as of much else) has become, at least until comparatively recently, determinative
for Western theology, at least since the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such com-
parison, however, usually tries to articulate the difference between Eastern and
Western approaches by concentrating on other aspects of trinitarian doctrine,
usually the question of the Filioque; I want to go behind that to what it seems to
me are more fundamental differences. I need, however, to limit my field of discus-
sion, for whereas in Latin theology it seems justifiable to concentrate on
Augustine, given his unquestioned influence, no such limitation in the realm of
Greek theology can be justified so simply. It might seem obvious to concentrate
on the theology of the great Cappadocian Fathers, especially given the likelihood
that Augustine was influenced by, at least, St Gregory Nazianzen, but I do not
propose to do that for two, closely related, reasons. First, almost all that the
Cappadocians have to say about the Trinity is directly related to their polemic
against Eunomius and his followers; so their discussion tends to be technical, and
to take its cue from Eunomius’ own philosophical arguments; but second, such
technical argumentation has little opportunity to develop links between Christian
life and Christian thought—between spirituality and theology, as we would say
nowadays—in the way that is characteristic of Augustine’s own treatment of love
and the Trinity, which though not so remote from polemics as has sometimes
1 Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Yale University Press, 1980), 4.
Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers 131
been claimed,2 certainly has a spaciousness that is usually impossible in direct

polemic. I am therefore going to use, as a foil to Augustine and an introduction to
Greek Trinitarian theology, two theologians: Clement of Alexandria and St Maximos
the Confessor. The choice of the latter needs no justification: the greatest of all
Byzantine theologians, St Maximos is unquestionably a benchmark for Greek
theology, as much by virtue of the brilliance and subtlety of his theology, as by his
influence. Clement is perhaps a more puzzling choice, but I think I am ultimately
moved by a series of articles, later published as a book, that constitute a seminal
work of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, by Myrrha Lot-Borodine, entitled
‘Le déification de l’homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs’, in which that great
interpreter of Byzantine theology made clear the fundamental place of Clement
in the formation of that tradition.3
What I propose to do, then, is, first, to look at Augustine’s own thinking
together with the doctrine of love and his Trinitarian theology, and then try and
see how these themes are treated in Clement and Maximos; finally, I shall try to
draw some conclusions.
Augustine on Love and the Trinity
In De Trinitate, to which I shall mostly confine my discussion, Augustine’s use of

his understanding of love to elucidate his doctrine of the Trinity occurs mainly in
two pivotal books: books VI and VIII. There is also a brief foreshadowing in book
V, and a kind of reprise in book XV.
First, let us look at the brief foreshadowing in book V. In that book, Augustine
asserts that the Spirit is peculiarly to be regarded as the “gift of God,” donum Dei.
Unlike the names “Father” and “Son,” which reveal the intratrinitarian relation-
ships in which Father and Son stand, the name “Holy Spirit” reveals no such
thing, since both Father and Son are both holy and spirit. The designation donum
Dei reveals the Spirit’s relationship to the Father and the Son. The identification of
the title donum Dei with the Spirit Augustine derives from Acts 8:20, where Peter
calls the Holy Spirit, which Simon Magus wishes to obtain, the “gift of God”; the
fact that it is given by the Father and the Son is justified by reference to John
15:26, which speaks of the Spirit “proceeding from the Father,” and Rom. 8:9,
which affirms that anyone “who does not have Christ’s Spirit does not belong to
him.” Augustine does not make the step from thinking of the Spirit as gift to
thinking of him as love, though he comes very close when he goes on to say,
2 I am not unmoved by the recent arguments by Lewis Ayres and others that Augustine’s argumen-
tation is much more directly affected by contemporary Arianism than has often been allowed.
3 M. Lot-Borodine, La deification de l’homme selon la doctrine des Pères grecs, Bibliothèque
Œcuménique 9 (Éditions du Cerf, 1970), esp. 26‒8.
to speak of the gift of the giver and the giver of the gift is to use terms that are
relative one to another. Therefore the Holy Spirit is a certain ineffable commu
nion of the Father and the Son; and thus perhaps is he called, because the same
designation can be appropriate to both Father and Son
—ineffabilis communio suggests something of the nature of love, but Augustine

does not make the connexion.4
On the basis of this point, it seems, Augustine brings in the notion of love in
book VI. He notes that, though on the one hand one can speak of God as spirit,
and on the other speak of the human spirit as spirit, when someone cleaves to the
Lord, “there is one spirit” (1 Cor. 6:17). If that is the case between human beings
and God, how much more is that true where there is inseparabilis atque aeterna
connexio, “an inseparable and eternal union” (trin. VI. iv. 6). Which leads
Augustine to begin the next section by asserting that “the Holy Spirit is the basis
(consistit) of the same unity and equality of substance,” and goes on to affirm that
whether it is a matter of the unity of the two [Father and Son], or holiness, or
love, or unity because of love, or love because of holiness, it is manifest that it is
not some one of the pair by which one is joined to the other, or by which the one
begotten is loved by the begetter, and loves his own begetter, and they are so not
by participation, but by its essence, nor by the gift of a superior, but genuinely
(suo proprio) preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace
—that last phrase being, of course, a citation of Eph. 4:3. Augustine continues:
Which [viz., that unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace] we are commanded to
imitate, both in relation to God and in relation to ourselves. On which two pre-
cepts hang all the Law and the Prophets. Thus these three are one, sole, great,
wise, holy and blessed God. We, however, are blessed from him, and through
him, and in him (cf. Rom. 11. 36); because by his gift [munus, rather than
donum] we are one among ourselves, and one spirit with him, because our soul
is firmly attached to him . . . . The Holy Spirit, therefore, is something common to
the Father and the Son, whatever that is. And this communion is consubstantial
and co-eternal; which, if it may appropriately be called friendship, let it be so
called; but still more aptly is it called love [caritas]. And this [love] is also sub-
stance, because God is substance, and “God is love,” as it is written.
There is a great deal going on here, but one thing is obvious: the centrality for
Augustine of the twofold commandment to love in elucidating what is meant by
4 For all this, see trin. V. xi. 12.

the unity that is Trinity. The unity that we may know among ourselves, the unity
we may know with God, and the unity there is in God himself: there is some deep
analogy between these, and that is signalled by the twofold commandment to
love. The way in which the first two of these—unity amongst ourselves and unity
with God—are spoken of in terms of spiritus gives the key to the unity of God
himself, that inseparabilis atque aeterna connexio, which is the Holy Spirit.
It is on this basis that Augustine conducts his investigation modo interiore, “in
a more inward way,”5 from book VIII onwards. What is important for our pur-
poses in book VIII is the way Augustine negotiates the problem of loving an
unknowable Trinity. For Augustine, love and knowledge go together: we cannot
love what we do not know. And yet our faith seems to involve much that we do
not know, and yet love: the people and places of the Gospel, the central events of
the creed, including the Resurrection of Christ himself, of none of this do we have
direct knowledge, and yet they are dear to us. But we have seen human beings and
other creatures mentioned in the Gospel, we know about life and death, and from
this we can make clear to ourselves what we mean when we talk about the events
of the Gospel. None of this helps much in relation to God, for God is not a kind of
being, examples of which we know, and even understanding what is meant by a
trinity or triad does not help, for God is not loved because we recognize him from
other examples of trinities.6 We do not even love the Apostle Paul simply because
we recognize that he is a kind of human being. Augustine dwells on this example,
arguing that we love Paul from what we read about him, for we love the justice we
read in him, because we ourselves want to be just: indeed, loving a just man for
his justice means wanting to be just ourselves; in fact, we love human beings
either because they are just or because we want to make them just.7
This clarification of what is meant by brotherly love gives Augustine a basis for
the rest of book VIII, for it has become clear, he asserts, that the heart of this
question “about the Trinity and our knowledge of God” is the nature of true love
(vera dilectio), or bluntly the nature of love itself, for true love is the only kind
worth talking about, the rest is cupiditas (trin. VIII. vii. 10). True love Augustine
goes on to define (or perhaps better, describe) by saying that “this is true love, that
cleaving to the truth we may live justly.” This leads, as we would expect, to the
twofold commandment to love and, by way of the ideas about that which we have
already seen to be implicit in Augustine’s mind, to the assertion that in dealing with
love, we are dealing directly with God himself, for which the key biblical evidence is
1 John 4:8: “God is love,” Deus dilectio est. Therefore Augustine can say:
Let no one say: I do not know what I love. Let him love his brother, and he will
love that same love. For he rather knows the love by which he loves, than the
5 Trin. VIII. i. 1. 6 See especially trin. VIII. v. 8. 7 Trin. VIII. vi. 9.

brother whom he loves. Behold now he can have God more known [to him]
than his brother; clearly more known, because more present; more known,
because more inward; more known, because more certain. Embrace love, and by
love embrace God. (trin. VIII. viii. 12)
Augustine goes on to envisage an objection:
But I see love, and as much as I can I look at it with my mind, and I believe what
Scripture says: “God is love, and he who abides in love, abides in God.” But when
I see [love], I do not see the Trinity in it. On the contrary, [Augustine replies]
you do see the Trinity, if you see love. But I will help you, if I can, to see what you
see; let [the Trinity] alone be present [to help us], that we may be moved by love
towards some good [end]. (Ibid.)
Imo vero vides Trinitatem, si vides caritatem: if you see love, you see the Trinity. It
is one of Augustine’s boldest claims. He has already warned us, that this is only
true in the case of true love, but nonetheless one is struck by its boldness. There is
a long way to go, from seeing love to discerning the Trinity. Augustine will offer,
at the end of book VIII, an initial “image” or “trace” of the Trinity in the lover, the
beloved, and the love that binds them together, but he makes few claims for it. It is
a starting point: “from here it remains to ascend, and to seek out these things
above, in as much as it is given to humans.” We have not, asserts Augustine,
“found what we are looking for, but we have found where to look” (trin. VIII. x. 14).
That is still quite a claim.
The theme of love and the Trinity is not absent from the following books, but I
do not think Augustine introduces any new considerations that directly affect this
theme. In his summary in book XV these ideas are stated concisely when he
affirms: “He who is the Holy Spirit in accordance with the Holy Scriptures is not
the Father’s alone, nor the Son’s alone, but belongs to them both: and thus he
instils in us that common love by which the Father and the Son love each other”
(trin. XV. xvii. 27).
What are the key steps in Augustine’s considerations? Immediately, I want to
draw attention to two of them, which are, indeed, closely bound up with each
other. First, there is the way in which the twofold commandment links the divine
and the human realms. It is a twofold command, but there are not really two
loves: there is one love which functions as a bridge between the divine and the
human. Even though the one definition (or description) proffered is in purely
human terms (“that cleaving to the truth we may live justly”), Augustine moves
between human and divine love without much sense of difference. The second
point I want to make is close to this: for it is the Holy Spirit who is the root of
either love, whether human or divine. In the case of divine love, there is a strict
identity: the Holy Spirit is the love by which the Father loves the Son and is in
turn loved by the Son. In the case of human love, such love is only genuine when
it is a matter of the Holy Spirit moving within us. The key text here is Rom. 5:5,
which speaks of “the love of God poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that
is given to us,” quoted five times in de Trinitate.8
Clement and Maximos
With Clement and Maximos, we shall have to approach the question of love and
the Trinity less directly, for neither of them wrote a work specifically on the
Trinity. There is a further complication with Clement, and that is that since he
lived more than a century before the Synod of Nicæa, we cannot expect to find in
him the clarity of Trinitarian theology that there is in Augustine and Maximos.
Nonetheless, there are compensations, as we shall see.
The first point I want to make about Clement is to challenge Oliver O’Donovan’s
assertion that Augustine is the first to see the centrality of the twofold command-
ment to love. On the contrary, it seems to me that Clement makes a great deal of
it: he frequently returns to it in his discussions of the perfect Christian life in his
Stromateis, and yet more frequently the notion of the twofold nature of love
guides his reflections, even when the Dominical commandment is not explicitly
cited. But it is more than a matter of mention. For the twofold commandment has
for Clement, it seems to me, something of the same pivotal significance that it has
for Augustine. Let me take a couple of examples. First, from the second book of
Stromateis. One of Clement’s ways of proceeding in this work is to discuss gnomic
sayings from both the Classical and the Biblical traditions. Here is an example:
A little more mysterious is the sentence, “Know yourself.” It comes from the text,
“You have seen your brother, you have seen your God.” In this way I suppose we
must take “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your
neighbour as yourself.” He says that the whole of the Law and the Prophets
depends on these commandments. This matches the others: “I have spoken thus
to you so that my joy may be made full. This is my commandment, that you love
one another as I have loved you.” “For the Lord is full of mercy and pity,” and
“The Lord is good to all.” Moses, transmitting “Know yourself ” with greater
clarity, often says, “Take heed” [πρόσεχε σεαυτῷ, common in Deuteronomy].
“By acts of mercy and faith are sins cleansed; by the fear of the Lord everyone is
turned away from sin.” “The fear of the Lord is education and wisdom.” [These
last two citations from Proverbs.] (Strom. II. 70. 5–71. 4)9
8 Trin. VII. iii. 5; VIII. vii. 10; XIII. x. 14; XV. xvii. 31; XV. xxvi. 46.
9 Translation, slightly modified, by John Ferguson, in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, Books
One to Three, Fathers of the Church 85 (Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 205‒6.
Here the apocryphal Dominical saying—“You have seen your brother, you have
seen your God”—is used to link the Delphic saying, “Know yourself,” with the
commandment to love (which suggests an attention to the qualification “as your-
self ” in the second part of the twofold commandment, that O’Donovan also
denies before Augustine).
The other passage of Clement I want to look at briefly in this connexion is the
passage that O’Donovan cites in support of his claim: from Quis dives salvetur.10
This is the passage where it is claimed that by loving one’s neighbour, Clement
means loving Christ (the implication being that this robs the command of its
function as a basis for human morality). He, of course, does say this, but this is
because in the passage (Qds 27ff.) Clement is not just discussing the twofold com-
mandment on its own, but in its context in St Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus’ answer
to the lawyer’s query as to the identity of the neighbour we are to love is the par
able of the Good Samaritan. Clement reads this parable with more care than some
exegetes. It seems to me that he sees it functioning on two levels: the Lord’s final
words, “Go and do likewise” subvert the lawyer’s question to limit the command-
ment to the “neighbour,” for, as Clement comments, Jesus’ words show that “love
bursts out in good works.” The neighbour then is the one whom we are to love,
and it is these good works (εὐπωιία) that are important rather than the identity
of the neighbour. This is the usual way in which the parable is taken. But
Clement is conscious that the parable is meant to answer the lawyer’s question.
Taken like that, it is the good Samaritan who is the neighbour: he is the one
who is to be loved. That is a more profound suggestion: that we are to love the
one who shows us pity, for only in that way will we open ourselves to the One
whose pity we desperately need, namely Christ himself. But even that interpretation
does not frustrate the commandment in the way O’Donovan feared, for
Clement goes on to say that he who loves Christ will obey his commandments,
and as an example quotes Matt. 25:34‒40, the Lord’s words to the sheep in the
parable of the sheep and the goats, a demanding account of neighbourly love.
But before Clement gets there he argues that such love on our part will not
be possible unless we are freed from the wounds visited upon us by the “world-
rulers of darkness”: “fears, lusts, wraths, griefs, deceits and pleasures.” “Of
these wounds,” he says,
Jesus is the only healer, by cutting out the passions absolutely and from the very
root. He does not deal with the bare results, the fruits of bad plants, as the law
did, but brings his axe to the roots of evil. This is he who poured over our
10 I have used the text of the Loeb Classical Library edition, with intro. and trans. by
G. W. Butterworth (Harvard University Press, 1968; imprint of 1919 edition), though I have often
modified, sometimes quite drastically, Butterworth’s translation (Quis dives salvetur is on pp. 270‒376;
abbreviated in citations as Qds).
wounded souls the wine, the blood of David’s vine; this is he who has brought
and is lavishing on us the oil, the oil of pity from the Father’s heart; this is he
who has shown us the unbreakable bands of health and salvation, love, faith and
hope; this is he who has ordered angels and principalities and powers to serve us
for great reward, because they too shall be freed from the vanity of the world at
the revelation of the glory of the sons of God. (Qds 29. 3‒6)
A little later on in this treatise, or homily, there is another striking passage that
leads up to an affirmation of the twofold commandment to love:
Behold the mysteries of love, and then you will have a vision of the bosom of the
Father, whom the only-begotten God alone declared. God himself is love, and
for love’s sake he manifested himself to us. And while the ineffable part of him is
Father, the part that has sympathy with us became Mother. By his loving, the
Father became female, a great sign of which is he whom he begat from himself;
and the fruit that is born of love is love. For this reason he himself descended,
for this reason he clothed himself in humanity, for this reason he willingly suf-
fered the human lot, so that, having been measured to the weakness of us whom
he loved, he might measure to us his own power. And when he was about to be
offered and give himself as a ransom, he leaves us a new covenant: ‘I give you my
love’. What love is this, and how great? For each of us he lays down his life, equal
to that of the whole world. In return he asks this from us for each other.
(Qds 37. 1‒4)
This passage is perhaps best known for its reference, unusual in the Fathers, to
God’s motherhood. But it is not this that I wish to pursue now. What we have in
this passage is a remarkable account of the manifestation of God’s love for us,
through the Son, in Incarnation and Redemption: a love that manifests God to us
and through that manifestation calls from us love on our part, a love for God, but
primarily manifest in our love for one another, for the twofold command is to
characterize the life of those who have responded to God’s gift of himself to us in
love. The passage we have just quoted continues:
But if we owe our lives to our brothers, and acknowledge such a reciprocal com-
pact with the Saviour, shall we still gather up and treasure the things of the world
which are beggarly and alien and unstable? Shall we shut out from one another
that which in a short while the fire shall have? It was with divine inspiration
indeed that John said, “He who does not love his brother is a murderer,” a seed
of Cain, a nursling of the devil. He has nothing of God’s tenderness, and no hope
of better things, he is infertile, he is barren, he is no branch of the ever-living
vine from the realm beyond the heavens; he is cut off, he is even now ready for
the fire. (Qds 37. 5‒6)
But the movement of love, the movement from God the Father to the Son (or
from God’s fatherliness to his motherliness) is a movement of manifestation to us
of that which, in itself, is ineffable. God, who is beyond knowledge and under-
standing, “beyond being,” like Plato’s form of the Good,11 makes himself known
as love in the Son, in his Incarnation and self-offering. But love belongs to the
manifestation; God in himself is ineffable. Clement expresses his movement from
what would later be called the apophatic to the cataphatic (from the realm where
our knowledge is expressed by negation to knowledge to the realm where we may
affirm what has been revealed), from ineffable mystery to divine manifestation as
love, in terms of the unknowable, invisible Father whom the Son makes visible or
known, terms characteristic of much pre- Nicene theology.12 In post- Nicene
Greek theology, this distinction is preserved as the contrast between θεολογία and
οἰκονομία: the unknowable mystery of God in Himself, God as Trinity, and God’s
self-manifestation in his bringing into being the “house” (οἶκος) of creation and
his work of redemption and bringing to perfection of all that belongs to that
house. The οἰκονομία is the realm of God’s love; God in Himself, God the Trinity,
is a mystery beyond our comprehension.
One consequence, or so it seems to me, of Clement’s correlating love with the
realm of manifestation is that it is something that can be known and understood;
and we indeed find in Clement much reflection on the nature of love as the
crowning human virtue, both requiring and making fully effective the other
human virtues. His picture of the Christian gnostic (or contemplative, though I
wish we could reclaim the word “gnostic” for Orthodoxy: it was far more com-
monly used, and continued to be used, in Orthodox ascetic theology than it ever
was among those we have come to know since the nineteenth century as “gnostics”):
this picture is of one moved by such love, what Clement calls “the divinity of love”
(θεῖον τῆς ἀγάπης), which is “not desire on the part of the one who loves, but a
loving affinity (στερκτικὴ οἰκείωσις) restoring the gnostic to unity of faith, having
no need of time or space”;13 it is a state of serene attention, made possible by the
acquisition of ἀπάθεια, freedom from passion or desire in virtue, as Clement sees
it, of the serene possession of the good on the part of the gnostic. It is this love
that we see in Christ, for “he could never abandon his care for human kind
(κηδεμονίαν) through the distractions of any pleasure, seeing that, after he had
taken upon himself our flesh, which is by nature subject to passion, he trained it
to a habit of freedom from passion (ἕξιν ἀπαθεὶας).”14
11 Plato, Republic VI. 509b, frequently alluded to by Clement.

12 On Clement’s apophatic theology, see most recently Henny Fiskå Hägg (ed.), ‘Apophaticism and
Knowledge in Clement of Alexandria’, Language and Negativity: Apophaticism in Theology and
Literature (Novus Press, 2000), 51‒62.
13 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis VI. ix. 73. 3.
14 Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis VII. ii. 7. 5.
This notion of love and ἀπάθεια is one that seems very strange to modern
Western ears: and that is partly because it was attacked early on in the West by
Jerome15 and perhaps also by Augustine,16 and therefore dropped out of Western
ascetic vocabulary, to be replaced by Cassian with the less alarming-sounding
puritas cordis. But Clement’s understanding of love and ἀπάθεια, developed and
deepened by their own experience, became the heritage of the Eastern ascetic
masters, and was inherited by Maximos.17
What we find in Maximos is very much what we have found in Clement, trans-
posed into the idiom of post-Nicene, indeed post-Chalcedonian, theology. The
distinction between the unknowable, apophatic realm of θεολογία and the cata-
phatic realm of οἰκονομία, about which we are granted understanding, is funda-
mental.18 In his beautiful letter on love (ep. 2), which is really a lengthy encomium
of love, Maximos says:
For nothing is more truly godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious,
nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification. For it has gathered
together in itself all things that are recounted by the understanding of truth in
the form of virtue, and it has absolutely no relation to anything that has the form
of wickedness, since it is the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. For they
were succeeded by the mystery of love, which out of human beings makes us
gods, and reduces the individual commandments to a universal meaning.
Everything is circumscribed by love according to God’s good pleasure in a single
form, and love is dispensed in many forms in accordance with God’s economy.19
Even though Maximos speaks (like Clement) of divine love, he means God’s love
towards us and the love he inspires in us, a love manifest both in our longing for
God and in our love for our fellows. Like Clement and Augustine, the twofold
commandment constantly guides Maximos’ reflections on love; Maximos even
concurs with Augustine in finding in the two pence the Good Samaritan leaves
with the innkeeper an allusion to the twofold commandment.20 Maximos also
follows Clement (and the by now highly developed Byzantine ascetical tradition)
in having a clearly worked out notion of love as the fruit of ἀπάθεια, itself the
product of the acquisition of the virtues. Love brings us to the threshold of the
divine mystery, but Maximos does not use the language of love to describe God’s
15 Jerome, ep. 133. 3. 16 Cf. Augustine, de Civitate Dei XIV. 9. 4.

17 On Clement’s understanding of love and ἀπάθεια, see my article, ‘Apathetic Love in Clement of
Alexandria’, Studia Patristica 18.3 (1989), 413‒19.
18 Though, as Maximos’ disciple, St John Damascene, points out the two distinctions—apophatic-
kataphatic, theologia-oikonomia—do not exactly correspond (expos. fidei 2).
19 Maximos the Confessor, ep. 2 (PG 91. 393BC).
20 Maximos the Confessor, Centuries on Love IV. 75 (cf. Augustine, Qu. Evang. II. 19; En. Psa.
125. 15).
inner nature or trinitarian life: love belongs to, indeed characterizes, the divine
economy. Of love, Maximos can say:
This is the way of truth, as the Word of God calls himself, that leads those who
walk in it, pure of passions, to God the Father. This is the door, through which
the one who enters finds himself in the Holy of Holies, and is made worthy to
behold the unapproachable beauty of the holy and royal Trinity. This is the true
vine, in which he who is firmly rooted is made worthy of becoming a partaker of
the divine quality. Through this love, all the teaching of the law and the prophets
and the Gospel both is and is proclaimed, so that we who have a desire for
ineffable goods may confirm our longing in these ways.21
It is not that Maximos has nothing to say about the Trinity, into whose mysteries
the Christian soul is initiated. There is a remarkable passage that occurs in a
slightly different form in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer and in his com-
mentary on the Divine Liturgy, called his Mystagogia. Let me quote part of it:
The Word then leads [the soul] to the knowledge of theology made manifest
after its journey through all things, granting it an understanding equal to the
angels as far as this is possible for it. He will teach it with such wisdom that it
will comprehend the one God, one nature and three persons, a tri-personal
unity of essence, and a consubstantial trinity of persons, trinity in unity and
unity in trinity, not one and another, nor one beside another, nor one through
another, nor one in another, nor one from another, but the same in itself, accord-
ing to itself, with itself, by itself . . . For the holy trinity of persons is an uncon-
fused unity, by essence and in its own simple meaning; and the holy unity is a
trinity, by persons and in its mode of existence, the same—whatever it is—as a
whole, and differently according to each meaning, as has been said, understood
as one and sole, undivided and unconfused, single and undiminished and
undeviating godhead, wholly a unity existing in its being and the same wholly a
trinity in its persons, a single ray of triply radiant light, shining in a single form.
In which light the soul, equal in dignity to the holy angels, having received the
manifest principles concerning the godhead that are accessible to creation, and
having learned in harmony with them without silence to praise in threefold
form the one godhead, has been drawn up to the adoption by grace through the
likeness it has acquired, through which, in its prayers having God by grace as the
hidden and only Father, it is gathered up to the One in its hiddenness by an
ecstasy from all things, and the more it is persuaded of divine things, or rather
comes to know them, the more it wants not to be its own, nor to be able to be
known from itself, by itself or anything else, but only as wholly God’s, who takes
21 Maximos the Confessor, ep. 2 (PG 91. 404A).

it up wholly in a way befitting of the good, wholly and impassibly in a divinely-

befitting way entering it wholly, wholly deifying it, and transforming it
unchangeably into himself.22
There is an intensity, a passion even, about this passage, a strangely sober, ethereal
intensity, that is not uncommon in Byzantine attempts to delineate something of
what knowledge (γνῶσις) of the Trinity means. But Maximos does not use the
notion of love to characterize the Trinity that he has discovered. Even though the
fulfilment of human love is deification, becoming divine, love is not used to char-
acterize the nature or inner life of the Trinity. The reason is, I think, very simple:
that for Maximos, and for the Greek patristic tradition both before and after him,
the mystery of God overwhelms any human categories; all one can do is stutter
the precise distinctions that belong to the doctrine of the Trinity, which do not so
much reveal the divine mystery as prevent one reducing it in one’s conception to a
bare philosophical unity or a pagan pantheon or any other misconception. As
Vladimir Lossky put it, with characteristic perceptiveness:
This is why the revelation of the Holy Trinity, which is the summit of cataphatic
theology, belongs also to apophatic theology, for [quoting the Areopagite] “if we
learn from the Scriptures that the Father is the source of divinity, and Jesus and
the Holy Spirit are the divine progeny, the divine seeds, so to say, and flowers
and lights that transcend being, we can neither say nor understand what
that is.”23
Conclusion
I think my conclusion is reasonably clear, and perhaps not very surprising. All the
Fathers we have discussed are in complete agreement that the twofold command-
ment to love is at the centre of any understanding of the Christian life; further-
more, in this love something of the divine is revealed to us, for the Incarnation is
a revelation of God’s love, and in our loving response to his love we come to share
in the divine love. But despite all this there is a striking difference between
Augustine and our two Greeks, and this difference is, broadly speaking, a differ-
ence between Augustine and Greek patristic theology. This difference lies in the
fact that for Augustine love characterized the divine life itself, and not just God’s
22 Maximos the Confessor, Mystagogia 23, ed. Ch. Sotiropoulos (Athens, 1993), 216. 14‒22, 218.
3‒220. 2; cf. Maximos the Confessor, exp. orationis dominicae, ed. P. van Deun, CCSG 23, ll. 440‒67.
23 Vladimir Lossky, ‘La notion des “analogies” chez le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite’, in Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 5 (1930), 283 (quoting Dionysios, Divine Names II. 7).
love for us and our love for one another. Love gives us some kind of key to the
inner reality of God. Augustine’s idea is intoxicating; it is difficult, once having
read Augustine, not to let this idea, which seems to be very much Augustine’s
own, condition our reading of other theologians, especially the Greeks, who do
not seem to share it.24
But if we look at how Augustine gets to this idea, it is clear that there are
reasons for reserving our judgement. “The unity of the spirit in the bond of peace”
(Eph. 4:3) is clearly for St Paul the unity of love in the Spirit that is the principle of
the unity of the Church; it is not, as it is for Augustine, the unity of the Spirit that
constitutes the unity of the Trinity (cf. trin. VI. v. 7). The advancement of
Augustine’s argument in the books of de Trinitate that we have looked at depends
on this blurring of the distinction between the divine and the human. But we
have seen in the Greek Fathers, in an inchoate form in Clement, but fully worked
out in Maximos, as in all the post-Nicene Greek Fathers (with rare exceptions
such as, perhaps, Synesius of Cyrene), the crucial significance of the distinction
between θεολογία and οἰκονομία, a distinction that holds together, on the one
hand, the genuine revelation of God that takes place in the created order, both in
the providential ordering of the cosmos and in the history of salvation, culminat-
ing in the Incarnation, and, on the other, the ultimate mystery of the ineffable
Godhead. For the Fathers this distinction, first evoked, to my knowledge, in con-
nexion with the Arian controversy,25 is crucial, because if it is breached we run
the risk of reducing the mystery of the Godhead to human categories. This, it
seems to me, is the danger with Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity, even if the
human category is love, and even though he does his best to make sure that we
derive our notion of love from God’s love, rather than the other way about.
This conclusion is not at all original, for much the strongest argument of
Orthodox theologians against the Western doctrine of the Filioque, the doctrine
that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father, is that this doc-
trine only gains what credence it has by confusing θεολογία and οἰκονομία, by
applying ideas about the Spirit’s mission in the οἰκονομία to his eternal procession
within the Trinity.
But it may be that my conclusion is not really a conclusion at all. Maybe
Augustine was right in seeing the notion of love as one that retains its meaning, if
not univocally, at least with a powerful analogy, whether applied to God or to
human kind. One might think that some recent developments in personalist
metaphysics in modern theology, whether Orthodox or Western, make
Augustine’s premise plausible (though Western advocates of such personalist
24 For someone who keeps her head, see Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of
Love (Clarendon Press, 1994).
25 See the letter of Alexander of Alexandria to Alexander of Byzantium (?Thessalonica), in
H.-G. Opitz, ed., Athanasius Werke, vol. III, part 1: Urkunde zur Geschichte des arianischen Streites,
Urkunde 14. 4.
metaphysics seem even less inclined than the Orthodox to seek support for their
ideas in Augustine).26 One might also point to the fact (for such I think it is) that
no less an Orthodox theologian than St Gregory Palamas, once he encountered
Augustine’s association of the Spirit and love, incorporated it into his own
theology.27
Perhaps then I have not reached a conclusion, but rather raised a question
about the continued relevance of the thought of the great African doctor of the
Church on the topic of love and the Trinity. But if we are to follow Augustine, we
should, I think, heed the fact that this is one aspect of Augustine’s theology that
departs from the tradition of the Church, both as it was understood in his day
and for centuries later, at least in the East. Not only that, but it is not difficult to
see why the Greek Fathers do not follow Augustine in tracing the reality of love
right to the heart of the Trinity. For myself, I would want to be sure that they were
wrong before abandoning their teaching.
I do not, however, think that the Greek Fathers are wrong, and it perhaps worth
concluding by drawing out why I think we should hold to the Greek distinction
between θεολογία and οἰκονομία, and resist the attraction of Augustine. What
Augustine does in allowing his doctrine of love to constitute a bridge between
θεολογία and οἰκονομία is, it seems to me, to begin to imagine the Trinity as a
community of loving individuals. The Trinity then becomes an object of human
speculation in itself: we are well on the way to a kind of mythological notion of
the Trinity, which will cause the problems Augustine is already somewhat at a loss
to answer, such as whether any other ‘members’ of the Trinity could have become
incarnate.28 The apophatic doctrine of the Trinity we find in the Greek Fathers
keeps a rein on such speculations, and this seems to me an advantage.29 Such
reasons to resist the modern tendency to go even further than Augustine with a
social model of the Trinity have been aired recently by several theologians, and
I would endorse their approach here.30 It must be granted that Augustine himself
26 I have in mind Orthodox theologians such as Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon and
Christos Yannaras, and Western theologians such as Colin Gunton and Alan Torrance.
27 See Gregory Palamas, Capita CL 36‒7. For evidence that Palamas derived this from his reading
of Maximos Planoudis’ Greek translation of Augustine’s de Trinitate, see R. Flogaus, ‘Palamas and
Barlaam Revisited: A Reassessment of East and West in the Hesychast Controversy of 14th-Century
Byzantium’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42 (1998), 1‒32. Palamas’ use of Augustine extends far
beyond this idea.
28 A question Augustine faces without giving any convincing response in both ep. 11 to Nebridius
and sermo 52. I am grateful to Lewis Ayres for bringing these to passages to my attention in a seminar
paper eventually published as: ‘ “Remember that You are Catholic” (serm. 52.2): Augustine on the
Unity of the Triune God’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000), 39‒82. But I think Augustine has
greater difficulty with this problem than Ayres would like to think.
29 The question as to why it is the person of the Son who becomes incarnate is raised, glancingly, by
John Damascene in his treatise against the Monotheletes (de Duabus in Christo Voluntatibus 37). But
his response in terms of the invariability of the mode of existence of the Son in θεολογία and οἰκονομία
provides an answer without raising any speculative questions about the nature of the Trinity.
30 See Karen Kilby, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrine of the Trinity’, New
Blackfriars 81 (2000), 432‒45; and from a rather different perspective, John Behr, ‘The Paschal
Foundation of Christian Theology’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 45 (2001), 115‒36.
does not advance very far down this route, his doctrine of the Trinity has its own
apophaticism;31 but his use of the doctrine of love in the way outlined above
advances along a road ruled out altogether by the Greek Fathers.
Another related point of contrast between Augustine and the Greek Fathers
might be worth mentioning briefly. I noted above that, because the Greek doc-
trine of love is about the realm of the οἰκονομία, it belongs to the realm of the
known, and in fact the Greek Fathers have a good deal to say about the nature of
love, and how to nurture it; there is, in short, a proper asceticism of love to be
developed. I find myself wondering whether there is not a link between
Augustine’s sliding between divine and human love in the way I have argued
above and what seems to me his shyness of any asceticism of love. Such shyness
occurs in, for instance, the second half of book ten of his Confessions, and also in
his response to the monks of Hadrumetum: in the former case, particularly, his
searching self-examination does not lead to any consideration of what his part
might be in remedying the defects he analyses but to the need to cast himself on
divine grace. If love is essentially divine, the presence of the Spirit within us, then
it is perhaps not surprising that Augustine finds it impossible to develop any
asceticism of love, such as can be found throughout the Byzantine ascetical
tradition.
But I am raising questions, not providing answers, and I hope that such may be
accepted as a proper use of the Villanova Augustine Lectures.
31 See Vladimir Lossky, ‘Les elements de “Théologie negative” dans la pensée de saint Augustin’,
Augustinus Magister I (Études Augustiniennes, 1954), 575‒81.
14
Heart in Pilgrimage
St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms
My argument in this paper1 is that the obstacles to a true appreciation of

St Augustine by the Orthodox are fundamentally the same as the obstacles faced
by Western Christians. And also that the remedy in both cases is the same. That
might seem very surprising, but I hope I shall be able to convince you of its truth.
The problem with understanding Augustine—both for the East and for the
West—is that we think we understand him perfectly well already. Virtually no
one comes to Augustine with no preconceptions: that, at least, is my conclusion
after nearly forty years of teaching early Christian doctrine, including Augustine,
to undergraduate students in England. For Christians of the Western tradition,
this is because he has been so influential. Scholasticism and the Reformation
would be inconceivable without Augustine. But which Augustine? He wrote an
enormous amount, so much that his biographer, Possidius, said of his works, that
“there are so many that there is hardly a student who has been able to read and get
acquainted with them all.”2
The Augustine who governs our preconceptions tends to be the Augustine of
the great controversies. First of all, there is Augustine the “Doctor of Grace,” the
champion of the grace of God against the Pelagians, someone who elaborated a
doctrine of grace that has left later theologians debating whether he allowed any
room for human free will at all. Certainly, he is one who shored up his doctrine of
grace with a doctrine of original sin, indeed of original guilt, so that all human
beings come into the world worthy of damnation, forming a massa peccati.
Augustine also pressed his understanding of the priority of grace to the point of
elaborating a doctrine of predestination, even a doctrine of “double predestin
ation,” whereby human beings are created by God either for election or damna
tion, regardless of the kind of lives they may live. Or, second, there is the
Augustine who opposed the Donatists, those North African Christians who
maintained that the Catholic Church in North Africa had ceased to exist as a
Church, owing to its collusion with bishops who had forfeited grace by their
1 This essay doubled as the 2007 Orthodoxy in America Lecture and the keynote address for the
conference. The mission of Fordham’s annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture is to bring the insights of
the Orthodox tradition to a broader, non-academic audience, which often includes Orthodox and
non-Orthodox students and lay persons.
2 Possidius, Vita 18.9. In The Western Fathers, trans. F. R. Hoare (Sheed & Ward, 1955), 217.
cowardly behaviour during the great persecution at the beginning of the fourth
century—nearly a century before Augustine’s own engagement with the Donatists.
This Augustine developed a doctrine of the Church that sees it as forming a mixed
community of saints and sinners until the last judgement, with sacraments that
are valid, whatever the moral state of the minister, for it is Christ himself who is
the true minister of the sacraments. In the controversy with the Donatists,
Augustine was eventually driven to accept the use of persecution against recalci
trant Donatists. And then there is the Augustine who spent the best part of a dec
ade of his early manhood as a Manichee. Despite his eventual return to the faith
of his childhood, and of his mother, there were those, even in his lifetime, who
claimed that Augustine was still a covert Manichee, sharing their hatred of the
body and sex. There is also the Augustine of the major works—De civitate Dei
(The City of God) and De Trinitate (On the Trinity). The De civitate Dei is often
treated as a quarry for the political ideas of the Western Middle Ages, while it is in
his treatise De Trinitate that many Orthodox are determined to find the Augustine
who, in his doctrine of the Trinity, effectively broke the unity of the Una Sancta—
the “One, Holy Church”—by his endorsement of the doctrine of the double
procession of the Holy Spirit, the filioque.
It is not easy for us, Christians of either the East or the West, to get behind
these enormous preconceptions, and many might ask, why should we?—Augustine
is the doctor of grace, and that is what is important about him. But if we follow
these preconceptions, we are very soon reading Augustine in the light of later
theology, making him take sides in subsequent controversies that he never envis
aged. If one actually starts to read Augustine, even the Augustine of the contro
versies outlined above, one quickly finds oneself in the presence of someone with
a quick intelligence, who thought on his feet, whose ideas are more often tenta
tive, not definitive, who was constantly exploring what it meant to confess Christ,
to seek to follow him, to be a member of his body, to submit to the transforming
effect of the grace of the resurrection. These controversies occupied Augustine’s
time, and certainly shaped his thinking, but the fundamental reality of Augustine’s
life as a priest and bishop was as the pastor of the Catholic Christian community
in Hippo. It was there that day by day he prayed with his congregation, preached
to them, celebrated the Eucharist as their bishop. For roughly thirty-five years
that was his principal, daily concern. Once a bishop, he never left North Africa,
but spent his whole time there, mostly at Hippo, though also in Carthage; he
preached several times a week, and many of those sermons have been preserved
for us, though many more have been lost. It has been estimated that Augustine
must have preached about 8,000 homilies, of which 546 survive; if you add to
them the homilies on the Psalms, and the Gospel and First Epistle of John, the
total of the surviving sermons comes to a little over 1,000, which is about one-
eighth of his preaching.3 But this is a good deal, and it is here, I think, that we find
3 See Goulven Madec, La patrie et la voie (Desclée, 1989), 115–16.

St Augustine ’ s Reading of the Psalms 147
the heart of Augustine. It is here that again and again scholars over the last half-
century have sought to discover the “hidden Augustine,” the priest and pastor.
So, what I want to do in this essay is to peer behind these preconceptions, and
simply listen to Augustine the preacher and pastor. In this way, Christians of both
Western and Eastern traditions can find themselves in the presence of a father of
the Church, one whose voice speaks with authority from the heart of the Una
Sancta. In particular, it is Augustine as commentator on the Psalms that I want to
explore with you, for in his Enarrationes in Psalmos (Enarrations on the Psalms),
we have a complete series of reflections on the Psalms, mostly in the form of
homilies given to his congregations. Here, I think, we find the heart of Augustine:
a “heart in pilgrimage,” to borrow a phrase from the English poet and priest,
George Herbert.
Why these reflections on the Psalms? Several reasons come to mind. The first
is that the psalms are fundamental to the consciousness of the Church: they are
constantly quoted from the New Testament onward; they have become the back
bone of the Church’s regular—daily and weekly—pattern of prayer; in many
contexts it came to be expected that Christians would learn the whole psalter by
heart: the second canon of the Seventh Ecumenical Synod, for example, requires
that any candidate for the episcopate should know the psalter by heart. Augustine
shared this sense of the importance and centrality of the psalter; Possidius tells
us that, on his death bed, Augustine “ordered those Psalms of David which are
especially penitential to be copied out and, when he was very weak, used to lie in
bed facing the wall where the sheets of paper were put up, gazing at them and
reading them, and copiously and continuously weeping as he read.”4 His
Enarrationes in Psalmos, the title given them by Erasmus, were put together by
Augustine with some deliberation. Most of the homilies were actually preached
to a congregation, either at Hippo or at Carthage, more than a third of them in a
single year: 412. These homilies were supplemented by others that were never
preached, so far as we know, but were dictated, so that, together with the
preached homilies, the whole of the psalter is covered. The homilies on the first
thirty-two psalms seem to have been composed as a kind of exercise in sustained
reading and commentary, just after his ordination as a priest. Various others
seem to have been dictated towards 420, with the explicit intention of complet
ing the Enarrationes in Psalmos, including a set of thirty homilies on the long
Psalm 118 (119 in the Hebrew enumeration). This evident desire to present a
complete set of reflections on the Psalms underlines the significance that the
Psalms had for Augustine.5
4 Possidius, Vita 31.2 (242).

5 For a good introduction to the En. in Ps., see the article by Michael Cameron in Augustine through
the Ages: An Encyclopaedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Eerdmans, 1999), 290–96, with useful bibliog
raphy. I have taken my information about the dating of the homilies from the Corpus Christianorum
edition (see below, n. 6), xv–xix, which may be more positive than the evidence can sustain. See also,
Rowan Williams, ‘Augustine and the Psalms’, Interpretation 58 (2004), 17–27.
There are various ways in which we could explore Augustine’s treatment of the
Psalms. We could trace the themes and images he develops, but that would
require much more time than we have at our disposal. Instead, what I have
decided to do is to take one of Augustine’s homilies and follow it through with
you. This will not exactly be a close reading, though it will include some close
reading, but it is really an exercise in seeing how Augustine read one of the psalms
with his congregation. I have chosen the homily on Psalm 100 (101 in the
Hebrew), which begins: Misericordiam et iudicium cantabo tibi Domine (I shall
sing to you of mercy and judgement, O Lord).6 Various considerations guided
this choice: among them, that it was actually preached by Augustine to his con
gregation in Hippo—in Eastertide in 395, when Augustine was on the threshold
of consecration as a bishop—and that it is not too long.
Augustine’s method of exegesis is always to follow the words closely, to inter
rogate them. This is partly a matter of his rhetorical training; such word-by-word
consideration was what he had learned in his years as a student. But even more it
is because these are the words of holy men inspired by the Holy Spirit: each word
is significant, as are the order of the words and their meaning. So Augustine
begins with what is meant by singing to God of mercy and judgement—mercy
and judgement together:
Let no one delude himself into thinking himself free of punishment because of
God’s mercy, for it is also judgment; and let no one changing for the better be
terrified by God’s judgment, because mercy precedes it. For when men judge,
sometimes they are overcome with mercy and act against justice; and there
seems to be mercy in them and not judgment; sometimes, however, they want to
adhere to strict judgment, and they lose sight of mercy. God, however, neither
loses the severity of judgment in the goodness of mercy, nor in judging with
severity does he lose the goodness of mercy.7
However, Augustine says we must observe the order: mercy first, and then judge
ment. “If we distinguish these two by times, we shall perhaps find that now—
modo, for the time being—is the time of mercy, while the time of judgment is
future.” Why, he asks? First of all, look to God, the Father. Remember what the
Lord has said: “Be like your heavenly Father . . . Love your enemies, pray for those
who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who
makes the sun rise on both good and bad, and rain to fall on the just and the
unjust.”8
6 The text, edited by E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont on the basis of the Maurist text, in CCSL 39, vol. 3,
Enarrationes in Psalmos LI–C (Brepols, 1956), 1405–17.
7 En. in Ps. 100.1. 8 Mt. 5.48, 44–5.
Behold mercy. When you see the just and the unjust looking at the same sun,
enjoying the same light, drinking from the same fountains, watered by the same
rain, filled by the same fruits of the earth, breathing the same air, having equally
the world’s goods, do not think that God is unjust, who gives these things equally
to the just and the unjust. For it is the time of mercy, not yet the time of judg
ment. For unless God first spares us in mercy, he will not find those he can
crown in judgment. It is therefore the time of mercy, when the patience of God
leads those who sin to repentance.9
This is how Augustine sets the scene for his interpretation of the psalm: we are
living in the time of mercy; there awaits us the time of judgement. He continues
this contrast between mercy and judgement by drawing a contrast between the
Latin verbs donare and reddere (to grant and to give back, or to recompense). The
time of mercy is the time of donare, the time of gifts; the time of judgement will
be the time of reddere, the time of recompense. Augustine illustrates this from the
example of Paul, who was first a blasphemer and persecutor, but then shown
mercy, so that Christ Jesus might show his long-suffering in him (cf. 1 Tim. 1.13,
16). At that time, “the Lord came to give to Paul, not to recompense him.” He then
goes on to quote from 2 Timothy: “For now I am being sacrificed, the time of my
departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith”—all this, Augustine comments, in the time of mercy.
Hear, now, of judgment: For the rest there is laid up for me the crown of justice,
which the Lord, the just judge, will recompense me [reddet mihi] in that day.
When he gives, he is merciful; when he gives back, he will be judge, because
“I will sing to you of mercy and judgment, O Lord.”10
But we must not presume on God’s mercy, Augustine continues:
Therefore, brethren, because we have the time of mercy, let us not delude
ourselves, let us not excuse ourselves, let us not say: God always pardons. Look,
what I did yesterday, God has pardoned; what I do today, God also pardons;
I shall do it tomorrow, because God pardons. You are aware of mercy, and you
do not fear judgment. But if you want to sing of mercy and of judgment, under
stand that he thus pardons, that he may correct, not that you may remain in
wickedness.11
And Augustine goes on to quote from Psalm 49(50), where the psalmist repre
sents God as upbraiding humankind for all kinds of sins and cruelties, ending:
9 En. in Ps. 100.1. 10 En. in Ps., 100.2. 11 En. in Ps., 100.3.
“these things you did, and I kept silence [Haec fecisti, et tacui].” “What does this
mean: I kept silence,” Augustine asks. “It cannot mean: I did not rebuke, but
rather: I have not judged. For how could he keep silence who day by day cries out
in the scriptures, in the gospel, in his preachers? I kept silence from punishment
[supplicium], not from words.” The time of mercy is the time to learn our faults
and repent, and not to presume of God’s long-suffering. This is what is meant by
“singing of mercy and judgment”:
Because therefore mercy and judgment is sung to us, we also who act with mercy
can be sure in the expectation of judgment; and let us be in his body, that we
also may sing. For it is Christ who is singing this; if only the head sings, it is sung
from the Lord, and is no concern of ours; if, however, it is the whole Christ who
sings, that is the head and his body, it is in his members to cleave to him through
faith, through hope, and through love; you both sing in him and exult in him;
because he works in you, and thirsts in you, and hungers and suffers tribulation
in you. Up to the present he is dying in you, and you have now been raised in
him . . . Therefore, my brothers, Christ is singing; but how, you know, for I know
that you are not ignorant about him. The Lord Christ is the Word of God,
through whom everything was made. His Word, that he might redeem us,
became flesh and dwelt among us; God who is above all became man, the Son of
God equal to the Father; he became man for this, that God the man might be
mediator between humans and God, and reconcile those placed apart, join
together the separated, recall those estranged and lead back the wanderers: for
this he became man. He therefore becomes the head of the Church, having both
head and members. Seek then his members; for the time being they groan
throughout the whole world; then they will rejoice—at the end, at the crown of
justice, with which, as Paul says, the Lord, the just judge, will reward me in that
day. For the time being, therefore, we sing in hope, all gathered together into
one. For clothed with Christ, we are Christ with our head.12
Mercy and judgement are the marks of this age and of the one to come; we live in
the age of mercy, the mercy shown us in Christ. In union with him, though we
groan in this present age, we can also sing—sing of mercy, but also sing of judge
ment, as we look to the age to come and its dawning.
Augustine has spent the first third of this sermon dwelling on this contrast
between mercy and judgement. The rest of the sermon continues under this over
arching theme.
The next verse reads: “I will sing psalms [psallam] and understand in the way
of purity [via immaculata], when you come to me.” It is only in the way of purity,
12 En. in Ps., 100.3.

Augustine comments, that we can sing psalms and understand. “If you want to
understand, sing in the way of purity, that is, work for God in gladness [in
hilaritate].”13 What, then, Augustine asks, is this way of purity (or “life of purity”;
the text now reads vita instead of via)? He answers his question by quoting the
next verse: “I walked in the innocence of my heart, in the midst of my house.”
“This way of purity begins in innocence, and also reaches its end in it.” “But what
is meant by innocence?,” Augustine’s interrogation of the text continues. The
Latin word innocentia suggests something not harmed or not harmful: from the
verb noceo, to harm. And, Augustine remarks, “there are two ways in which
someone can cause harm: either by making someone unhappy [miserum], or by
deserting someone in their unhappiness; for you do not want to be made unhappy
by another, nor do you want to be deserted by another, if you are unhappy.” There
is a play of words here, very important for grasping Augustine’s sequence of ideas:
the play between misericordia, mercy, and miser, unhappy, pitiable, miserable.
Mercy, misericordia, is what those who are miseri need: the time of misericordia is
the time of the miseri; it is also the time of the nocentes, those who harm others
and reduce them to being miseri. The nocentes do this in two ways: by active
harm— by violence, oppression, robbery, covetousness, calumny— by what
Augustine calls generally studium malevolentiae; and by neglecting the needy,
despising the tears of the unhappy. Either way, the one who does this alienat cor
suum—makes his heart strange to himself. If we ask who is innocent, the answer
is: “One who neither harms another nor harms himself. For one who harms him
self is not innocent.” And Augustine goes on to comment,
But if someone corrupts himself, if he over-throws God’s temple in himself,

what do you expect, that he will be merciful to others, and spare the miserable?
He who is cruel to himself, could he be merciful to another? The whole of justice
therefore can be reduced to the single word: innocence.
So, “the one who wants to harm others has first harmed himself; nor can he walk
about, because there is no ‘where’ [quia non est ubi]. For all wickedness is subject
to narrowness: only innocence is broad, where it may walk about.” The freedom
to walk can only be exercised in the space provided by innocence of heart; there
one is free to walk “in the midst of my house.” Augustine picks up on this and
comments:
He says the “midst of his house”—or the Church itself; for Christ walks about in
it—or his heart, for our heart is our interior house, as he expressed it when he
said above: “in the innocence of my heart.” What is the innocence of his heart?
13 En. in Ps., 100.4.

The midst of his house. Whoever does evil in this house is driven outside
it . . . Whoever does not have a peaceful heart cannot freely dwell in his heart . . .14
And Augustine goes on to cite the example of the paralytic whom the Lord healed,
telling him to “take up his bed and go into his house”: “he takes up his bed and
rules his body; now he goes into his house, enters into his conscience; now he
finds broad place [latam], where he talks around, sings, and understands.”
Note how this exegesis turns on the idea that the wicked person has damaged
himself, has driven himself out of his heart, which has become too narrow to
inhabit. In contrast, the innocent harms no one, and finds within himself a broad
space, where he can walk about in freedom.
There follows a series of verses in which the one who “sings of mercy and judg
ment” expresses his attitude towards those who “work iniquity” (facientes prae-
varicationem), the “crooked heart” (cor pravum), the proud, and those whose
heart is insatiable. The psalmist will have nothing to do with them: he hates them;
he will drive them away; he will not eat with them. Augustine is at pains to make
sure that such hatred is not misunderstood. The psalmist “hates those who work
iniquity” (facientes praevaricationem; the Latin praevaricatio has a very different
meaning from our English “prevarication”—it means deeply culpable evil). “But,”
says Augustine, “you must hate the prevaricators, not the men. There is one man
the prevaricator, but see that he has two names—man and prevaricator: God
made man, man made himself a prevaricator; love in him what God made, drive
away in him what he has made of himself.”15 Or, a little later on: “Behold the good
persecutor persecutes not man, but sin.”16 Mention of the cor pravum provokes a
discussion of prayer, which is only true prayer—prayer from an “upright heart”
(cor rectum)—if it wants what God wants. Augustine considers, briefly, Christ’s
prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, and his expression of “sadness, even unto
death.” Augustine comments, “But what was that voice, save the sound of our
weakness?”—Christ, as head of the body, gives expression to the groaning of the
members. When he comes to consider the psalmist’s refusal to eat with the proud
and those with insatiable hearts, Augustine considers the counter-example in the
gospel, where Christ eats with the proud pharisee, how the prostitute wept at
the Lord’s feet and caused the pharisee silently to blame Christ’s ignorance of the
woman’s nature. Augustine comments,
How did he know that Christ was ignorant, unless he suspected that he did not
know, because he did not push her away? Because, if it had been him, he would
have repelled her. The Lord, however, not only knew that the woman was a sin
ner, but as a physician saw that the wounds of that proud man were incurable.
14 En. in Ps., 100.4. 15 En. in Ps., 100.5. 16 En. in Ps., 100.8.
Christ could use the meal with the proud man at least to warn him of the danger
of his pride. For us, Augustine warns, “Beware, lest in their banquets you are
caught in the snares of the devil.”17
Augustine finally comes to the last verse of the psalm: “In the morning I put to
death all the sinners on the earth.” “This is a dark saying,” he remarks, “we do well
to pay attention, for it is the very end of the psalm.”18 The psalmist gives his
reason in the final words: “that I may utterly destroy from the city of the Lord all
workers of iniquity.” So, Augustine comments, there are workers of iniquity
within the city of the Lord, but that is, as we well know, because it is still the “time
of mercy”; but the morning will be the time of judgement; then the workers of
iniquity will be destroyed. If morning is the coming time of judgement, then the
present time of mercy is night, and the theme of night, nox, leads to this reflection:
For at the present, while you do not see my heart and I do not see yours, it is
night. You sought I do not know what from someone. You did not get it; you
thought yourself despised, but maybe you were not despised; for you do not see
the heart—and suddenly you blaspheme. In the night pardon is to be given you
when you go astray. Someone loves you, I do not know who, and you think that
he hates you; or he hates you, and you think that he loves you; but whatever it is,
it is night. Do not fear, trust in Christ; in him grasp the day. You can think noth
ing evil of him, for we are sure and certain that he cannot be deceived. He loves
us. Of ourselves, however, we cannot yet be certain. For God knows our love for
one another; we, however, even if we love one another, who knows how such
love works out among us? Why does no one see the heart? Because it is night. In
this night temptations abound. It is, as it were, of this night that the psalmist
says, “You have placed darkness and made night; in it all the beasts of the forest
move. The young lions [catuli leonum] roar after their prey and they seek their
food from God.” In the night the young lions seek their food. Who are these
young lions? The princes and powers of this air, the demons and the angels of
the devil. How do they seek their food? When they tempt. But they do not come
near it, unless God gives them power, for thus it is said: “they seek their food
from God.” The devil sought Job to tempt him. What food? The rich, the fat, the
just man of God, to whom the Lord bore testimony and said: “a man without
blame, he was a true worshipper of God.” He sought him to tempt him, seeking
food from God. And he accepted that he should be tempted but not crushed,
purified but not oppressed, or perhaps not purified but proved. However, those
who are tempted are sometimes handed over for some secret reason into the
hands of the tempter, because, perhaps, they are delivered over to their desires.
17 En. in Ps., 100.9. 18 En. in Ps., 100.12.

For the devil harms no one, unless he receives power from God. But when? In
the night. What does this mean: in the night? In this time . . .19
“This time,” to which Augustine refers, is the time of mercy. But this time will
pass, and in the morning will come the time of judgement. And what is meant by
“in the morning”? Augustine ends his sermon with these reflections:
What is: in the morning? While the night is still passing. Why does he still par
don? Because it is the time of mercy. Why does he not always pardon? Because
“of mercy and judgment I shall sing to you, O Lord.” Brothers, let no one delude
himself: all who work iniquity will be put to death; Christ puts them to death in
the morning, and destroys them from his city. But while it is still the time of
mercy, let us hear him. Wherever he calls out through the law, through the
prophets, through the psalms, through letters, through the gospels. See that he is
not silent, that he pardons, that he distributes mercy. But beware, because the
judgment is to come.20
The voice of Augustine the preacher is a fascinating voice. It unfolds the message
of the psalm with a sense of great respect for the intelligence of his people. He
does not try to fob them off with generalizing morality, nor does he make light of
the difficulties of the psalm. Even in looking at a single psalm, we recognize sev
eral guiding themes: it is Christ’s voice we hear in the psalm, and part of what is
meant by understanding the psalm is learning how to join our voice to Christ’s;
the Christ singing in the psalm is Christ the head of the Church, of which we are
the members; in this sense, the Church links this time of trial and temptation
with the future time of glory, when Christ will be revealed as judge; finding Christ
in the psalm also leads, in both minor and more important ways, to finding the
gospel reflected in the psalm. Above all, perhaps, we hear in this homily, the voice
of St Augustine the pastor, who had a deep understanding of the darkness of the
human condition. This sense of the darkness of the human condition lies behind
his concept of original sin, and the frailty of the human will; but here, Augustine
does not systematize this insight: it remains an insight, based on human experi
ence, an insight we find, expressed in very similar terms, in the Macarian
Homilies, for instance. At this level, of pastoral concern and psychological insight,
we can all—Christians of both Western and Eastern traditions—find a voice that
has still a great deal to say to us all.
19 En. in Ps., 100.12. 20 En. in Ps., 100.13.

15
Pagan Theurgy and Christian
Sacramentalism in Denys the Areopagite
Ever since the researches of Koch and Stiglmayr it has been recognized by scholars
that the vocabulary of Denys the Areopagite is deeply impregnated with Procline
Neoplatonism. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way Denys makes use of
θεουργία and related words. It occurs regularly in his accounts of the Christian
sacraments: indeed of the twenty-five times Denys uses the word θεουργία, eighteen
of these occur in EH.1 This naturally raises the question as to how far Denys’
doctrine of the sacraments, and not just his language, has been influenced by
Neoplatonism.
Pagan Theurgy
The word θεουργία is a late Greek word, seemingly coined in the circles that pro-
duced the Chaldean Oracles at the end of the second century ad.2 It seems to have
been fashioned on analogy with θεολογία: as a θεολόγος is one who can speak of
the divine or declare divine things, so a θεούργος, a theurgist, is one who can do
divine things, or tap the divine power on a human level, by offering sacrifices that
influence the course of events, performing divination, uttering oracles. Plotinus
had no time for theurgy: the word θεουργία is not used in the Enneads, he uses
the older, derogatory word, γοητεία, ‘sorcery’. Later Neoplatonists were more wel-
coming: Porphyry cautiously so, but Iamblichus, in his de Mysteriis,3 a response to
1 References to the Dionysian corpus (= CD) are given to Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 3, by col-
umn number. EH = Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; CH = Celestial Hierarchy. Information about Denys’ use
of words is drawn from A. van den Daele SJ, Indices Pseudo-Dionysiani (Bibliothèque de l’Université,
Louvain, 1941).
2 On theurgy, see H. Lewy, Chaldaean Oracles and Pagan Theurgy, rev. edn M. Tardieu (Paris,
1978), esp. Exe. iv. 461–6; E. R. Dodds, ‘Theurgy’, App. ii, The Greeks and the Irrational (University of
California Press, 1951), 283–311; A. Smith, Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition (Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974), pt. ii, pp. 83–150. For an earlier discussion of the influence of pagan theurgy
on Dionysian sacramental theology, see P. E. Rorem, ‘Iamblichus and the Anagogical Method in
Ps-Dionysian Liturgical Theology’, Studia Patristica xvii (1982), 453–60, and P. E. Rorem, Biblical and
Liturgical Symbols within the Ps-Dionysian Synthesis (Ponitifcal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984),
esp. 99–116. Without the stimulus provided by the book this article would probably never have been
written.
3 Cited in the edition (with French trans.) by E. des Places SJ, Jamblique. Les mysteres d’Egypte (Les
Belles Lettres, 1966) (= dM).
Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo on theurgy, with great enthusiasm. It was Iamblichus’

estimate of theurgy that was embraced by Athenian Neoplatonism, so great an
influence on Denys.
Iamblichus’ de Mysteriis is not to be dismissed as a farrago of magical non-
sense: it represents a serious and carefully argued attempt to incorporate theurgy
into man’s search for contact with the divine. It certainly represents a new depart
ure in the Greek philosophical tradition as found (say) in Plotinus: Iamblichus
does not at all share Plotinus’ confidence in the power of human reason (or better
intellect) to attain the divine, but his is a reasoned qualification of the powers of
the intellect, not an irrational descent into anti-intellectualism. Iamblichus does
not defend any and every recourse to pagan magic, nor does his defence of the-
urgy entail a belittling of the divine (that indeed is the substance of his charge
against Porphyry’s cautious attempts to accommodate a certain acceptance of
theurgy). For Iamblichus theurgy means, as the word suggests, divine activity,
and sacrifices, divination, prayers and so on are ways in which man can tap divine
power. These human activities are not seen by Iamblichus as bending the divine
to human purposes—he is unyielding in his defence of divine transcendence—
but rather as rendering man apt for the divine, responsive to divine activity. For
Iamblichus such theurgy is essential if man is to attain the divine: it is impossible
for man on his own, it is only the divine power itself that can raise man to contact
with the divine.4 And this divine power is manifest in certain traditional rites and
sacrifices that man has simply to accept: they have been ordained by the gods
themselves and man discovers this by attention to ancient tradition, particularly
the traditions of the Egyptians. This manifests itself in a point we shall come back
to later: Iamblichus’ defence of unintelligible ritual (unintelligible, that is, to
Greeks). It is not necessary, he argues, to understand theurgic rites, since theurgy
is not in essence a human activity and human understanding can never attain the
divine; it is better to perform the rites as they have been handed down by trad
ition. Some of the oldest and best of these traditions are Egyptian, hence the rit
uals unintelligible to Greeks: ‘since the Egyptians were the first to receive
communication from the gods, the gods love to be invoked according to the rules
of this people.’5
Θεουργία in Denys
The word θεουργία occurs twenty-five times in CD and related words several
times (θεουργικός, -ῶς, sixteen times; θεούργος, four times). They betray their
Neoplatonic ancestry in other ways than simply their linguistic form: the parallel
4 See esp. dM ii. I I. 5 dM vii. 5. 258. 4–6.

Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism 157
with θεολογία, for example, is several times apparent (e.g., EH 429D, 513C) and
once Denys seems to echo Iamblichus in appearing to exalt theurgy over theology
(EH 432B: θεουργία the συνκεφαλαίωσις of θεολογία). But if we look at the way
these words are used, there are a number of contrasts to the use we find in
Iamblichus. Θεούργος, for instance, in pagan use is usually a noun, meaning a
theurgist, one who practises theurgy; in Denys it is always an adjective. But the
use of the word θεουργία is even more striking. In Iamblichus θεουργία refers to
the religious rituals—prayers, sacrifices, divinations—performed by the theurgist:
it is one of a number of words—θεουργία, μυσταγωγία, ἱερὰ ἁγιστεία, ἱερουργία,
θρησκεία, ἱερατικὴ τέχνη, θεοσοφία, ἡ θεία ἐπιστήμη—which have all more or less
the same meaning and which are frequently simply translated théurgie by E. des
Places in his edition of Iamblichus’ de Mysteriis.6 But in Denys the word θεουργία
seems never to be used of religious rituals.7 The word seems rather to mean divine
activity, or perhaps better, divine work or action (as it is frequently used in the
plural). And it is very striking that, in more than a third of its occurrences (nine
times out of twenty-five), θεουργία refers to the divine activity of the Incarnate
Christ (e.g., ἀνδρικῆς τοῦ Ἰησου θεουργίας; CH 181 B). Although the word
θεουργία never refers to religious ritual, it frequently occurs in the context of
descriptions of such ritual, and if we ask what the connection between θεουργία
and ritual is, the most obvious answer seems to be that in the performance of
religious ritual the θεουργίαι, the divine acts, are praised or celebrated (ὑμνεῖν)—
something we are told six times. If we put all this together the following rather
startling conclusion seems to emerge—startling at least to those who hold the
common view that Denys’ Christianity has been swamped by his enthusiasm for
Neoplatonism: that the liturgy is a celebration of the acts of God, especially and
centrally the divine activity manifest in the Incarnation of Jesus. Far from the
focus of Denys’ concern lying in the hierarchies which ‘perform’, as it were, in the
liturgy, the Incarnation being hardly more than the occasion for the establish-
ment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (or ‘our’ hierarchy, as Denys calls it),8 the lit-
urgy itself is seen as a celebration of acts of God manifest pre-eminently in the
Incarnation. Denys seems much more Christocentric than has often been allowed.
This contrast with Iamblichus can be strengthened by a further observation
about Denys’ language. Whereas, as we have seen, a whole range of terms, includ-
ing θεουργία, are used interchangeably by Iamblichus to refer to religious rites,
Denys seems to make a clear distinction between θεουργία, which refers to the
divine acts praised in the liturgy, and the celebration of the liturgy itself, for which
6 See des Places, Jamblique, 40 n. 1, 45 n. 2, 6o n. 1.

7 Despite J. Meyendorff ’s assertion that Θεουργία is ‘l’activité de la hierarchie’: Le Christ dans la
théologie byzantine (Cerf, 1969), 144, justified by a reference to J. Vanneste SJ, Le mystère de Dieu
(Desclée de Brouwer, 1959), 34–5.
8 As Meyendorff seems to think; Le Christ dans la théologie byzantine, 143–7.
his favourite term is ἱερουγία and related words. This distinction is made very
clear in the following passage:
And the hierarch, having praised (ὑμνήσας) the sacred divine acts (θεουργίας)
celebrates (ἱερουγεὶ) the most divine [rites], and brings to view those things that
have been praised (τὰ ὑμνουμένα) through the symbols sacredly presented. And
showing the gifts of the divine acts, he himself comes into sacred communion
(κοινωνίαν) with them, and then invites the others.9
If we ask what the divine acts are that are celebrated in the liturgy, given that these
focus on the Incarnation, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Denys is refer-
ring to the acts of God in creation and redemption culminating in the Incarnation
celebrated in all the ancient Eucharistic prayers. In other words θεουργίαι refer to
the historical divine acts recalled in liturgical celebration. Indeed at one point
Denys says that our likeness to God is effected by the renewal τῆς τῶν ἱεροτάτων
θεουργίων μνήμης through liturgical actions, and goes on to use the word
θεουργίας, of Jesus’ actions in instituting the Eucharist (EH 441C).
Sacramental Efficacy in Denys
But how far are we to go in contrasting the pagan understanding of θεουργία as

found in Iamblichus and the later Neoplatonic tradition and Denys’ understand-
ing of the Christian sacraments? Paul Rorem, in his recent brilliant study of
Denys,10 would go still further. Whereas for Iamblichus the pagan rites are actu-
ally efficacious through being performed (though this does not imply, as we have
seen, that Iamblichus thinks that we can actually influence the divine beings), for
Denys, Rorem argues, the Christian sacraments are not strictly speaking effica-
cious through being performed, but through being understood. The performance
of the Christian sacraments provides a display of sacred symbols, the understand-
ing of which raises us (or ‘uplifts’ us, as Rorem prefers us to translate ἀνάγειν) to
contemplation. Rorem insists on ‘the thoroughly interpretive nature of Pseudo-
Dionysian anagogy, namely that the uplifting does not occur by virtue of rites or
symbols by themselves but rather by their interpretation, in the upward move-
ment through the perceptible to the intelligible’.11
Rorem’s argument here seems to rest on two points: first, the contrast he draws
between Iamblichus and Denys; and second, his analysis of the notion of anagogy,
9 EH 425D; cf. the very similar language in EH 444A.

10 Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols, cited in n. 2.
11 Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols, 116: see the whole chapter, ‘The Anagogical
Movement’, 99–116.
‘uplifting’. The first point makes much of the contrast between Iamblichus’ defence
of unintelligible ritual (referred to above) and the constant emphasis in Denys on
intelligibility in relation to liturgical matters. The contrast is certainly there, but
whereas Iamblichus’ position does mean that he did not think theurgic efficacy
depended on intelligibility, it does not follow that Denys thought that sacramen-
tal efficacy was solely a matter of intelligibility. The second point, as I understand
Rorem, is intended to bridge the gap left by this non sequitur. Rorem’s treatment
of anagogy is masterly: it is clearly an important notion for Denys (and, import
antly, points to something that does not directly concern us here, the close link
in Denys between Scripture and liturgy) and he establishes that anagogy is
effected through knowledge and understanding. The only question is: is this the
whole story?
To suggest that it might not be, let us examine the term used in the passage
quoted above (EH 425D) which gives a summary account of the nature of sacra-
mental action according to Denys. There the process culminates in κοινωνία,
communion, or participation.12
Κοινωνία and related words occur frequently in CD (the word κοινωνία itself
occurs, according to van den Daele, sixty-six times, most of them in EH). It is an
important term for Denys with a wide spectrum of meaning. Sometimes it is used
in a primarily philosophical sense expressing the Neoplatonic commonplace that
everything shares in everything else in a way appropriate to each.13 It is a central
metaphysical desideratum: the Good rejoices in κοινωνία (DN 717A), it is proper
(ἴδιον) to the Cause of all to call all things to κοινωνία himself (CH 177C). Denys,
like other Neoplatonic writers, will not use one word if three or four will do, and
it is interesting to note the words which appear more or less in apposition to
κοινωνία. Ἀναγωγή is one of them (260B, 504C). Rorem notes that ἀναγωγή is a
synonym for ἐπιστροφή, though with a more specific connotation.14 Ἐπιστροφή is
once coupled with κοινωνία, and most of the terms that come to stand in appos
ition to κοινωνία denote the movement of return, or the fruits of such: θεωρία
(532B, C, D, 588D), ἕνωσις (425D, 588D, 260B), συνεργία (212A), ἐποψία (very
frequently). This suggests that, whereas ἀναγωγή refers to an important aspect of
the movement of return, namely that this movement takes place through our
understanding the illumination conveyed through the words of Scripture and the
symbols of the liturgy and being uplifted by this, κοινωνία refers to what is
acquired by this process of return: union or communion. Union or communion
with what? What it is we have κοινωνία with is specified in a variety of ways.
Sometimes it seems to refer to the society of beings that share the same rank
12 Whether in the ‘gifts of the divine acts’ (? = theEucharistic ‘gifts’; though δῶρα would be more
usual than δωρεαί or in the θεουργίαι, themselves is not clear: perhaps the former is more likely.
13 DN 704C; cf. Proclus, Elements of Theology, prop. 103 (Dodds, ‘Theurgy’, 92).
14 Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols, 101.
(e.g., 337C, 5I3B). More often it refers to something granted or attained: κοινωνία
with God (44IB, etc.), or the Cause of all (I77C), or the One (40IA, etc.), the
thearchic goodness (44IB), the thearchic likeness (I8oA). In these cases we are
thinking of the κοινωνία which conveys likeness with God, deification (as the last
example cited makes explicit; cf. 424C), an assimilation to God that is the goal of
the whole system of hierarchies (see CH I64DI-5). Another whole group of
occurrences of κοινωνία refers to the κοινωνία that takes place in the liturgy, and
effects deification. The sacred signs typify θεουργικὴν ὁμοίωσιν (208C); the liturgy
effects κοινωνία with the divine acts or their gifts (425D); Denys speaks of
κοινωνία with the symbols (536C; in this case as a lowly stage beyond which there
is something deeper), with ‘the most resplendent rites’ (532C), πρὸς τὰ φωτοειδῆ
καὶ τελεσιουργικά (433B; in a liturgical context): κοινωνία sometimes simply
means Holy Communion (444D, 505B, 536C, 565B). This makes it look as if
through participation in the sacraments deification is effected, which itself can be
characterized as κοινωνία with God. Two further observations support such an
interpretation. First, if we look at Denys’ use of the adjective θεουργικός, it seems
to be the case (though it is not always easy to be sure) that its primary meaning is
‘deifying’ (Eriugena, Sarrazin, and Grosseteste regularly translate it deificus), or as
conveying divine activity (which comes to the same thing for Denys), and several
times its context shows that it refers to sacramental action, most notably at EH ii.
2. 7 (396D), where the oil of chrismation is called θεουργικώτατος. Second, if we
look at the adjectives Denys uses to qualify κοινωνία, it emerges that his favourite
seems to be θεαρχικός, which suggests that he sees κοινωνία as belonging to the
Thearchy (his coinage for the Trinity) and mediated through the hierarchies of
which the Thearchy is the pinnacle: which means, for practical purposes for
humankind, through the liturgy.
What, of course, distinguishes human beings from the higher beings in Denys’
cosmos is that they are corporeal, and in two places this leads Denys to be explicit
about instances of κοινωνία that take place apart from understanding. In EH vii.
3. 11 Denys defends the idea that children—a feature of humanity’s corporeal and
temporal state—who are not yet capable of understanding divine matters (or any-
thing else) can be partakers of ‘divine birth’ and ‘the most sacred symbols of the
thearchic communion’ (565D‒568A), and like Iamblichus15 he argues that a cer-
tain incomprehension is fitting in our dealings with a God who is utterly beyond
our understanding. A little earlier (EH vii. 3. 9; 565B) Denys, in commenting on
the rites of burial, has explained the honour shown to the body of the departed
one by saying that
the divine ordering of sacred rites bestows thearchic communion on both [soul
and body]; on the soul through pure contemplation and knowledge of the sacred
15 See dM ii. 1 1 and vii. 4.

rites, and on the body by the most divine oil, as in an image, and by the most
sacred symbols of the thearchic communion, sanctifying the whole man, and
sacredly effecting his whole salvation (τὴν ὁλικὴν αὐτοῦ σωτηρίαν), and pro-
claiming through catholic ceremonies his future most perfect resurrection.
This certainly envisages a dual activity of the sacraments, operating on the soul
spiritually through knowledge, and the body physically;16 but there seems no
doubt that for Denys both are necessary, for ‘the one who has died lived a life of
friendship with God in both soul and body’ (565B3‒4).
All this confirms Rorem’s argument that for Denys knowledge and understand-
ing are paramount in (at least) the soul’s advance towards union with God, but it
suggests too that this is not the whole story and that there is a place for genuine
sacramental efficacy in Dionysian sacramental theology.
16 Cf. Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching in Oratio Catechetica 37 (Srawley, 141. 1–144. 3).
16
‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest
Images of Invisible Things’
Dionysios the Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible
What I want to do in this paper is to try and explore the way in which Dionysios
contributes to a change in the understanding of the place of the visual and visual
images in the Byzantine East between the period of the great Fathers of the fourth
and fifth centuries—especially the Cappadocian Fathers—and the period of the
iconoclast controversy and the defence of the making and veneration of images
found in St John Damascene. For it seems to me that there is a manifest shift in
the assessment of the visual, and also that Dionysios plays a role in this shift of
perception. The role, though crucial, was far from being unambiguous, the multi-
valency of this shift of perception being the key to its protean effects in different
schools of thought and, in fact, to the status it gained as a locus classicus. How
conscious anyone was of this shift is difficult to ascertain, as appeal to tradition
has the effect of covering one’s tracks even from oneself. Indeed, what I am doing
is something invited by the iconodule sources themselves, though this invitation
has rarely, if ever, been taken up. For fundamental to the iconodule defence, espe-
cially in the eighth century, was appeal to the authority of the Fathers, amongst
whom the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Basil the Great and his brother
Gregory of Nyssa, and Dionysios the Areopagite figured prominently. Indeed, the
quotation that I have used in my title is taken immediately, not from Dionysios’
tenth letter, but from the lengthy florilegium of patristic citations that John
Damascene appended to his third and most systematic defence of the making and
veneration of icons: this quotation from Dionysios is the very first citation head-
ing the list. If we refer to its context in the tenth letter of Dionysios, ostensibly
written to John the Apostle and Theologian, we immediately encounter the differ-
ent perspectives that the Damascene is seeking to align in his patristic florile-
gium. For in context, Dionysios’ assertion here seems to have little to do with the
understanding of icons John seeks to promote. What Dionysios means by this
assertion, to judge by the argument in which he places it, is that what happens in
this world here below is an image of invisible truth, and in particular that those
who oppose the gospel in the present age, by persecuting the apostles, will find
themselves separated from God in the invisible realms of eternity, and conversely
that those who live lives dedicated to God here already ‘live like angels among
men’. There is nothing directly about visual images at all. Nevertheless, this
passage was regarded as crucial for other eighth-century defenders of icons:
following John, it was also cited by Hadrian I in his letter to Angilbert of St Riquier
(the ‘Hadrianum’), to defend the veneration of icons.1 For the defenders of icons
against the iconoclasts, this quotation affirmed a central principle: that visible
images provided authentic access to the invisible. John of Damascus, in particular,
tries to make the whole controversy turn on two issues: the nature of the image
and the nature of veneration. For him, any theological understanding at all was
dependent on the notion of the image. In a remarkable passage in his first treatise
against the iconoclasts, repeated in a more systematic form in his third treatise,2
John makes a careful distinction between the different forms of the image,
demonstrating that it provides an essential concept for understanding the doctrine
of the Trinity and the relationship between God and the world, and especially
human kind, created in his image, a key to biblical interpretation, as well as
furnishing ways by which, through narrative and pictorial depiction, we could
recall the events and people of the past through which and whom God had
revealed himself and his power. In this way the concept of image is seen to be
embedded in the very nature of theology. The citation from Dionysios sums up,
for the Damascene and the pope, that principle.
We find the same kind of disjunction—between apparent original intention
and perceived significance—if we look at the other citations John Damascene
provides in his florilegia. In the case of the citations from the Cappadocian
Fathers (and also their contemporary John Chrysostom), the disjunction appears
like this: the Damascene cites the Cappadocians for their appeal to visual imagery,
but that was, in fact, a rhetorical appeal to visual imagery. Take, for example, the
first citation he provides from Basil the Great:
Rise up now for me, O radiant painters of athletic achievements, and magnify
the mutilated image of the general [Barlaam, the martyr about whom Basil is
preaching] by your arts. The context in which he was crowned, described more
dimly by me, you make radiant with the colours of your wisdom. Overwhelmed
by you, I will refrain from describing the martyr’s deeds of valour. I see the
struggle depicted most exactly by you, with his hand in the fire; I see the
1 A letter I completely misunderstood in my article, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and the Iconoclast
Controversy’, In Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia (Institut
des Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 327–39, on 335. For an accurate account of Hadrian’s defence of
icons, see Bronwen Neil, ‘The Western Reaction to the Council of Nicaea II’, Journal of Theological
Studies, n.s., 51 (2000), 533–52.
2 John Damascene, On the Divine Images I.9–13; cf. III.16–23. The text of On the Divine Images, as
Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres is generally known in English, is that prepared by
Bonifatius Kotter for his edition of the prose works of John Damascene (Die Schriften des Johannes von
Damaskos, vol. 3, Patristische Texte und Studien 17 (Walter de Gruyter, 1975)), and the translation my
own: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003).
combatant, radiant with joy, depicted in your image. Let the demons howl, as
they are now struck down by the valiant deeds of the martyrs now manifest in
you. Let the burning hand be once again shown as victorious over them. May
Christ, the judge of the contest, inscribe them on his list, to whom be glory to
the ages.3
What Basil is doing here is appealing to his audience to imagine a picture of the
martyr, holding the burning incense in his hand, and refusing to let it drop on the
pagan altar over which his hand is held. He invokes the greater realism of a
painted picture as a rhetorical device: his appeal to visual imagery is part of his
rhetorical craft. Basil and other fourth-century Fathers use visual images rhet
orically: they are a starting point for the practice of ekphrasis, in which, by appeal-
ing to the greater vividness of pictorial depictions, they summon up images in the
minds of their audience, so that by their rhetorical skill they harness the imme-
diacy of visual impact (notice the present tense—‘I see the struggle . . . I see the
combatant’—and the reference to the demons ‘now struck down’ by the emula-
tion of the martyrs’ deeds evoked by the recollection of their deeds). Ekphrasis
replaces the pictorial images it conjures up4—and so in that sense scarcely serves
the Damascene’s argument at all—but nonetheless it is through the mediation of
images that understanding is conveyed: and that was the point the Damascene
drew from these citations.
I am tempted to describe the transition that has taken place between the
Cappadocian Fathers and John Damascene as the transition from a rhetorical cul-
ture to a more straightforwardly visual culture, from a culture in which truths are
conveyed by rhetorically constructed sermons, in which visual imagery plays an
important part, to a culture in which it is important to affirm that truths are con-
veyed both ‘by word of mouth and image’, to quote the conclusion the Damascene
repeated draws in the earliest of his florilegia, where he generally comments on
the significance of the passages he cites.5 It seems to me that in this transition
Dionysios the Areopagite played a fundamental role; it is this I want to
explore now.
To begin with, notice how visual Dionysios’ imagination is. In ep. 10 from
which we took our opening citation, Dionysios goes on to refer to ‘John’s all-
shining ray’: what John the ‘Theologian, Apostle and Evangelist’ is famous for is
what he wrote—the Gospel, Epistles, and Apocalypse—but this is, for Dionysios,
3 John Damascene, On the Divine Images, I.34 = II.30 = III. 46.

4 As Jás Elsner puts it: ekphrasis ‘was not intended (as modern descriptions are) to go beside and to
supplement the real painting or statue being described; it was intended to replace the sculpture or
painting’ (Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24; italics in original).
5 Cf. John Damascene, On the Divine Images I.38, 41, 45, 47.
summed up in a visual image of radiance.6 It is, in fact, striking how little use
Dionysios makes of the carefully crafted language of Christian Orthodoxy, to the
fashioning of which the rhetorical training of the Fathers had contributed greatly.
The careful distinctions in terms of which the doctrines of the Trinity and the
Incarnation were now expressed find little explicit mention in Dionysios’ works:
he does, it is true, use the term hypostasis a couple of times in relation to the
Trinity, and it seems to me (though not to all) that what he has to say in his own
way represents pretty accurately the Cappadocian understanding of the Trinity,
but his imagery is visual: three lamps, the light of which merges into one, or the
Son and the Spirit as ‘divine blossoms, flowers, as it were, and transcendent
lights’7—not only visual, but also of Neoplatonic inspiration. The same is, it seems to
me, true of his references to Scripture: what he lists from Scripture are depictions—
of God and angels, and events—he has much less to say about its teaching, and
when he does—for instance, when he speaks of God’s love—it is again visual
language of movement, going out and embracing everything and then returning
and drawing everything to itself, that he uses, a movement he finds reflected in
the circular movement of the bishop as he goes round the church, censing it.8
It is not surprising, then, that beauty, the beautiful, is all-pervasive in Dionysian
corpus, and that it is an important aspect of the influence of Dionysios, so that
Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of ‘his deepest influence, the clear, realized syn-
thesis of truth and beauty, of theology and aesthetics, which was never wholly lost
even in the driest realms of the schools’.9 The ranks of the celestial hierarchy, and
the orders of the clergy and laity in the earthly church, and not least, the perform
ance of the sacred rites: all of these radiate beauty, and indeed effect beauty. To
quote Dionysios, speaking of the ultimate beauty, which is God, the cause of all:
From this beauty comes the existence of everything, each being exhibiting its
own way of beauty. For beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy, of commu-
nity. Beauty unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the great creating
cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing
inside them to have beauty. And there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as
the Cause toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which
actually brings them into being.10
6 The text used for the Corpus Dionysiacum is that edited by Beate Regina Suchla, Günther Heil,
and Adolf Martin Ritter, 2 vols., Patristische Texte und Studien 33, 36 (Walter de Gruyter, 1990, 1991).
In the references to the works, DN = De Divinis Nominibus; MT = De Mystica Theologia; CH = De
Coelesti Hierarchia; EH = De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia. I have frequently used Colm Luibheid’s transla-
tion in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1987), but sometimes modified it or
made my own.
7 DN 2.7. 8 Cf. DN 4.14; and EH 3.2 (Heil, 80.8–10, cf. 3.3.3; Heil, 82.13–83.10).
9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II (Edinburgh:
T. & T. Clark, 1984), 148.
10 DN 4.7.
It is all this that the hierarchies manifest and effect—within the Church, through
the ceremonies of the liturgy. Dionysios uses the word play on kallos, beauty, and
kalein, to call, found in Plato and Proklos: ‘beauty calls all things to itself (whence
it is called beauty) and gathers everything into itself ’.11 Though he does not use
the word, he sees the whole cosmos, both visible and invisible, as a theophany: a
manifestation of God, in which God is calling the whole order of things ‘after him’
back into union with him. But the word play robs the word kalein of its aural sig-
nificance: this is not something heard, but something seen, and the very vision
draws the beholder towards it, it is something like the pull a magnet exerts on
iron. But not just towards it, rather to what is manifest through it. Dionysios does
not accept—indeed he implicitly, though firmly, rejects—Proklos’ idea that self-
reverting beings are causes of themselves and all that emanates from them, but
that is because he clings firmly—maybe more so than Proklos—to Plotinus’
insight that beauty is something lent from beyond, a radiance that discloses
through the beautiful thing the grace of a higher realm. It is in accordance with
his notion of human perception of the divine as a response to the call of beauty
that he thinks of the human response not just as acknowledgment in terms of
theologically orthodox confession, but rather as going beyond such acknowledg-
ment to praise and worship. It has been noticed by many (first by one of the scho-
liasts to the Dionysian corpus) that Dionysios speaks not so much of attributing
qualities to God (kategorein) as of praising God through the names we ascribe to
him (hymnein).12 This again is a theme in which Dionysios draws on both
pagan and Christian antecedents, but it is a theme—with its powerful liturgical
associations—echoes of which and variations on which are rarely less than palpable
in his writings. To quote Balthasar again: ‘the style strides along so consciously
loaded, draped with so many sacred garments, that it makes any haste impossible
and compels us not only to follow him in his train of thought but also to join with
him in his mood of celebration.’13
This visual luxuriance savoured in words is not, however, there for its own
sake: its purpose is to draw human kind, and indeed the whole cosmos, towards
the radiance that shines through it and bestows on it the quality of beauty. How
does this take place? Dionysios expresses his understanding of this ascent to the
origin in two ways: one a general theme, the other a more precise discussion. The
general theme is the way the hierarchies perform their task of effecting assimilation
to God by means of purification, illumination, and union—katharsis, photismos,
henosis. Dionysios never explains exactly what he means by these terms, though
he clearly envisages a progression from purification, through illumination, to
11 DN 4.7.
12 Scholia in Divinis Nominibus V. 8: Patrologia Graeca 4.328A. Noted by Jean-Luc Marion in his
L’idole et la distance (Folio, 1991; originally, Grasset, 1977), 190, and n. 24.
13 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 172.
final union: purification being separation from sin and any attachment to the
particular or material that draws one away from God; illumination involving
both instruction in the requirements of the faith, and more deeply a growing
transparency to the divine light; union entailing a state of such transfiguration in
the divine light that scarcely any distinction between God and the soul can be
discerned. More clearly, however, this threefold process is the function of hier
archy, reflected in its threefold structures: the whole process of hierarchy reaching
out into the manifold has the purpose of drawing the manifold back into union,
of completing the cycle of procession and return. The visual, therefore, is import
ant precisely because it is an image, pointing beyond to the source of its beauty.
The precise discussion is found in chapter 2 of the Celestial Hierarchy, where
Dionysios considers the two ways in which symbols work: by similarity and by
dissimilarity. Symbols can be like that which they symbolize, as when we use rea-
son or mind or being as symbols of the divine. Symbols can, however, be unlike
what they symbolize, as when angelic beings are described as oxen or eagles or
flaming wheels whirling in the skies. Dionysios points out that the Scriptures
mainly use unlike symbols, symbols obviously incongruous with that to which
they are applied. And with good reason: for if the Scriptures described the invis
ible realm of the heavens using like symbols, we would too easily form a concep-
tion of the heavenly beings—as Dionysios slyly puts it, we might well be misled
into ‘thinking that the heavenly beings are golden or gleaming men, glamorous,
wearing lustrous clothing, giving off flames that do no harm’14—but there is no
danger of that, if we see that the symbols used are obviously incongruous.
For the purpose of these visual symbols is not to depict, for they are symbols of
what is beyond depiction: their purpose is to effect a process of anagogê, ascent or
better ‘uplifting’, for it is a process in which we are passive, not an achievement.
Dionysios’ attitude to incongruous symbols is rather like Origen’s attitude to
contradictions in the scriptural record (and it is likely that Dionysios was con-
sciously indebted to Origen here), which serve to force the reader to push beyond
the surface meaning of the text, which makes no sense in its own terms. That
means, incidentally, that any imagery can be used of God, so long as we recognize
its shortcomings, and indeed that theology is more expressive if it luxuriates in
the wealth of symbolism, than if it seeks to develop some symbolism that applies
more or less directly to God.
This understanding of the limitation of human language about God leads
Dionysios to make a more general point: that in relation to God our affirmations
always need qualification, in contrast to our negations, as when we say that God is
not knowable, not limited, not visible. To quote him: ‘This second way of talking
about him seems to me much more appropriate, for, as the secret and sacred
14 CH 2.3.
tradition has instructed, God is in no way like the things that have being and we
have no knowledge at all of this incomprehensible and ineffable transcendence
and invisibility’.15 Like and unlike symbolism is presented by Dionysios as a spe-
cial case—applying to (mostly) visual imagery (Dionysios is aware of other kinds
of symbolism—the symbolism of sound (music) and of smell (scent)—which
seem less problematic to him, possibly because we are much less adept at ‘reading’
the significance of such symbolism) what he elsewhere calls ‘affirmative (kata-
phatic) and negative (apophatic) theologies’.
The terminology of kataphatic and apophatic theology was to become very
popular in Byzantine theology, though in Dionysios himself such language only
occurs occasionally. It is, as is well known, language borrowed by Dionysios from
his Neoplatonic contemporaries, especially Proklos. For both Proklos and
Dionysios, the two forms of theology belong together, not, however, in the way
they are presented in Scholastic theology, where negative theology appears as a
corrective to affirmative theology, guiding it in some way towards its goal. They
belong together because access to the divine realm is only possible if the divine
discloses itself, as it has done for Proklos in the Platonic dialogues and the
Chaldaean Oracles, and for Dionysios in the Christian Scriptures. This self-
disclosure is to be affirmed, but then it is recognized that God or the One is
beyond anything we affirm through our concepts, so that we trace our way back
into the divine realm by denying our affirmations. Dionysios puts this process in
a typically celebratory way:
The fact that the more we take flight upward, the more our words are confined in
the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness
which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of
words but actually speechless and unknowing. In the earlier books my argument
travelled downward from the most exalted to the humblest categories, taking in
on this downward path an ever-increasing number of ideas which multiplied
with every stage of the descent. But my argument now rises from what is below
up to the transcendent, and the more it climbs, the more language falters, and
when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely, since
it will finally be at one with him who is indescribable.16
Dionysios’ understanding of how imagery or symbolism—mainly visual, as we

have seen—works should have posed enormous problems for the iconodules, for
both his insistence that our ascent to God and assimilation to him effected by the
radiant theophanic imagery of the Scriptures take place through a process that
includes purification, and his preference for unlike symbolism and apophatic
15 CH 2.3. 16 MT 3.

theology render the images themselves almost literally ambivalent. Even if
images are necessary for human minds to form some conception of the invisible
realm—as he affirms frequently—the way the human mind interprets these
images involves a process of both affirmation and denial. The purified mind
passes beyond images, and the preference for unlike symbolism suggests that the
way in which images disclose that of which they are images is highly indirect.
Indeed, Dionysios’ preference for unlike symbolism might be thought to lend
support to an abstract religious imagery quite unlike that found in icons. It might,
in passing, be thought that it is the appreciation of Dionysios’ approach here that
led to the embracing of a style of icon painting that prescinds from the realistic,
even though what little reflection on the meaning of icons we find in the Byzantine
period seems to be inspired by quite straightforwardly realistic canons.17
In fact, however, there is no trace in the writings of the iconodules that they
have any problem with Dionysios, and even though Dionysios’ preference for
unlike symbolism might have provided grist to the iconoclast mill, there is pre-
cious little evidence that the iconoclasts made any use of this.18 What the icono
dules took from Dionysios was his insistence that the visible provides access to
the invisible: ‘truly visible things are manifest images of invisible things’, or what
seems to have become the favourite Dionysian quotation during the second phase
of the iconoclast controversy: ‘the truth is in the likeness, the archetype in the
image, each in the other, apart from the difference of substance’.19 And this pro-
vided a direct justification for the icon as opening onto the invisible world.
Theodore of Stoudios directly appeals to Dionysios—or a Dionysian manner of
thinking—in justification both of the use of images and of the use of the imagin
ation, through which such images may be understood:
To speak in a Dionysian manner (Dionysiakôs eipein), [it is by images that we]

ascend to intellectual contemplations . . . Imagination is then one of the five fac-
ulties of the soul, and imagination itself seems to be a kind of image; for they are
both manifestations. The image is not unprofitable, therefore, since it is a help to
the imagination. If the image were unprofitable, then the imagination which
depends on it and co-exists with it would be even more useless, and if it were
useless, then so too would be the faculties that co-exist with it—the senses, opin-
ion, understanding, the intellect.20
17 Though this ‘realism’ is significantly different from what we might regard as realistic: see Henry
Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (University of Princeton
Press, 1996).
18 Contrary to what I argued in Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite’.
19 Dionysios, EH 4.3.1; discussed in Louth, ‘St Denys the Areopagite’, 333.
20 Ep. 380, ll. 167–73, in Theodori Studitae Epistulae, ed. Georgios Fatouros, Corpus Fontium
Historiae Byzantinae XXXI, 2 vols. (Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 517 (translation somewhat paraphrased
in the interests of intelligibility).
The making of images and understanding by means of images are, it is suggested,

an essential element in human understanding, for the human is more than simply
a pure intellect. Dionysios was too much of a Neoplatonist to think that, but the
place he gave to visual imagery in the human ascent to understanding of God is
given ampler significance in the thought of the iconodules.
There is not time now to explore why Dionysios’ focus on visual imagery paved
the way for the essential role that visual images came to assume in both human
understanding in general and human knowledge of God and the spiritual world
in particular, in iconodule thought. Contributory factors must be, it seems to me,
the decline in the rhetorical culture still alive and well in the fourth and fifth century.
This decline was manifest, among other things, in what appears to be a change in
the homily from the living rhetorical exercise we find in the Cappadocians and
John Chrysostom to the much more formal and also more liturgical confection
we find from the sixth century onwards. Perhaps it was caused by the changing
political structures of Roman Empire, as the last vestiges of the power of the
educated elite vanished, to be replaced by power centralized on the imperial
court, justified in religious terms, and projected in the visual imagery of the icon
that comes to assume much greater prominence in the course of the sixth century.
Such a decline in rhetorical culture goes hand-in-hand with the eventual collapse
of the educational system in the East, whatever the causal relationship between
the two. More positively, there is the change that one can see in Maximos the
Confessor, very much, I would argue, influenced by Dionysios here, whereby the
technical language of Christology is used to build up an image of Christ through
which Christ himself is encountered. All this creates a context in which visual
imagery assumes such significance as both to provoke the iconoclast controversy
and also to ensure the ultimate defeat of iconoclasm.
Dionysios is then, I would argue, a pivotal figure in the development of the
role of visual imagery in understanding and communicating any understanding
of God in the early Byzantine period. For he provided an analysis of the way
(primarily) visual imagery was to be interpreted that was ideally suited to serve
the more dialectical nature theology came to assume from the sixth century
onwards. In this development, although appeal to visual imagery remained a
constant, how it operated and what it implied about human understanding
underwent fundamental change.
17
The Reception of Dionysius up to
Maximus the Confessor
It is now well-nigh universally accepted that the works ascribed to the Athenian
convert of the Apostle Paul, Dionysius, i.e. the Corpus Areopagiticum or Corpus
Dionysiacum, are a much later fabrication. The story of the beginnings of their
reception is little understood and tainted by a kind of scholarly distaste, as if, hav-
ing discovered that these writings are inauthentic—bluntly, forgeries—scholarship
is unwilling to forgive their author, and needs to find further grounds for recrim
ination.1 His evident Neoplatonic leanings, or borrowings, are invoked to demon-
strate that ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ (as I shall call him, for his mask of
pseudonymity fits so closely that the efforts by scholars to prise off the mask and
identify the person behind it have been completely fruitless) was not really a
Christian at all, but a pagan Neoplatonist who sought to preserve in the harshly
Christian empire of Justinian the Neoplatonic tradition which that emperor had
tried to destroy in closing the Platonic academy at Athens in 529 by draping it in
the liturgical finery of Christianity.2 Or his affinities with Syrian Christianity—
one of the few secure results of the quest for the ‘real’ author of the CD—are
turned into an accusation that Dionysius was a Monophysite (after all, the first
person to refer to him seems to have been the great Monophysite heresiarch,
Severus of Antioch), and the story of his reception told in such a way that the
‘real’ Dionysian doctrines are seen to have been in some way neutered by his
Orthodox advocates, John of Scythopolis and especially Maximus the Confessor.3
Or the profound significance for Dionysius of the Christian liturgy—another
insight established by recent scholarship—is turned on its head, so that it is
Dionysius who is blamed for turning the liturgical encounter of the people of
God with the risen Christ in the Eucharistic liturgy gathered under the bishop
into an elaborate dramatic performance, laden with complex symbolism, that
demands an equally elaborate conceptual interpretation, furnished by an individ-
ual whose presence is that of a spectator.4
1 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. II: Studies in
Theological Style: Clerical Styles (T. & T. Clark, 1984), 144.
2 For example, Vanneste, Hathaway, Brons, and many other scholars.
3 For example, Meyendorff, and even Grillmeier. 4 Schmemann, and also Meyendorff.
The trouble with all these grudging ways of interpreting the reception of
Dionysius in the sixth century is that they fail to explain why the Dionysian writ-
ings came to be interpreted at all, if in essence they are so rebarbative to authentic
Christianity. The sixth century was by no means a period when Christianity was
exceptionally gullible, and thus easily taken in by the outrageous act of forgery
that, at one level, these works represent. The long-running contest between those
who accepted and those who rejected Chalcedon had led to the sharpening of
scholarly tools. A scholar like Leontius of Byzantium was perfectly capable of
detecting Apollinarian forgeries, and it has long been observed that the need to
convince opponents—or at least not to maintain what opponents could laugh-off
as ridiculous—had an effect on the way the lives of the saints were presented,
reining in over-enthusiastic claims, and introducing at least a measure of reserve.5
And it was the sixth century that saw the high point of commentary on the works
of Aristotle, mostly, perhaps entirely, conducted by Christian scholars in
Alexandria.6 It was, indeed, in an age of critical scholarship that the CD was
received and interpreted—and interpreted with an enthusiasm that seems to have
grown as the works became more widely known.
Let us first sketch the story of the emergence and reception of the CD. The
received story goes something like this. The first references to Dionysius’ works
are found among the opponents of Chalcedon, called by their opponents ‘mono-
physites’ (or ‘miaphysite’, the barbarous construction favoured by modern schol-
arship), in particular (as already mentioned) the great monophysite theologian,
Severus of Antioch. At the colloquy between the Chalcedonians and non-
Chalcedonians, called in Constantinople in 532 by Justinian, the monophysites
cited a passage from the CD in support of their case. The Orthodox bishop,
Hypatius of Ephesus, protested against this recourse to ‘Dionysius’, someone
unknown to the great Fathers like Athanasius or Cyril. This is generally inter-
preted as an authentically Orthodox rejection of Dionysius, which, however
(alas), was quickly overruled by the distinction of the pseudonym, so that soon
Dionysius came to be accepted amongst the Orthodox, too. Nonetheless, this
Orthodox reception was made possible, or palatable, by the rather strained com-
mentary that came to accompany the CD, initiated by John of Scythopolis and
continued by Maximus the Confessor, which masks his truly monophysite
tendencies—which are, strangely enough, often interpreted as failure to be genu-
inely Christocentric (as if the ‘monophysites’ dissolved the humanity of Christ in
his godhead, as the Orthodox accused them of doing)—and renders him accept-
able to the Orthodox. This received story has been completely overturned by Paul
5 See H. Delehaye, L’ancienne hagiographie byzantine. Les sources, les premiers modèles, la formation
des genres, Subsidia Hagiographica 73 (Société des Bollandistes, 1991).
6 See the later essays in Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and their Influence, ed.
Richard Sorabji (Duckworth, 1990).
Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor 173
Rorem and John Lamoreaux in the first chapter of their book on John of
Scythopolis,7 where they point out that Hypatius’ objection to the citation of the
Areopagite concerns simply the fact that he had been hitherto unknown, even to
Fathers like Athanasius and Cyril, not to what he said in the passage cited; indeed,
as Rorem and Lamoreaux point out, Hypatius’ suggestion that, had Athanasius
and Cyril known of the Dionysian passage cited (DN 1. 4, 113, 6–12),8 they would
have used it, requires that he found nothing unorthodox in the passage.9 For the
rest of the sixth century, although Dionysius was popular amongst monophysites,
he was just as popular, if not more so, amongst the Orthodox. One should not
however exaggerate his popularity in the sixth century; it was only a few bits of
the CD that were cited (parts of the Divine Names and especially the letters, in
particular the Christological ep. 4, with its fateful mention of Christ’s ‘theandric
activity’), though some of Dionysius’ distinctive vocabulary quickly became fash-
ionable: e.g., the use of ἱεραρχία and the prefix ὑπέρ. John of Scythopolis’ com-
ments on the CD had a much wider purpose than taming his Christology; indeed,
in his comments on the crucial ep. 4, John does not give the impression that he
felt Dionysius’ language dangerously monophysite at all. Rather he is quite clear
that Dionysius does not say that Christ is a θεανδρίτης (a god-man: neither god
nor man), but that Christ’s activity was sometimes θεανδρίκη, divine-human, as
when he healed (a divine activity) by touch (a human activity).
Another aspect of Dionysius that it is claimed was neutered by John and the
later scholiasts is his Neoplatonism: an aspect of Dionysius acknowledged by all
strands of modern scholarship. Of course, it could hardly be claimed that John
sought to disguise a dependence on Neoplatonism of which he was himself aware:
that would take John to have colluded in Dionysius’ pseudonymity in a way that
would be simply incredible. Nevertheless, John is conscious of parallels with
ancient philosophy— Dionysius’ use of the Aristotelian notion of nous, for
instance—and one of the most interesting aspects of his own use of Dionysian
7 Paul Rorem and John C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating
the Areopagite (Clarendon Press, 1998), 9–22. Because this book is ostensibly about John of
Scythopolis, this chapter has perhaps escaped the attention of people writing on Dionysius: in
A. Grillmeier’s great work, Jesus des Christus im Glauben der Kirche, vol. 2/3 Die Kirche von Jerusalem
und Antiochien, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, Rorem and Lamoreaux’s John of Scythopolis is only men-
tioned in the section on John of Scythopolis (pp. 163–7), and not in the section on Dionysius the
Areopagite (pp. 309–56). For the reception of Dionysius, see also Theresia Hainthaler, ‘Bemerkungen
zur Christologie des Ps.-Dionys und ihrer Nachwirkung im 6. Jahrhundert’, in Denys l’Aréopagite et sa
postérité en orient et en occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia, . Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série
Antiquité 151 (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 267–92.
8 Passages from the Corpus Dionysiacum are cited from the new critical edition (Corpus
Dionysiacum, vol. 1: De divinis nominibus, ed. Beate Suchla; vol. 2: De coelesti hierarchia, De ecclesias-
tica hierarchia, De mystica theologia, Epistulae, ed. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, Patristische
Texte und Studien 33, 36 (Walter de Gruyter, 1990–1), with the customary abbreviations (DN = De
divinis nominibus; CH = De coelesti hierarchia; EH = De ecclesiastica hierarchia; MT = De mystica theo-
logia; Ep. = Epistula), so DN 1. 4, 113, 6–12 = De divinis nominibus 1. 4, (Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 1),
113, ll 6–12).
9 Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 18.
ideas is the way in which he seems to illustrate the Areopagite with ideas drawn
from Plotinus. Quite how John viewed what we see as indebtedness to Greek
philosophy, and especially Neoplatonic philosophy, is hard for us to judge. He will
have accepted the general early Christian conviction that what we now regard as
borrowings from Greek philosophy were, in fact, borrowings by the Greek philo
sophers themselves from the Old Testament, especially from Moses (whom they
believed to be the author of the Pentateuch). What seems most likely is that John
shared Dionysius’ attitude to the wisdom of the Greek philosophers; it was not a
problem, but a common attitude of mind that John developed in his own way.10
Nevertheless, it was certainly as a legacy from the apostolic age that these writ-
ings came to be treasured. This is probably the explanation for one of the most
curious facts about the transmission of the CD, namely that, as Beate Suchla has
demonstrated, all the existing Greek manuscripts of the CD derive from an edi-
tion made in the sixth century, barely a decade after the writings seem first to
have become known, by John, Bishop of Scythopolis.11 It is this to which we now
have access: a carefully compiled edition, complete with variant readings, com-
mentary (scholia), and prologue. All the manuscripts, all the translations, go back
to this editio princeps, save the translation into Syriac, made some time before he
died in 536 by Sergius of Reshaina, of which more later. The reason for this edi-
tion, then, is not, as is commonly suggested, that the CD was too dangerously
monophysite (or Neoplatonic) to be let loose in the Byzantine world without
careful commentary, neutralizing its heterodox tendencies, but precisely because
it was regarded as a precious legacy from the apostolic age. It was too fascinating
to escape for long from the attention of scholars, the first of whom was John of
Scythopolis. The web of scholarly commentary that surrounded the text, filling
the margins of the manuscripts, was there to capture the least drop of honey from
the Apostle Paul’s convert and the friend and intimate of some of the revered
names of the earliest days of the Church—Titus, Timothy, Bartholomew, Polycarp
and, last but not least, the Apostle and Evangelist John—someone who, from as
far away as Heliopolis (in Egypt, as John of Scythopolis clarifies),12 had witnessed
the darkening of the sky at the time of the Crucifixion and later been a witness of
the last hours of the Virgin Mother of God and her assumption into heaven.
Whatever the reason for this edition of the CD, it meant, as Rorem and
Lamoreaux have put it, that ‘subsequent generations did not read the Areopagite;
they read the annotated Areopagite—and John had the early monopoly on those
annotations. It is hard to overemphasize the significance of this literary phenom-
enon, this linkage of text and exegesis’.13 We do not know much about John.
10 On this issue, see Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 106–37.
11 See Suchla, Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 1, 54–7. The date of the edition is given as between 537 and
543 by Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 38–9.
12 PG 2:541C. 13 Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 2.
Patriarch Sophronius of Jerusalem cites him in the next century as a staunch

defender of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. He seems to have been fairly prolific in his
defence of Chalcedon, and was one of the first to identify as Apollinarian forger-
ies some of the works to which the monophysites appealed, but very little of his
works has survived; we catch glimpses of them through references from other
writers. At some point, he was bishop of Scythopolis, and Rorem and Lamoreaux
argue that this was in the period between 537 and 548. It seems that it was towards
the beginning of this period that he made his edition of the Areopagite and wrote
his prologue and scholia.14 As printed in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (in this fol-
lowing Balthasar Corderius’ modern editio princeps of 1634, and the majority of
the manuscripts), the scholia are ascribed to Maximus the Confessor. Hans Urs
von Balthasar was the first to identify the earliest stratum of scholia and ascribe it
to John of Scythopolis,15 who emerged from the scholia as ‘a personality of sig-
nificant dimensions . . . a great scholar and no mediocre philosopher’, writing in an
‘elegant style, limpid in comparison with Maximus’, who ‘cites poets and histor
ians, philosophers and theologians of pagan and Christian antiquity’, who ‘every-
where arouses the impression of comprehensive, effortless, even playful
learning’.16 Suchla’s research attributes fewer scholia to John, who now appears
somewhat less impressive.17
Much of John’s commentary is what one would expect of a scholiast: he identi-
fies sources, he draws parallels, he elucidates difficulties. So, for instance, when
Dionysius speaks of sun, morning star, fire that illuminates without harm, living
water and ointment as symbols of God (CH 2. 5, 15, 11–16), John identifies the
biblical texts where such symbolism is found. More interestingly, perhaps,
Neoplatonic-sounding terminology—such as offshoots, flowers and lights (DN 2.
5, 132, 1–3), theurgy (CH 4. 4, 23, 3), paradigms (5. 8, 188, 6)—is given a biblical
source, though often enough John is only following the Areopagite’s example in
this. He is greatly interested in the Areopagite’s descriptions of (supposedly) apos-
tolic liturgical practice, and notes differences from what he is familiar with. He
sometimes corrects the Areopagite: an example, influential perhaps because well-
founded, is his reversal of the Dionysian order of the highest rank of celestial
beings. For Dionysius, the highest rank consists of seraphim, cherubim, and
thrones in descending order, whereas for John the highest of these beings are the
14 For all this, see Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 23–36.
15 Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Das Scholienwerk des Johannes von Skythopolis’, which first appeared
in Scholastik, 15 (1940), 16–38, and was substantially reproduced in the second edition of Kosmische
Liturgie. Das Weltbild Maximus’ der Bekenner (Johannes-Verlag, 1961), 644–72; Brian Daley, trans.,
Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe according to Maximus the Confessor (Ignatius Press, 2003), 359–87).
16 Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 366.
17 See, Beate Regina Suchla, ‘Die sogenannten Maximus- Scholien des Corpus Dionysiacum
Areopagiticum’, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, vol. i: Philologisch-
historische Klasse 3 (1980): 31–66.
thrones, on which God, as it were, immediately rests, for which he cites Ezekiel.18
Another change occurs with his treatment of the Dionysian notion of hierarchical
order. As we shall see, the notion of rank and authority is relatively secondary in
Dionysius’ understanding of ‘hierarchy’, whereas for John, bishop of Scythopolis,
it is the authority of the hierarch that is paramount.19 Yet another interesting
feature of John’s commentary is his use of the Fathers. As Rorem and Lamoreaux
comment, it is not quite what one would expect from a sixth- century
Chalcedonian theologian. He seems especially interested in pre-Nicene theolo
gians: Africanus, Aristo of Pella, Clement of Alexandria, Hermas, Hippolytus,
Irenaeus, Justin, Methodius of Olympus, Origen, Papias, Polycarp, Symmachus,
and the Apostolic Constitutions (not, of course, pre- Nicene, but John of
Scythopolis would have thought them so).20 An interesting footnote reveals that
several of these pre- Nicene references are also found in Eusebius’ Church
History.21 His post-Nicene references do not go much beyond the Cappadocian
Fathers (he is especially keen on Basil). In particular, he does not cite Cyril of
Alexandria, a common point of reference for both Chalcedonian and non-
Chalcedonian, nor does he refer to any of the decrees of the synods of the Church.
What are we to make of this? The interest in the pre-Nicene Church, largely as
depicted by Eusebius, is something John shares with Dionysius; it is striking how
much of the Areopagite’s picture of the Church is drawn from Eusebius (some-
thing not sufficiently noted by scholars). One can relate this to the tendency that
becomes more pronounced in the wake of the Nicene synod to present the belief
and life of the Church as apostolic.22 Indeed, one might wonder whether, as the
divisions of the post- Chalcedonian Church became more and more deeply
rooted, there may not have been a tendency to look back with a kind of nostalgia
to an earlier age, and whether this nostalgia found nourishment in Eusebius’
Church History. Some of the other features that Rorem and Lamoreaux remark on
in John are not peculiar to him. Maximus, for instance, makes few references to
synodical decrees (a fact somewhat disguised by the fashion for speaking of his
‘Chalcedonian logic’).23 Moreover, an interest in pre-Nicene theology is one of the
striking features of the early seventh- century Pandects of Antiochus of the
18 PG 2:64C; the Ezekiel reference is Ezek. 1:26. This interpretation of Dionysius is, however, sup-
ported in the recent book by Sarah Klitenic Wear and John Dillon, Dionysius the Areopagite and the
Neoplatonist Tradition: Despoiling the Hellenes (Ashgate, 2007), 59.
19 All these examples are drawn from Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, part I, ch. 3:
‘Sources of the Scholia’, 46–65.
20 Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 57.
21 Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 55, n. 70.
22 See my brief comments in Denys the Areopagite (Geoffrey Chapman, 1989), 7–8. Throughout
that book, I noted parallels between the Areopagite’s picture of the Apostolic Church and that found
in Eusebius. I would be inclined to make much more of them now.
23 See, most recently, Melchisedec Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus
the Confessor (Oxford University Press, 2007), 2–6 (who also notes Maximus’ lack of reference to syn-
odal decisions).
Monastery of Mar Saba and the Hiera (also known as the Sacra Parallela),
ascribed, probably with justice, to John Damascene: two monuments to the learn-
ing of the Palestinian monks.24 Perhaps the Scythopolite’s predilections are not
that surprising; maybe it is the way our view of post-Chalcedonian theology is
over-determined by the Christological quarrels that makes John’s interests seem
unusual to us.
Indeed, although it is certainly the case that later generations read the anno-
tated Areopagite, one begins to wonder whether this is as significant as Rorem
and Lamoreaux make out. What exactly is it that it is ‘hard to emphasize’ about
this undoubted fact? There seems to me a much greater continuity between the
concerns of the Areopagite and those of John of Scythopolis, as well as between
the concerns of John of Scythopolis and those of later Byzantine theologians, for
it to be at all clear in what way the presence of annotation affected the subsequent
reading of the Areopagite. More work needs to be done on the reception of the
‘divine Dionysius’ before this question can be satisfactorily answered. But what
seems so obvious from the unusual circumstances of the textual tradition of the
CD is perhaps less significant that it might appear at first sight.
Whatever reference John of Scythopolis makes to the Fathers, there is no ques-
tion but that his own Christological position is Chalcedonian, and he is certainly
aware of the fact that Dionysius was appealed to by those who rejected Chalcedon
(though it is equally clear that he regards such an appeal as illegitimate: see above,
for John’s discussion of the Dionysian idea of a theandric activity in Christ).
Another contemporary controversy of which John displays knowledge is that
over ‘Origenism’. The whole question of fourth-century Origenism is the subject
of scholarly dispute.25 What John attacks is the Origenist doctrine of a pre-cosmic
fall, in the precise form that the angelic ranks are the result of injury (λώβη) that
led to the fall.26 As Rorem and Lamoreaux note, this is a doctrine that Dionysius
himself specifically denies, referring to the angels as ‘uninjured’, ἀλώβητοι.27 John
is not, then, guarding against a misreading of Dionysius; on the contrary, he
enlists Dionysius as rejecting the Origenist doctrine in advance, as it were, from
his sub-apostolic vantage point. Nonetheless, it is beyond question that Dionysius
had himself read Origen: the sequence of ideas in his discussion of the words
ἔρως and ἀγάπη and, in particular, the use of the quotation from Ignatius’ Epistle
to the Romans, ‘my love is crucified’, in DN 4.12 are too close to Origen’s discus-
sion in the prologue to the commentary on the Song of Songs for it to be a coinci-
dence; similarly his use of the expression πηγὴ τῆς θεότητος of the Father in
24 See Karl Holl, Die Sacra Parallela des Johannes Damaskenos, Texte und Untersuchungen
16 (1897).
25 For a reliable guide, see Brian Daley, ‘What Did “Origenism” Mean in the Sixth Century?’ In
Origeniana Sexta, ed. G. Dorival and A. Le Boulluec (University Press/Peeters, 1995), 627–38.
26 PG 4.172C. 27 Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis, 179, n. 24 (for CH, read EH).
DN 2.5 is most likely indebted to Origen (cf. De Principiis I.3.7; not to the
Cappadocians, who do not use the expression, despite what some textbooks say).28
Though all later access to the Areopagite was mediated through John of
Scythopolis, the first translation of the CD into Syriac, by the learned doctor
Sergius of Reshaina, pre-dates the Scythopolitan edition. This very early Syriac
translation of the Areopagite underlines the Syrian affinities of the CD. There is
also preserved in Syriac a unique attempt to supplement the CD: the work known
as The Book of the Holy Hierotheos.29 In this context, it is worth recalling that the
CD presents itself as the surviving volume of a somewhat larger corpus of writ-
ings to which references are made in the surviving works. Lost works are men-
tioned: there are frequent references to the Theological Outlines and the Symbolic
Theology, and occasional references to On Angelic Properties and Orders, On the
Just and Divine Judgment, On Intelligible and Sensible Beings, and On the Soul.
There are also references to and quotations from two works by his ‘famous
teacher’, Hierotheos: Elements of Theology and Hymns of Love. Outside the CD,
there is no trace of any of these; it is a natural thought that the mention of these
works was intended to give the impression that the works that emerged in the
sixth century were all that had survived from apostolic times of a larger corpus of
works. The Syriac Book of the Holy Hierotheos seems to be a partial exception: it
must be intended to supplement the existing Dionysian writings. It is not, how-
ever, one of the lost works mentioned by Dionysius, but another one, unknown
to—or, at least, unmentioned by—him. Later writers—John of Dara, who wrote
commentaries on Dionysius’ works on the hierarchies, and Kyriakos, patriarch of
Antioch, both the eighth/nineth- century and the thirteenth- century Bar
Hebraeus— regarded the work as pseudonymous, and credited Stephen bar-
Sudhaili with its composition. Philoxenus of Mabbug and Jacob of Sarug, both his
contemporaries, give us colourful accounts of Stephen as an Origenist, who
believed in the final restoration of all, ἀποκατάστασις παντῶν, in which the dis-
tinction between Father, Son, and Spirit would be transcended, and was fond of
strange interpretations of scriptural passages, into which he claimed to have had
special, visionary insight. To some extent, the Book of Hierotheos fits this picture
of Stephen bar-Sudhaili. The last of the five discourses is certainly concerned with
the final consummation of all things, in which all distinctions will be obliterated,
even the distinction within the Blessed Trinity, and everything will return to a
primal unity. This last discourse also contains esoteric utterances, even a quota-
tion from Heraclitus ‘the Obscure’;30 there is promise of further revelation—‘we
28 See István Perczel, ‘Denys l’Aréopagite, lecteur d’Origène’. In Origeniana Septima. Origenes in den
Auseinandersetzungen des 4. Jahrhunderts, ed. W. A. Bienert and U. Kühneweg (Leuven University
Press/Peeters, 1999), 673–710; and other articles by the same author.
29 F. S. Marsh, ed. and trans., The Book of the Holy Hierotheos (Williams and Norgate, 1927; Gregg
Reprint, 1969).
30 ‘All from one and one from all’: Marsh, Book of Holy Hierotheos, 140.
are not receivers of revelations but givers of revelation’31—in which the secret
meaning of scriptural passages will be made known. This esotericism is found
throughout the four earlier discourses, but their content is different. The first dis-
course is cosmological, giving an account of the origination of everything in the
Good, which is dispersed in multiplicity through a Fall, the place in the scale of
being of each entity or species being determined by the extent of its fall. The nine-
fold division of heavenly beings found in Dionysius is the basis for a more elabor
ate set of divisions in which there are 243 (93) kinds of heavenly beings. These
minds or intellects receive knowledge and impart purification. The picture pre-
sented in the first discourse is an elaboration of Origenist and Dionysian themes.
The middle three discourses are concerned with the ascent of the mind or intel-
lect. Five kinds of intellectual motion are distinguished: ‘natural’, ‘after nature’,
‘above nature’, ‘below nature’, and ‘beyond nature’. Of these, the first is neutral, the
second and third ascending, and the fourth and fifth descending. The ‘ascent of
the intellect’ described in these discourses is of the third kind, transcending
nature, or supernatural. The detail of the account is complex, expressed in scrip-
tural language, leading to the ‘firmament’, and beyond that to the ‘mansions’. Then
follows a passage through Gethsemane— crucifixion—
often repeated several
times, resurrection—union with oneself—and finally transfiguration before the
angels. Then, the intellect is plunged back into the ‘abyss of impurity’, and emerges
separated from it. A final purification takes place involving the ‘tree of evil’, a pas-
sage through baptism to a heavenly Eucharist, which leads to paradise and eating
of the ‘tree of life’. The final stage involves judgement and a cosmic war, having
passed through which the intellect learns the secret of life, descends into hell, and
then emerges, having passed beyond Christ, and is now united as creator with the
Good in a union of love.
The judgements of the first editor of the Book of Hierotheos on all this are curi-
ous: ‘the least tedious of extant Syriac mystical works’.32 Perhaps something has
been learned in the course of the last century, with the discovery of such genuine
spiritual giants as Isaac of Nineveh (‘the Syrian’), John of Dalyatha, or Joseph
Hazzaya. It is hard to think of someone confessing to such a judgement now
adays. Although the Book of Hierotheos draws on Origenist ideas, and to a lesser
extent on Dionysius, it is hard to rid oneself of the impression that it belongs to a
different world, much more frankly esoteric, with gnostic and Manichaean
affinities.
There is something frustrating about this, admittedly brief, survey of the early
reception of Dionysius. The Syriac evidence suggests that some aspects of the
Dionysian vision found ready acceptance among some esoterics—as has perhaps
always been the case, and certainly the case from the eighteenth century onwards,
31 Marsh, Book of Holy Hierotheos, 131. 32 Marsh, The Book of the Holy Hierotheos, 247.
when the CD was eagerly read and interpreted amongst those who rebelled
against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The evidence of John of Scythopolis
suggests something rather different: a figure who seems very much at home in
some, at least, of the preoccupations of sixth-century theology, though not par-
ticularly those that have attracted the most scholarly attention: the technical
Christology of that century has left little imprint on the Areopagite; indeed part
of the reason for his pseudonymity may have been to escape that suffocating
world. The gradual acceptance of Dionysius’ works may well be regarded as
shadowing another transition, a transition in which the language of imagery took
over from the technical language of much sixth-century theology.33
For as the sixth century drew to a close, Dionysius comes into his own. His
works gradually come to be known throughout the Byzantine world, even in
Rome, where Pope Gregory the Great refers to him as an ‘ancient and venerable
Father’ in his homilies on the Gospels.34 Their eventual popularity doubtless
owed much to their ‘ancient and venerable’ pseudonym, but the rather pedantic
reception he received from John of Scythopolis suggests that this can hardly be
the whole story. Rather it is the case that Dionysius, in his works, expressed in a
novel and exciting way ideas already firmly established in the Byzantine Christian
mind. His conviction of the mystery of God, a mystery communicated in the
Incarnation and made palpable in the Divine Mysteries— the Eucharistic
Liturgy—but nonetheless a mystery that remains unfathomable, not only to
human minds but even to the angelic mind, so that angels are at once sureties that
we are in communion with God and also witnesses to the utter unknowability of
God, because the divine is veiled even from them; his sense of community, which
turns the manifold variety of the created order from a ‘realm of unlikeness’, in
which we are cut off from one another and from God, into an infinitely sensitive
manifestation of God so that all creatures, however divided or even depraved, can
catch some glimpse of the Divine Beauty calling out to them and drawing them
back into union with the divine—this sense of community expressed by his coin-
age, hierarchia, which for Dionysius meant ‘a sacred order, knowledge and activ-
ity, which is being assimilated to God as much as possible’ (CH 3. 1, 17, 3–4), a
rather different notion from what is nowadays meant by ‘hierarchy’; his use of the
terms apophatic and kataphatic—negation and affirmation—of our language of
God, a language better thought of as praise, than simply predication of attributes;
and the implications for individual ascetic endeavour of the calling of creatures to
union with God, expressed in his triad of purification, illumination, and union,
together with the sense that this individual asceticism had cosmic implications:
33 See ‘From the Doctrine of Christ to the Person of Christ: St Maximus the Confessor on the
Transfiguration of Christ’, Chapter 21 in this volume.
34 Gregory the Great, In Evang. Hom. 34. 12 (PL 76:1254), cited in Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, a
Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence (Oxford University Press, 1993), 75.
all this—and more, a sense of the sacramental, the place of the monastic order
within the life of the Church— was already the firm conviction of the
Christian Church.
The enthusiasm for the Dionysian writings as they gradually made their way in
the Byzantine world is not hard to account for: in succinct and sometimes intoxi-
cating language, Dionysius expressed convictions that were dear to the Byzantine
Christian mind. This is not at all to deny that frequently what Dionysius contrib-
utes is something peculiar to himself, and often enough something that he
imports into Christian theology from the Neoplatonic writings that he evidently
so loved. The terminology of apophatic and kataphatic theology he borrows from
Proclus, and his enthusiasm for liturgy, for heavenly beings, also has parallels
with that great pagan philosopher. The distinction of purification–illumination–
union, destined to leave such a mark on Christian ‘mystical’ traditions, seems to
be Dionysian in that form. The word ‘hierarchy’ is his. But though there is much
that is peculiar to Dionysius, the realities he is responsive to are already present in
the Byzantine tradition. John Chrysostom, for instance, has the same mix of a
sense of the mystery of God, expressed in ‘apophatic’ language, the role of the
angels in both preserving and disclosing this mystery, and the liturgy as the place,
par excellence, where this mystery is acknowledged and celebrated.35
The parallels with the liturgical practice of the Syrian East that we find in the
CD further serve to demonstrate how Dionysius is embedded in the life of the
Church. His enthusiasm for the monastic order is authentically sixth century, and
the sense of the cosmic significance of asceticism is well established in the tradi-
tions that emerge from the fourth- century Egyptian desert. It may be that
Archimandrite Alexander Golitzin lets his enthusiasm run away with him, as he
traces the foreshadowings of the CD, but his instinct is true. The way in which the
concerns of Dionysius and his editor and scholiast John overlap is further evi-
dence that Dionysius came, as it were, to a world that already knew him. If
Dionysius—and not least his language and concepts—became a presence in the
Byzantine world that is impossible to ignore, that was, at least in part, because he
expressed so well its own fundamental convictions.
35 See my article, ‘Apophatic Theology: Before and after the Areopagite’, Bogoslovni Vestnik, 56
(1996): 297–310.
18
The Reception of Dionysius in
the Byzantine World
Maximus to Palamas
Just as the story of the immediate reception of the Dionysian writings is ham-
pered by the distaste of much modern scholarship, prejudiced by the galling suc-
cess of his daring pseudonym, so it is with the story of his influence on the
Byzantine world. Much scholarship seeks to diminish his influence and cast him
as a ‘lonely meteorite’ in the night sky of patristic (and Byzantine) thought.1 As
such Dionysius can be dismissed as untypical and someone who can safely be
ignored.2 The reasons for this and the contexts in which such neglect is valued
have been sketched at the beginning of my earlier article. This keenness to down-
grade Dionysius is not just characteristic of Protestant, and especially German,
scholarship, where such an attitude might be expected, but of some influential
Orthodox theologians, too. Other scholars are content, or even eager, to detect
the influence of Dionysius, to the extent of seeing Dionysius’ influence as deep
and pervasive in Byzantine theology. This is true of Vladimir Lossky, for instance,
and also of Christos Yannaras, both of whom are happy to find in Dionysius the
source of ideas they value in the Byzantine tradition of theology. It is also true of
secular scholars who readily trace the aesthetic ideals of the Byzantines, or their
hierarchical notions of political society, back to Dionysius, sometimes perhaps
without sufficient discrimination.3 Sergei Averintsev’s remarkable book, Poetika
Rannevizantiyckoy Literatury (‘The Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature’), makes
many references to ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ throughout the work.4 In this article,
I shall argue that the truth is, as ever, rarely pure, and never simple. Dionysius’
influence is pervasive, though not all-pervasive. It is also uneven, both in the
1 The phrase seems to be Vanneste’s: see Alexander Golitzin, ‘Dionysius the Areopagite in the
Works of Gregory Palamas: On the Question of a “Christological Corrective” and Related Matters’,
St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 46 (2002), 163–90, here 166, n. 8.
2 And his undoubted influence in the West, especially in the High Middle Ages, can be taken as
evidence for the corruption of the Christian tradition in the (Catholic) West.
3 Art historians generally seem confident of a Neoplatonic inspiration for Byzantine aesthetics,
mediated or popularized by Dionysius, but rarely seem to explore this: see, passim, Gervase Mathew,
Byzantine Aesthetics (John Murray, 1963); and more recently, John Lowden, Early Christian and
Byzantine Art (Phaidon Press, 1997).
4 S. S. Averintsev, Poetika Pannevizantiyskoy Literatury (Nayka, 1977).
Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World 183
sense that some Byzantines seem more open to his influence than others, and also
in the sense that there is a very generalized influence, alongside genuine attempts
at engagement with his thought. I shall deal first with the general issues and then
in more detail with the evidence of theological encounter with Dionysius.
It needs to be recognized that Byzantine theology itself is scarcely a uniform,
undifferentiated phenomenon. The way in which Wirkungsgeschichte affects our
perception of the past has some very specific consequences for our grasp of
Byzantine theology. After the collapse of Byzantine civilization before the onslaught
of the Turks and the indifference of the West, the values of that civilization were
preserved by the monks; it was in the monasteries that the glories of the Byzantine
liturgy and the subtleties of its thought were preserved. The worship of the modern
Eastern Orthodox Church is fundamentally monastic, and the near hegemony of
‘philokalic’ theological reflection in modern Orthodox thought— that is, an
approach to theology inspired by the collection of fundamentally monastic ascetic
and mystical texts published in 1782 as the Philokalia—only reinforces a sense of
the centrality of monastic experience in modern Orthodoxy. I would argue that this
is a strength, but I would also observe that it is different from the Byzantine reli-
gious culture that met its end in the fires of Constantinople in 1453. Alongside
monastic theology there was also a strong lay interest in theology, a tradition that
has been called ‘humanist’5 or ‘lay’.6 As Sir Steven Runciman observed,
Throughout the history of the Eastern Empire there was a large lay population
that was as well educated as the clergy. The professors, the government servants,
and even the soldiers were usually as cultured as the priests. Many of them were
highly trained in theology, and almost all of them felt themselves perfectly com-
petent to take part in theological discussions. No one in Byzantium thought that
theology was the exclusive concern of the clergy.7
Prominent representatives of this humanistic tradition were the great ninth-

century patriarch Photius and the eleventh-century ‘consul of the philosophers’,
Michael Psellus (the fact that the former became patriarch and the latter a monk
only illustrates how difficult it is to draw lines of classification in Byzantine soci-
ety). A first observation about the Areopagitical influence is that it is primarily
manifest in the monastic, not the humanist, tradition.
It is surprising how little impact Dionysius seems to have made on the
Byzantine humanist theological tradition. Photius does not include his works in
his Bibliotheca, though this may be less significant than might appear, as we
5 So Gerhard Podskalsky, in his Von Photios zu Bessarion. Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter
Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende Bedeutung (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003).
6 So Andrew Louth in ‘Photios as a Theologian’, Chapter 35 in this volume.
7 Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism (Clarendon Press, 1955), 7.
cannot be sure that the list of books treated in that work was intended to be
exhaustive, but elsewhere in that work he only refers to Dionysius a handful of
times, in every case because the writers he is reviewing have made reference to
Dionysius (e.g., the mysterious sixth-century Job the monk, and the seventh-
century defenders of Orthodoxy, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Maximus the
Confessor). In his epistles and Amphilochia, where Photius demonstrates his
theological prowess, there is scarcely a mention of Dionysius: one letter (ep. 249)
and one of the Amphilochia (amph. 182) each have a couple of brief references
(there are nearly 300 epistles and over 300 Amphilochia, though many of the epis-
tles reappear as Amphilochia). The picture gained from the new critical edition of
Michael Psellus’ works is much the same: there are occasional references to
Dionysius in his philosophical treatises, mostly concerned with the doctrine of
participation, the three references in the poems (many of them theological) are to
Dionysius’ listing of the celestial beings (which Psellus does not follow at all
strictly, anyway), and even in the theological treatises more than two-thirds of the
references (twenty-six out of thirty-seven) come in a single treatise (op. 112 in the
volume edited by Gautier)8 which is a paraphrase of Dionysius on the doctrine of
the heavenly beings. In the case of Photius, this neglect may be due to his doubts
about the authenticity of the Areopagite. The very first book reviewed in the
Bibliotheca is a work, now lost, by a priest called Theodore, defending the authen-
ticity of the Corpus Areopagiticum against four objections: Why is Dionysius not
quoted by later Fathers? Why is he unknown to Eusebius? Why does he describe
later traditions as contemporary with himself? Why does he, a contemporary of
the apostles, quote from Ignatius, who came a generation later? Photius lists the
objections, but simply comments on Theodore’s refutations that ‘[t]hese are the
four problems he makes an effort to resolve, confirming to the best of his ability
that the book of the great Dionysius is genuine’. As Nigel Wilson remarks, ‘the
nuance of the Greek allows one to put forward the hypothesis that Photius is here
expressing in a guarded and tactful way his own scepticism’.9 Michael Psellus’
neglect of this (in part) disciple of the Neoplatonists may, too, be due to his own
profound knowledge of the real thing, especially the ‘Lycian philosopher’, Proclus.
Nonetheless, it is striking that neither Photius nor Psellus makes much of
Dionysius, and this may well be typical of the ‘lay tradition’ of Byzantine theology
(insofar as anything can be regarded as typical of a tradition mostly known to us
through exceptional individuals).10
8 Michael Psellos, Theologica, I, ed. P. Gautier (Teubner, 1989).

9 N. G. Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca (Duckworth, 1994), 27, n. 2.
10 It might be thought that Leo Magistros Choirosphaktes’ Thousand-line Theology constitutes an
exception, given that the index to Ioannis Vassis’ edition gives fifty-nine references to the Areopagite
(though this is nothing like the number of references to Gregory the Theologian), but close inspection
suggests that a good deal of imagination has been exercised in adducing the references (Leon
Magistros Choirosphaktes, Chiliostichos Theologia, ed. Ioannis Vassis, Supplementa Byzantina, Texte
und Untersuchungen 6 (Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 232).
In those much better known traditions of theological reflection and celebration

influenced by the monastic tradition the presence of Dionysius is much more
evident. This presence manifests itself, broadly speaking, in two ways. First of all,
there is a general enthusiasm for the themes that Dionysius made his own: a sense
of the mystery of God expressed by a delight in apophatic, or negative, language
applied to God; the way in which this sense of the divine mystery is symbolized
by the angelic realm that lies between human kind and God, both protecting God
from the prying human intellect, but also communicating something of the
divine to human kind; the role of the liturgical in the approach to God, both mak-
ing central the language of praise and entreaty as the most typical theological lan-
guage (in the sense of language that appropriately reaches out towards God) and
also suggesting that it is only in an ecclesial encounter with God that we come to
know Him at all; a sense that this ecclesial encounter with God is hierarchical, in
which higher beings pass on to lower beings the fruits of their contemplation
(though, as noted in the last chapter, the primary meaning of hierarchy for
Dionysius is not subordination, but assimilation to the divine appropriate to each
particular created being); a sense that this human encounter with God in not sim-
ply a matter of individual effort and endeavour, but something in which the whole
cosmos is involved and in which human kind comes to fulfil a cosmic function;
but combined with this, a sense that human engagement with God is costly, the
purification of a deep longing of love, in which the human is drawn into the
divine life, assimilated to God and finds fulfilment in deification (usually
expressed in terms of a triad that came to have a vast influence: purification, illu-
mination, union, or perfection); and furthermore, and for the moment finally,
that this combination of individual ascetic struggle and social and liturgical com-
munion with other beings, reaching beyond the human to the cosmic, finds
expression above all in the monastic life. In all of this, one finds a general
Dionysian influence, though because, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Dionysius
gives signal expression to tendencies already characteristic of the Byzantine trad
ition, it is often not clear how integral Dionysius is to this tradition; indeed,
Dionysian influence is often only unmistakably betrayed by the use of character-
istic language.
Whether this affinity with the monastic tradition is because, fundamentally, as
Hieromonk Alexander Golitzin has claimed, Dionysius embraces an understand-
ing of monastic experience as ‘interiorized apocalyptic’, derived from Jewish
apocalytic, seems to me less clear. Golitsin has identified some very striking par-
allels between the true Dionysian understanding of the function of hierarchy and
the monastic understanding of monastic experience as passed on by the institu-
tion of elderhood (starchestvo in the later Russian tradition), and found striking
parallels between the visionary core of Christian monastic experience and the
Jewish apocalyptic notion of the ‘open heaven’. But this does not necessarily mean
that Dionysius derived his ideas directly from Jewish apocalyptic; it may simply
be another, immensely fruitful, way of exploring the bonds of affinity that exist
between the monastic tradition and Dionysius.
This generalized influence of the Areopagite within the Byzantine monastic
tradition may be illustrated from a work that was to become the touchstone of
Byzantine theology, and those other traditions, not least the Slavic, that flow from
it: John Damascene’s work in a hundred chapters—that is, properly speaking, a
‘century’—generally known in the West as On the Orthodox Faith, the title given it
by the influential thirteenth-century translation into Latin.11 John begins this
work by emphasizing the incomprehensibility of God, so that God is only made
known by God, through revelation, a revelation culminating in the Incarnation,
witnessed by prophets and apostles, in which God is made known as fundamen-
tally unknown (exp. fid. 1). John then goes on to invoke various distinctions made
by theologians to protect the ultimate ineffability of the God thus revealed: the
distinction between knowing God and knowing ‘about’ him; the use of denial,
apophasis, in our knowledge of God, who is thus revealed as ‘ineffable, incompre-
hensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing’, as the Divine Liturgy of John
Chrysostom puts it—all adjectives beginning with alpha, and therefore with
negative force (so that even ‘ever’, ἄει, is made to seem like an alpha-privative); the
distinction between theologia and oikonomia (the doctrine of God in Himself,
and of God as manifest in creation); the distinction between God’s unknowable
essence and knowable energies (exp. fid. 2). John’s ways of expressing the mystery
of God go beyond what we find in Dionysius, but he gratefully and extensively
draws on Dionysius and his sense of the fundamental character of apophatic the
ology; furthermore, his sense of tradition is deeply hierarchical, though he does
not use the word. The Dionysian influence is palpable a little later on in the work,
when John comes to treat of the angels (exp. fid. 17). For the rest one may say that
we find the same emphases in John as in the Dionysian tradition—the liturgical,
the cosmic, the ascetic/monastic—but generally without any specific reference to
Dionysius, though in the liturgical poetry that John pioneered we find a ‘baroque’
use of overloaded adjectives, headed with the prefix hyper- or the alpha privative,
that owes much to Dionysius. Just how typical John is of the Byzantine tradition
becomes more apparent when it is realized how deeply monastic John’s theology
is, not least in On the Orthodox Faith, a century of chapters, conforming to the
monastic genre created, it would seem, by Evagrios Pontikos: not so much a sys-
tematic presentation of theology, as a series of points for meditation.12 The
11 The Latin translation divided the work into four books (mirroring the four books of the
Lombard’s Sentences), thus obscuring the fact that it conforms to the monastic genre of the century.
The original genre of the work emerges in Kotter’s edition: Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos,
II. Expositio Fidei, Patristische Texte und Studien 12 (Walter de Gruyter, 1973). References are to this
edition, abbreviated as exp. fid.
12 See my article, ‘St John Damascene as Monastic Theologian’, Downside Review, 125 (2007),
197–220.
influence of Dionysius is found in the presentation of theology of a similar com-

plexion, even though in detail it is often expressed differently: the liturgical, the
cosmic and the ascetic are all there in John, but he mostly draws on other trad
itions to give them expression. There is one point in John’s theology, however,
where arguably we find a deeper engagement with Dionysius, and one that lends
Byzantine theology its distinctive character. This is found in the role and function
of the image. John is well known as a defender of icons against Byzantine icono-
clasm, something he did from the safety of his position as a subject of the
Umayyad caliph, but the whole notion of image is fundamental to John’s theology,
and in his development of this, he makes his own a central dimension of the
Dionysian vision. For both of them, images combine the material and the spirit-
ual, enable a transition from the material to the spiritual by means of the material,
and thus make the body and the bodily fundamental to their vision of God’s deal-
ing with the created order. For John, the notion of the image underlies the nature
of creation, which functions as a theophany. The Incarnation is then something
new, certainly—the ‘only new thing under the sun’, as John puts it (exp. fid. 45)—
but not unexpected, for it fits in with the duality John finds in a material creation
that discloses the immaterial God, and the duality that is fundamental to the
human, created as body and soul. In this John develops ideas that remain little
more than hints in the Areopagite, and gives a curious twist to the angelology that
owes so much to Dionysius, arguing that the very simplicity of angelic beings pre-
vents them from the richness of communion with God offered to beings of body
and soul, whose communion with God becomes palpable in the Eucharist.13
John’s engagement with Dionysius is, however, glancing, compared with what
we can find in other parts of the Byzantine tradition, before him and after. This
we shall now pursue, looking at three figures: Maximus the Confessor, Nicétas
Stéthatos, and Gregory Palamas (and hesychasm and the hesychast controversy in
general).
Maximus’ receptiveness to the Dionysian tradition has been much discussed.
The attribution of the scholia on the Dionysian writings to Maximus once made it
seem that Maximus had been a close student of Dionysius. However, the recent
discovery (first by Hans Urs von Balthasar, and now confirmed by the research of
Beate Suchla) that most of the scholia were compiled by John of Scythopolis (as
discussed above) have changed the terms of the debate. Initially many scholars
tended to play down the influence of Dionysius, and this mood of scholarship
came to serve the notion of Meyendorff that Maximus fundamentally disagreed
with Dionysius and only accepted his ideas after subjecting them to a
13 See, especially, imag. III.26 (and the note in my translation, St John of Damascus, Three Treatises
on the Divine Images (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 103, n. 93). For the influence of Dionysius
on iconodule theology, see my article, ‘Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things’,
Chapter 16 in this volume.
‘Christological correction’.14 The influence of Dionysius on Maximus is, however,

manifest, even if we discount the few scholia that may still belong to Maximus.
Maximus acknowledges it explicitly in his Mystagogia, which is presented as a
supplement to the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,15 and the use of apophatic theology
and the other themes mentioned as part of the generalized influence of Dionysius
are found throughout Maximus’ writings. What we find, too, however, is an
engagement with Dionysius’ ideas that develops them in a novel way. I shall
discuss three examples: first, the Christological use of apophatic and kataphatic
theology; second, the way Maximus relates the cosmic and the ascetic in his
Mystagogia; and third, the Maximian doctrine of the logoi, or principles, of
creation.
Maximus’ Christological Use of Apophatic

and Kataphatic Theology
As already mentioned, in Maximus we find the (by his time) traditional use of
the categories of apophatic and kataphatic theology; in his treatment of the
Transfiguration in several of his earlier works, we find a quite novel use of these
categories.16 Maximus discussed the Transfiguration three times in his early
works.17 In what is probably the second treatment, in Quaestiones et Dubia
191–2,18 he remarks of the disciples’ experience that
The Word leads those who possess faith, hope and love up on to the mountain of
theology and is transfigured before them, so that to call him God is no longer to
affirm that he is holy, king and suchlike, but to make denial of him according to
14 The burden of his article, J. Meyendorff, ‘Note sur l’influence dionysienne en Orient’, Studia
Patristica 2 (= Texte und Untersuchungen 64) (1957), 547–52, which is really concerned with the
influence of Dionysius in Palamas. For a survey of the scholarly treatment of the influence of Dionysius
on Maximus and an attempt at a new approach, see my article, ‘St Denys the Areopagite and St
Maximus the Confessor: A Question of Influence’, Studia Patristica, 27 (1993), 166–74. Meyendorff ’s
influence is still detectable in the article by Adolph Ritter, ‘Gregor Palamas als Leser des Ps.-Dionysius
Areopagita’. In Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité in orient et en occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia, Collection
des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 15 (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 565–79.
15 Maximus, Mystagogia, proœm (PG 91.660D–661A).
16 For this, see the brilliant paper by Ysabel de Andia, ‘Tranfiguration et théologie négative chez
Maxime le Confesseur et Denys l’Aréopagite’, in de Andia, ed., Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité,
293–328 (reprinted in Ysabel de Andia, Denys l’Aréopagite. Tradition et métamorphoses (Vrin, 2006),
147–84). My approach is not exactly the same, but I owe a great deal to her treatment. For more detail,
see my ‘From the Doctrine of Christ to the Person of Christ: St Maximus the Confessor on the
Transfiguration of Christ’, Chapter 21 in this volume.
17 Maximus, Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation II. 13–16; Maximus, Quaestiones et Dubia
191–2; Maximus, Ambiguum 10. 17, 31.
18 Critical edition by José H. Declerck, CCSG 10, 1982 (abbreviated in references as QD).
the fact that he is beyond God and beyond holy and everything said of him tran-
scendently. (QD 191, 41–6)
This is a straightforward use of the categories of apophatic and kataphatic

theology. What follows, however, is not. Maximus remarks that ‘the face of the Word,
that shone like the sun, is the characteristic hiddenness of his being’ (QD 191,
47–8). The Greek word for face, prosopon, is also the word for person. The divine
person of Christ is apprehended by the disciples in an act of apophasis: the daz-
zling glory of the face discloses the hidden reality of the divine, which can only be
apprehended in its hiddenness. Maximus gives a Christological twist to the cat
egories of apophatic and kataphatic: the kataphatic affirms the created human
reality of Christ, the apophatic points to the hidden mystery of the divine person
Christ is. This interpretation is taken a stage further in the discussion of the
Transfiguration in Ambiguum 10.19 The brightness that transfigures Christ’s body
and garments is subject to a long development of something already mentioned
briefly in the treatment in the Quaestiones et dubia, namely that diaphanous glory
of Christ’s body and garments symbolizes the clear message of the Scriptures and
of creation, transparently clear to those with purified minds and hearts: this rep-
resents kataphatic theology, the affirmations we make of God in concepts and
images. But the disciples are also ‘taught hiddenly that the all-blessed radiance
that shone resplendently from his face, as it overpowered the sight of the eyes,
was a symbol of His divinity, that transcends mind and sense and being and
knowledge’ (Amb. 10.17: 1128A). They were taught to see in one who was ‘with-
out form or beauty’ the ‘Word made flesh . . . fair with beauty beyond the sons of
men’. Explicitly Maximus asserts that it is ‘by a theological denial (ἀποφάσις) that
praises Him as being completely uncontained, [that] they were led contempla-
tively to the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth’
(1128B). Later on in the Ambiguum he returns to the topic of the Transfiguration
and asserts that ‘the light from the face of the Lord, therefore, conquers the
human blessedness of the apostles by a hidden apophatic theology (τῆς κατ᾽
ἀπόφασιν μυστικῆς θεολογίας)’ (10. 31d: 1168A). What we find here is not just the
influence of a Dionysian theme, but an engagement with it—a creative theological
development. It is true that Maximus takes the notion of apophatic and kataphatic
theology out of the realm of theology in general and gives it a Christological
application, but we should not construe this as a ‘Christological corrective’;
Maximus is not correcting Dionysius, rather he is redeploying one of the theo
logical categories he introduced.
19 Text in Migne, PG 91:1105C–1205C; Eng. trans. in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor
(Routledge, 1996), 96–154.
The Mystagogia, as already mentioned, is presented by Maximus as a supple-

ment to the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.20 The body of the text is an interpretation of
the ceremonies of the Eucharistic liturgy, developing and extending what we
already find in Dionysius’ treatise. Several of these interpretative passages later
found their way into the commentary on the liturgy called ‘Ecclesiastical History
and Mystical Contemplation’ (probably more intelligibly translated as ‘What hap-
pens in Church and its hidden meaning’), ascribed by many to Patriarch
Germanus I of Constantinople (c.640–c.733), though attributed in the manu-
scripts most frequently to Basil the Great, which became the most influential
interpretation of the Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine world.21 The most striking
feature of Dionysius’ interpretation of the Divine Liturgy is perhaps his emphasis
on movement, the movement of the hierarch out from the sanctuary, around the
Church, and back again into the sanctuary, symbolizing the circular movement,
expressed in the Neoplatonic language of rest, procession, and return that under-
lies the whole of reality. Maximus has the same sense of the liturgical or ecclesial
space as a locus of meaning, but gives this a much richer significance than we find
in Dionysius. He does this by prefacing his account of the Divine Liturgy by a
series of chapters on the symbolism of the liturgical space itself.22 The Church
first of all symbolizes God, for as God embraces everything and draws it into
unity, so too the Church embraces the whole of human kind and draws it into
unity (Myst. 1). The parallelisms that follow are based on the church as a building,
rather than a community—and therefore a liturgical space—divided into sanctu-
ary and nave, and trace this division between sanctuary and nave in other ‘spaces’:
in the cosmos of invisible and visible reality, in the visible cosmos of heaven and
earth, in the human form of soul and body, in the soul as comprising the intel-
lectual and the living (Myst. 2–5). Two final chapters of this introduction suggest
a parallelism between the human, comprising body and soul, and the Scriptures,
comprising Old and New Testaments, or alternatively, patient of a literal and spir-
itual interpretation (Myst. 6), and between the human and the cosmos, so that the
human may be regarded as a microcosm, a miniature cosmos, and the cosmos as
the human writ large, a ‘makranthropos’ (Myst. 7). This repeated parallelism, like
a series of Chinese boxes, means that what happens in the church building has
reverberations of interpretation that range from the cosmic to the innermost
human soul. An example of how this functions may be seen in the following
quotation:
20 Critical text by Charalampos G. Soteropoulos (Athens, 1993); trans. George C. Berthold in
Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings (SPCK, 1985), 183–225.
21 See St Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, ed. and trans. Paul Meyendorff
(St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).
22 For a more detailed account, see my ‘Space, Time, and the Liturgy’, printed as Chapter 19 in
Selected Essays, volume II.
The human is a mystical church, because through the nave which is his body he
brightens by virtue the ascetic force of the soul by the observance of the com-
mandments in moral wisdom. Through the sanctuary of his soul he conveys to
God in natural contemplation through reason the principles of sense purely in
spirit, cut off from matter. Finally, through the altar of the mind he summons
the silence abounding in song in the innermost recesses of the unseen and
unknown utterance of divinity by another silence, rich in speech and tone. And
as far as is possible for humans, he dwells familiarly within mystical theology
and becomes such as is fitting for one made worth of his indwelling and he is
marked by dazzling splendour. (Myst. 4)
The theme of spiritual progress through purification, illumination, and union, to

use the Dionysian terms, is given a liturgical significance, and beyond that a cos-
mic significance, making explicit the interrelationships that in Dionysius’ own
writings are left more or less implicit.
The Maximian Doctrine of the Logoi
One of the most characteristic of Maximus’ cosmic ideas is his doctrine of the
logoi of creation, the principles in accordance with which the whole creation, and
each created being, is fashioned, the way in which creation through the Word, or
Logos, of God is spelled out in detail. In some of the passages already discussed,
this idea has been implicit: the radiant garments of Christ are said to disclose the
logoi of both creation and Scripture (the logoi of Scripture being both the words of
which it is composed and their meaning), and the way in which meaning is
expressed through the juxtapositions implied by the parallelisms discussed in the
introductory chapters of the Mystagogia sometimes makes mention of the logoi:
‘for the whole intelligible cosmos is imprinted in a hidden way on the whole sens
ible cosmos through the symbolic forms, while the whole sensible cosmos can be
understood to be present to the intelligible cosmos through its principles (logoi)
that reveal its simplicity to the intellect’ (Myst. 2).
Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi of creation could well be described as a ‘lonely
meteorite’; its antecedents are scarce and its influence almost nil. It has however
been rediscovered in modern times and is a feature of Maximus’ cosmic theology
that has attracted a good deal of attention.23 Here is not the place to explore the
meaning and ramifications of this doctrine, rather to point out that one of the
authorities Maximus cites for the doctrine is a passage in Dionysius’ Divine
Names, where Dionysius says:
23 For this, see my article, ‘St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoi of Creation’, Chapter 25 in
this volume.
We say that paradigms (παραδείγματα) are the principles (λόγους) that pre-exist
as a unity in God and give being to what is, which the theologians call predeter-
minations (προορισμούς) and divine and good wills (θελήματα), that are definitive
and creative of what is, in accordance with which [principles] the One beyond
being predetermines and directs everything that is. (DN 5. 8: 188. 6–10)
Maximus refers to this in justification of his doctrine of the logoi in Ambiguum 7

(1085A). Again what we find in Maximus is the making explicit and the develop-
ment of an idea that remains largely implicit in Dionysius. What we find, too, in
Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi is the linking up of the doctrine of the logoi he
finds in Dionysius with what he found in the Origenist tradition, especially, it
would seem, in Evagrious Pontikus.
Nicetas Stethatos was an eleventh-century monk of the Stoudios monastery in
Constantinople, who as a young man came to know Symeon the New Theologian
in his latter years, and promoted his memory by, among other things, composing
his life. He acquired his nickname, Stethatos (‘courageous’), for his noisy oppos
ition, quite in the Stoudite tradition, to the Emperor Constantine Monomachos’
liaison with his mistress, Skleraina; he also attacked the use of unleavened bread
in the Eucharist by the Armenians and the Latins; a number of his other works
are polemical. Despite his connection with Symeon the New Theologian, the dif-
ferences between them are considerable and nowhere more so than in the ques-
tion of their reception of Dionysius. Although there are several apparent points of
contact between Dionysius and Symeon,24 the evidence suggests that they belong
to a common tradition, rather than that Symeon was drawing directly on
Dionysius. With Nikitas the situation is quite different. He quotes Dionysius not
infrequently (especially from his works on the hierarchies), and wrote two works
where the influence of Dionysius is palpable: On Hierarchy and the three
Centuries, the latter of which were included by Makarios of Corinth and
Nikodimos the Agiorite in the Philokalia. On Hierarchy25 is concerned to com-
plete what appeared to Nikitas incomplete in the Dionysian works on the hier
archies. Whereas the Celestial Hierarchy gives an account of three triads of
celestial beings—seraphim, cherubim, thrones; lordships, powers, authorities;
principalities, archangels, angels—the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy speaks only of two
triads of beings (plus a triad of mysteries)—hierarchs, priests, ministers; servers
(or worshippers: therapeutai), contemplatives, catechumens (plus penitents and
24 Explored in two articles: István Perczel, ‘Denys l’Aréopagite et Syméon le Nouveau Théologian’,
in de Andia, ed., Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité, 341–57; Alexander Golitzin, ‘Anarchy vs. Hierarchy?
Dionysius Areopagita, Symeon the New Theologian, Nicetas Stethatos and their Common Roots in
Ascetical Tradition’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 38 (1994), 131–79 (reprinted in Bradley
Nassif, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Theology, Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff (Eerdmans,
1996), 250–76).
25 Critical edition, along with other works by Nicétas, in Nicétas Stéthatos, Opuscules et Lettres, ed.
J. Darrouzès, Sources Chrétiennes 81 (Le Cerf, 1961), 292–362 (abbreviated in references as H).
the possessed, i.e. those excluded from communion). Nikitas tidies this up in two
ways. First of all, he makes the language more ecclesiastical. Dionysius had
avoided the settled language of the Church; Nikitas brings it into line with ecclesi-
astical usage, so that Dionysius’ two triads become: bishops, presbyters, deacons;
subdeacons, readers, monks. Second, he provides a triad of the highest rank:
patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops (cf. H 22). The effect of these two changes
is to identify the ecclesiastical hierarchy with the clerical hierarchy, thus under-
mining Dionysius’ original understanding of ‘our hierarchy’ (as he called it: ‘eccle-
siastical hierarchy’ only occurs in the, possibly editorial, title). Hierarchy becomes
less the way in which the divine theophany reaches out into multiplicity to draw
the whole created order into union with God, and more a system of subordinate
authority that ministers to those outside the hierarchy (the laity, now no longer
part of ‘our hierarchy’). Nikitas keeps the Dionysian definition of hierarchy
(indeed, often enough his chapters are composed of lengthy quotations from the
Areopagite: cf. H 56, 57), but its meaning has been transformed into the provision
of a sacramental way of deification, administered by the clergy. The goal of hier
archy now, quite explicitly, lies in the next life (H 59): in that life, the ecclesiastical
hierarchies will be assimilated to their celestial counterparts. It is odd how, despite
his learning and faithful citation of his source, in his hands the Dionysian cosmic
vision dissolves into an all- too-comfortable clerical ecclesiasticism. We have
already noticed the way in which Dionysius’ notion of hierarchy was being used to
support an understanding of subordinating clerical authority as early as his editor
and commentator, John of Scythopolis. Nikitas also shares with John another
misreading of Dionysius (minor, if indeed it is a misreading at all) in making the
highest of the heavenly beings not seraphim, but thrones (H 17, 22 f., 25).
The three Centuries26 conform to a familiar style of Byzantine monastic litera-
ture, a threefold century devoted to the three stages of the spiritual life, as
described by Evagrius: praktikē, ascetic struggle; physikē, natural contemplation;
gnosis, contemplative knowledge of God. By the time of Nikitas it was already
commonplace to assimilate Evagrius’ triad to the Dionysian triad of purification,
illumination, and union or perfection (it is found, for example, in Symeon the
New Theologian), so there is nothing unusual in Nikitas’ doing the same. The
influence of Dionysius is found in countless details, but also in another broad
assimilation, whereby the monastic ideal of the ‘angelic life’, found in Evagrius,
but much more widespread, is interpreted in terms of Nikitas’ understanding of
the purpose of hierarchy: the celestial hierarchies constitute our destiny. A corol-
lary of that might be (though Nikitas does not explicitly draw it) that the
monastic destiny is merely ‘angelic’, while patriarchs aspire after thrones! On
Hierarchy and the three Centuries culminate in a vision of the parallel
26 Text in the Philokalia (Venice, 1782), 785–851; Eng. trans. in The Philokalia. The Complete Text,
trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. IV (Faber & Faber, 1995), 79–174.
hierarchies united in their song: the highest celestial rank chanting ‘Blessed is
the Glory of the Lord in his place!’, corresponding to the chant of the highest
earthly rank, ‘Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit, now and for ever and to the ages of ages!’—the opening acclamation of
the Divine Liturgy. The middle rank chants in heaven the angelic song of Isaias’
vision (there, specifically the song of the seraphim!), ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord of
Sabaoth, the whole earth is full of his glory’, to which the middle rank on earth
replies with the sanctus of the Divine Liturgy: ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Sabaoth,
heaven and earth is full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who
comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!’ While the lowest rank,
both in heaven and on earth, sings: ‘Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia’ (H 31, 48, 55). In
the next life, the ecclesiastical hierarchies join in the song of their celestial
equivalents (Century III. 99).
The influence of Dionysius on Gregory Palamas and the other participants in
the hesychast controversy is widely acknowledged, but not thoroughly under-
stood. Both sides appealed to Dionysius (and also to Maximus) with the result
that both sides display a broad familiarity with the Dionysian corpus. John
Meyendorff, indeed, in his pioneering work on the Palamite controversy main-
tained that the interpretation of Corpus Areopagiticum lay at the very heart of the
dispute, Barlaam and Akindynos appealing to Dionysius’ apophatic theology,
which they interpreted in an intellectualist way, while Palamas himself used the
distinction between God’s unknowable essence and the energies in which he is
made known, to safeguard apophatic theology in relation to God’s essence, while
allowing a genuine experiential knowledge of God through his energies.27 If,
however, we look at the use of Dionysius from the perspective of Gregory Palamas
himself (this is clearly not the only way of regarding Dionysius’ influence, but it is
one easily gleaned from Palamas’ Triads, the work most studied in relation to the
hesychast controversy), it is two aspects of Dionysius that predominate. First, the
interpretation of the discussion in Divine Names 2 of union and distinction in
God; second, the topic of angelic mediation (or strictly speaking the mediation of
celestial beings, as Dionysius reserves the term ‘angel’ for the lowest rank of these
beings). The first topic relates to the distinction that Palamas found in God
between his οὐσία and his ἐνέργεια, his essence and his energies (to use
the accepted translation, though the Greek word ἐνέργεια corresponds more
accurately to the English ‘activity’, rather than ‘energy’, which rather suggests a
potentiality for activity).28 The doctrine of the Trinity already affirms a distinc-
tion within the One God between his οὐσία and his ὑπόστάσεις; for Palamas in
27 See Jean Meyendorff, Introduction à l’étude de Grégoire Palamas, Patristica Sorbonensia 3 (Seuil,
1959), 280–5.
28 For a concise account of the appeal to the Areopagite in this connection, see 150 Chapters, 85–95
(critical edition by Robert E. Sinkewicz: St Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters,
Studies and Texts 83 (Pontifical Insitute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 182–96).
order to affirm a genuine, deifying participation in God it is necessary to add this

further distinction between essence and energy, so that deification may be seen as
participation in God’s energies. For Gregory Akindynos (Palamas’ principal
opponent in the strictly hesychast controversy), if the energies are genuinely God,
rather than God’s operations—created effects of God’s activity—then the unity of
God is compromised, and we fall into polytheism. In defence of this further dis-
tinction within God, that does not compromise the divine unity, Palamas invoked
Dionysius’ discussion of union and distinction (ἕνωσις and διάκρισις) in Divine
Names 2. Dionysius develops a fourfold differentiation: of the names with which
we praise God some represent ‘union’ and others ‘distinction’, furthermore within
the ‘unified’ names, some represent union and others distinction, and similarly
within the names that express distinction; there are those that represent union as
well and others distinction; so there are unified names expressing both union and
distinction, and within names of distinction, too, those expressing both union
and distinction. Dionysius’s discussion of these names is not entirely clear, but the
unified names that express union refer to the attributes of God ascribed to the
one divine substance (goodness, justice, mercy, etc.), while the names of union
that express distinction are the names of the persons of the Trinity—Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit. Amongst the names of distinction, those that express distinction
seem to refer to the Incarnation par excellence, while those that express union
seem to refer to ‘processions and manifestations of the thearchy’ (DN 2. 4: 640D),
that is, perhaps, the manifestations of God as good, wise, just, merciful, etc.,
among the creatures, which is precisely what Palamas means by ‘energies’. It
would seem then that Palamas has some justification for appealing to Dionysius
in defence of his notion of energies, as a distinction within the Godhead parallel
to the Trinitarian Persons—unified distinctions as opposed to distinct unions—
even though Dionysius does not use the word energeia in this sense (though he
does use it in other senses). But the obscurity of this section of the Areopagite
means that it is not difficult for Akindynos to quote against Palamas passages
from Dionysius in which he affirms uncompromisingly the unity of God.29
The other topic on which Palamas makes reference to Dionysius concerns the
question of angelic mediation. Palamas is concerned to refute the idea that angels
are necessary intermediaries between humans and God, so that human union
with God must take place through angelic mediation. Meyendorff argues that
Palamas, following Maximus, ‘corrects’ Dionysius and affirms a more thoroughly
Christological understanding of union with God through Christ.30 It is not clear,
however, that this is necessary, for Dionysius’ understanding of hierarchy does
not interpose the hierarchies between God and human kind, with ascent to God
29 For Akindynos’ use of Dionysius, see Juan Nadal, ‘Denys l’Aréopagite dans les traités de Grégoire
Akindynos’, in de Andia, ed., Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité, 535–64.
30 See Meyendorff, ‘Notes sur l’influence dionysienne en Orient’ (cited in n. 14, above).
entailing ascent through the hierarchies.31 It is here that Dionysius, though using
their language, breaks away from the Neoplatonic tradition on which he is draw-
ing. Whereas in that tradition, as represented by Proclus, lower beings proceed
from higher beings, who proceed from still higher beings, who ultimately proceed
from the One—there is a genuine ontological hierarchy—for Dionysius it is only
so far as the impartation of illumination, wisdom, is concerned that there is hier
archy, at the level of being all beings proceed immediately from God. The point of
hierarchy, for Dionysius, is not to explain how the manifold nature of existence
derives from the One, but rather it is the way everything ‘after God’ functions as a
theophany, a manifestation of God, drawing all back into union with God.32
When he [Dionysius the Areopagite] reveals to us the origin of the angelic

names, he says that many visions appear to us through intermediaries, but not
that they are all revealed by [the angels], nor that all union and all enlighten-
ment comes through them. When he speaks of ‘that many-hymned doxology of
the innumerable heavenly host’, which at Christ’s nativity was passed on ‘to those
on earth’, when he says that an angel announced the good news to the shepherds’
because, ‘in withdrawal and silence they had been purified’, he does not say that
the glory of God that enlightened them came through the angels. On the other
hand, it was not by the illumination of that glory that the shepherds received the
revelation of salvation: because they were afraid, being unused to such visions,
the angels announced to them the meaning of the presence of the light.33
In this passage, Palamas is not imposing on Dionysius an alien meaning; he is

simply demonstrating that he understood the limited purpose of Dionysian
hierarchy.
Evidence of a broader, less polemical, influence of the Areopagite is found in
hesychast circles in the writings of the supporter of Palamas, Nicholas Cabasilas,
concerned with the Divine Liturgy. Both in his Commentary on the Divine
Liturgy,34 and even more evidently in his Life in Christ,35 which takes its under-
standing of the threefold nature of the ‘Mysteries’, as Baptism, Chrismation, and
the Eucharist, more or less directly from the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, there is clear
evidence that Dionysius’ understanding of the sacramental nature of the Christian
life was still influential in the Byzantine world.
31 See my The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Clarendon Press,
1981), 171 f.
32 See my Denys the Areopagite (Geoffrey Chapman, 1989), 105–9.
33 Gregory Palamas, Triads, II. 3. 28; J. Meyendorff, ed., Specilegium Sacrum Lovanense, 30–1, 2nd
edn (Louvain, 1973), 443.
34 Critical edition by Sévérien Salaville: Nicolas Cabasilas, Explication de la Divine Liturgie, Sources
Chrétiennes 4bis (Le Cerf, 1967); Eng. trans. J. M. Hussey and P. S. McNulty (SPCK, 1966).
35 Critical edition by Marie- Hélène Congourdeau: Sources Chrétiennes 355, 361 (Le Cerf,
1989–90); Eng. trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974).
19
Dionysios the Areopagite
The Unknown God and the Liturgy
It is only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that we find ourselves
in a position to understand the writings ascribed to Dionysios the Areopagite.
This might seem an extraordinary claim, but it is this that I propose to defend in
the first part of this paper; then, I want to take this claim a stage further by seeking
to demonstrate that the Eucharistic Liturgy is central to Dionysios’ understanding
of apophatic theology, the theology of negation or denial.
For what the author of the Corpus Dionysiacum is doing is to make the Apostle
Paul’s teaching in his speech to the Court of the Areopagos absolutely central to
his understanding of the nature of the Christian Faith: in that speech, Paul pro-
claimed the true God as ἄγνωστος θεός, which Dionysios (as I shall call the author
of the Corpus Areopagiticum) takes to mean not simply an unknown, or even
overlooked, god (which may have been the original meaning of the dedication of
the altar, to which Paul draws attention), but a God beyond any understanding or
knowing, a God who is essentially unknowable. He does this, however, by losing
himself, as it were, in Dionysios, one of the judges of Areopagitical Court who
heard Paul and was converted, along with a woman called Damaris, according to
the account in Acts (17:34). The author of the Corpus Areopagiticum, who calls
himself Dionysios, becomes the historical Dionysios the Areopagite, one of a
group of the Apostle Paul’s disciples, including Titus, Timothy, and Bartholomew,
and also the Apostle John (Dionysios is again surprisingly contemporary with us,
in finding a profound coinherence between the two great theologian-apostles; a
sense of opposition between the two having been the ruling opinion in the last
century), as well as seemingly familiar figures from the early decades of Christianity,
associated with the circles around these two apostles—Gaius, Ignatios, Polycarp:
these are his fellow disciples, with whom he is in correspondence, addressing to
them his treatises and his letters—as well as his mentor, Hierotheos, regarded,
like Dionysios, as an early bishop of Athens. The way he loses himself in Dionysios
is not just a matter of imaginative sympathy, but something much more serious:
the identity he finds with the Athenian judge is a corollary of the identity his mas-
ter, Paul, finds with Christ—‘For I live, but no longer I, but Christ lives in me’
(Gal. 2:20). For this is not an exclusive identity, distinguishing him from his fel-
low Christians, but an inclusive identity, since it is through the communion of
those who are ‘in Christ’ that we discover our true selves.
It is only now that we are able to grasp this in its full significance, for that such
an understanding of Dionysios as someone who exegetes himself into the
Apostolic Age has only now become available to us. It was closed to those who
first encountered the Corpus Areopagiticum, for they quickly came to accept these
writing as authentic in a straightforward way, ranking them with the apostolic
writings, treating them as next to Scripture; the alternative then, it seems, would
have been to reject them altogether. Once, however, Dionysios was unmasked as
an imposter—something that took centuries, from Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth
century to the German scholars Koch and Stiglmayr, who finally laid any doubts
to rest at the end of the nineteenth—scholarship occupied itself largely with the
pursuit of the ‘real’ author, a pursuit that has led nowhere, all possible candidates
satisfying hardly anyone other than their proponents.1 In parallel with this fruit-
less pursuit, Dionysios was treated as a second- rate Neoplatonist, slavishly
dependent on Proklos (or more recently, some think, on Damaskios), his the
ology being of only historical interest, owing to its influence, for the vast influ-
ence of the Corpus Arepagticum is beyond cavil. Only recently has Dionysios been
taken as a Christian theologian, whose identity as the Areopagite should be
regarded as a clue to where he found the source of his vision. Perhaps the most
important example of this latest phase in Dionysian studies is Charles Stang’s
Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No longer I”,2 which
takes the pseudonym, together with the claim to be Paul’s disciple, as the key to
understanding the Areopagite. The pseudonym accomplishes the death of the
author—‘no longer I’—and the author clothes himself in Scripture, inserting him-
self into Acts 17, and reading his theology out of a profound grasp of the writings
of the Apostle Paul.
Central to his reading of Pauline theology is the notion of apophatic theology,
the theology of negation or denial. The terminology Dionysios uses—apophatic,
in contrast with kataphatic, affirmative, theology—is something that he clearly
derives from Proklos (410 or 412–85), the fifth-century diadochos of Plato’s
Academy (or, perhaps, as so much has been lost to us, some other Neoplatonist
philosopher, deeply in tune with Proklos). The notion, however, has roots that
reach back a long way, even though we should not underestimate the importance
of Dionysios’ finding a terminology that fitted so well with his core conviction.
I want to spend a little time exploring Dionysios’ apophatic theology and his debt
to Proklos, as well as the broader background that made his emphasis on apo-
phatic theology so attractive to Dionysios’ contemporaries, and even more to the
generation of thinkers that succeeded him.
1 Twenty-two by the time of Hathaway’s monograph in 1969; since then the search has looked to
people less well known, or even completely unknown: see Beate Suchla, Dionysius Areopagite. Leben—
Werk—Wirkung (Herder, 2008), 24–5.
2 Charles M. Stang, Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I”
Dionysios the Areopagite 199
In introducing the terminology of apophatic and kataphatic theology into

Christian theology, Dionysios accomplished a decisive turn in Christian theology
in general, and Greek, or Eastern, theology in particular. This terminology, how-
ever, he did not himself invent but, as we have seen, borrowed (like much else)
from Proklos. A distinction between ‘apophatic’, negative, and ‘kataphatic’,
affi rmative statements had been made by Aristotle in his Categories (12b5–16),
but he did not employ the distinction in relation to God (or first substance). The
importance of negation in our knowledge of God, or the One, was recognized by
Plotinos, following Plato; indeed, the Neoplatonists, led by Plotinos, found a good
deal more apophatic theology in the Platonic dialogues than scholars do now
adays (or indeed their predecessors, the so-called ‘Middle’ Platonists), notably in
the latter section of the Parmenides concerned with the consequences of positing
or denying the One, or that ‘the One is’ (Parmenides 137c–142a). But it fell to
Proklos to introduce the terminology of ‘apophatic’ and ‘kataphatic’ theology. In
the second book of his Platonic Theology, he says that according to Plato, the One
is elder to intellect or being, and that Plato shows, on the one hand, that the One
can be revealed ‘through analogy (δι’ ἀναλογίας) and through likeness to what is
posterior [to the One]’, and, on the other, that ‘through negations (διὰ τῶν
ἀποφάσεων) its transcendence over everything can be shown’.3 Proklos suggests
that the first way, that of analogy, is discussed by Plato in the analogy of the sun in
the Republic (506D–509C), where the first principle is considered as the Good,
and that the second way, the apophatic, is treated in the second part of the
Parmenides, where the first principle is considered as the One. He continues:
It seems to me that the latter of these modes manifests the procession (πρόοδος)
from the One of everything else, above all the divine orders, for the reason why
it is transcendent over everything that comes into being from it is because the
cause is more elevated that any of its effects, and for this reason it is none of all
these, because everything proceeds from it. For it is the principle (ἀρχή) of
everything, both beings and non-beings. But the first of these modes gives an
image of the return (ἐπιστροφή) to it of everything that has proceeded from it.
Because of the likeness that every rank of being has with the One, there is a
monad which is analogous to the Good, which plays for the whole of the series
that is united to it the role that the Good plays in relation to the orders of gods,
and this likeness is without doubt the reason for the return of everything to the
One. Beings do not simply proceed thence, but they return to that One, and
while the procession of everything reveals to us the ascent to the first by way of
negations, the return reveals that by way of analogies.4
3 Platonic Theology II.5; H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink, eds., Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne,
livre 2 (Paris, 1974), 37.12–15.
4 Platonic Theology II.5; Saffrey and Westerink, eds., Proclus, 37.19–38.12.
Proklos goes on to warn against interpreting the negations (ἀποφάσεις) as privations

(στερήσεις), or the analogies as identities: both misinterpretations, he says, will
frustrate the ‘journey which raises us towards the first principle’.5 The analogies,
he says, are hints or suggestions that point us towards the One, while the negations
do not simply contradict affirmations (here Proklos uses the word κατάφασις),
rather because they are closer to the first principle they, as it were, underlie and
generate affirmations. There are two points to note about this exposition of
Proklos’. First, apophatic and kataphatic (or for Proklos analogical) theology belong
together: they complement each other, and furthermore apophatic theology
undergirds kataphatic theology, they do not simply balance each other. Second,
the pair constituted by apophatic and kataphatic theology match the pair procession
and return, procession corresponding to apophatic theology, and return
corresponding to kataphatic theology.
This is very much what we find in Dionysios’ use of apophatic and kataphatic
theology: they are a pair, and they match the pair, procession-return, though
Dionysios, compared with Proklos, switches the match; for him, apophatic the
ology corresponds to return, and kataphatic theology to procession. Dionysios
also emphasizes, as Proklos does, that negations applied to God do not indicate
that God lacks some quality or another, but that he transcends it. He expresses
this conviction by supplementing adjectives prefixed by the alpha-privative with
adjectives prefixed by ὑπὲρ- (‘beyond’). The most explicit discussion of apophatic
and kataphatic theology is found in chapter 3 of his short treatise, Mystical
Theology, which is entitled in some manuscripts: ‘What Are the Kataphatic
Theologies, and What the Apophatic’.6 The kataphatic theologies (in the sense of
ways of talking about God) descend from affirmations about the being of God,
who is both one and three, through the Incarnation, to the concepts we use of
God and the images Scripture applies to him. The further we descend with kata-
phatic theology, following the way of procession, the more verbose our explan
ations become, whereas when we trace the way of return, the way of apophatic
theology, ‘the more we ascend to the heights, the more our words are confined by
the all-embracing vision of the conceptual. So now, when we enter the darkness
beyond the intellect, we find ourselves not just running short of words, but
reduced to complete wordlessness and unknowing’.7 But Dionysios discusses the
nature of apophatic and kataphatic theology elsewhere, for instance in the Divine
Names, where he says:
Therefore God is known in all things and apart from all things; and God is
known by knowledge and by unknowing. Of him there is understanding,
5 Platonic Theology II.5; Saffrey and Westerink, eds., Proclus, 37.17–18.

6 Mystical Theology 3; Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, PTS 36
(Berlin, 1991), 146–7.
7 Mystical Theology 3; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 147.7–10.
reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many

other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be
named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things
that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything; he is known to all
from all things and to no one from anything. For we rightly say these things of
God, and he is celebrated by all beings according to the analogy that all things
bear to him as their cause. But the most divine knowledge of God, that in which
he is known through unknowing, according to the union that transcends the
intellect, happens when the intellect, turning away from all things, including
itself, is united with the dazzling rays, and there and then illuminated in the
unsearchable depth of wisdom.8
This expresses very clearly two aspects of Dionysios’ theology: the complementar
ity of apophatic and kataphatic theology, and the more fundamental truth
expressed by the way of negation. The key term here is that of ‘cause’ (αἰτία),
applied to God. It is in virtue of being the cause of all that everything has a rela-
tionship to God. Because there is an analogy, in virtue of the relationship every
thing has to its cause, every affirmation can be made in same way of God. But the
term ‘cause’ is also the key to Dionysios’ apophatic theology. For God as cause
really is the ‘cause of all’, and for that reason does not belong to ‘the all’: ‘he is not
one of the things that are’. In virtue of this, any attribute applied to God must be
denied of him: he does not belong to the realm from which our concepts and
images are derived.
There are some other consequences of Dionysios’ understanding of apophatic
and kataphatic theologies that should be mentioned. The denial and affirmation
of images and concepts of God are equally radical: all are affirmed, all are denied.
It follows that conceptual images are not privileged. Closely allied to this is the
fact that, as one of the scholiasts on the Dionysian Corpus (probably Maximos
the Confessor) remarked, Dionysios does not usually say that we predicate qual
ities of God, ‘but properly he is hymned’ (PG 4.325). It is praising him that we
celebrate what we can affirm of God, not merely by logical predication. For
Dionysios theology is doxology.
We could put these two points together, following Jean-Luc Marion, by sug-
gesting that the word αἰτία in Dionysios does not so much mean ‘cause’, but rather
derives from the verb αἰτέω, αἰτιάομαι, I request, beseech, or ask for, and so
means the One to whom we turn in prayer or beseeching.9 Αἰτία, then, means not
so much cause, in any scientific sense—a cause that is discerned in its effects—as
8 Divine Names 7.3; in Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla, PTS 33 (Berlin, 1990),
198.2–15.
9 See Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance (Grasset, 1977), the section called ‘La requête du
réquisit’, 189–201.
‘the ground of [our] beseking’, as Julian of Norwich understood it,10 the One to
whom we direct our requests, our prayers, the ultimate source—le réquisit, in
Marion’s French, not easy to render in English—not the beginning of lines of
causality, but the ultimate source of being and life. Perhaps this suggestion is not
very plausible from the point of view of philology, but it makes very good sense of
the logic of Dionysios’ thought.
This apophatic dimension of theology is, however, not something that
Dionysios created (or stole); it has its roots both in the Scriptures and in the
Classical tradition, the two roots of Christian theology. In the Old Testament, it is
impossible to see God and live, though virtually all the occasions on which this is
asserted concern an encounter in which someone beholds God and nonetheless
lives: examples such as Jacob and Gideon spring to mind (Gen. 32:30; Judg.
6:22–3). The archetypal account is that of Moses, the man with whom God spoke
face to face. Moses asks to see God’s glory, and God replies that he will make ‘all
his goodness’ pass before him, but ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see
me and live’. Instead Moses is placed in the cleft of a rock, which God covers with
his hand until he has passed by, then, says God, ‘I will take away my hand, and
you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen’ (cf., Exod. 33:18–23). The
passage is full of expressions that confuse or complicate the issue: God’s glory, his
goodness, his back, as well as his face which is not to be seen. Later reflection on
this passage made much of these ambiguities. Elsewhere there are other passages
that point to an apophatic dimension in our knowledge of God, for example, in
the prophecies of Isaiah, we read: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither
are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’
(Isa. 55:8–9). Or one might think, too, of the hymn to Wisdom in Job 28.
In the classical tradition, we find the apophatic dimension especially in Plato,
for whom the Form of the Good is ‘beyond being’, ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας (Rep.
VI. 509b). The fashioner God, the demiurge, of the Timaeus is a being of whom it
is said, ‘Now to discover the maker and father of all were a task indeed; and hav-
ing discovered him, to declare him to all men were a thing impossible’ (Tim. 28c).
Furthermore, whatever Plato himself meant by the first hypothesis in his
Parmenides (137c–142a), the Neoplatonists took this passage to be exploring the
unknowability of the One. We have seen how Proklos introduces the terminology
of apophatic/kataphatic to elucidate this.
These two traditions converge in Greek Patristic theology, first, where it is seen
explicitly as a convergence, in Clement of Alexandria. In a passage from the
Stromateis, Clement assimilates the passage from the Timaeus we have quoted
with the Exodus account of Moses’ ascent into ‘the thick darkness where God
10 Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (University of Exeter Press, revised
edition 1993), 134 (ch. 86).
was’, which shows that God is ‘invisible and beyond expression in words’ (Strom.
5.78.1–3).11 Clement was very important to Dionysios, and indeed anticipates the
Areopagite in seeing Paul’s doctrine of the ἄγνωστος θεός as a culminating point
in the understanding of the unknowability of God (see Strom. 5. 12).
What Dionysios calls ‘apophatic theology’ does not exhaust what one might
call the ‘apophatic dimension’ of his theology. In his treatise, The Celestial
Hierarchy, he discusses the use of symbolism as applied to the denizens of the
celestial realm. Again we find affirmation and negation; some symbols point to
what they symbolize by finding some kind of likeness; others, however, function
not by means of likeness, but by means of unlikeness. And it is unlike symbolism
that is the more reliable and fundamental. Like symbolism is almost bound to
mislead:
for there is the likelihood, with regard to the more sublime representations of
the sacred, that we should be led astray, supposing that the heavenly beings have
a golden form, like men dazzling with light, glittering like lightning, handsome,
clothed in bright shining raiment, radiating innocuous flames, and so with
regard to all the other beautiful forms, with which theology has depicted the
heavenly intellects.12
If one thinks of the depiction of heavenly beings in baroque churches, it is clear

that such a danger of being led astray is by no means a remote possibility.
Dionysios’ understanding of symbolism is also something that he owes to
Proklos, though he by no means follows him slavishly.13 My understanding of all
this has been enormously enhanced by Peter Struck’s book, The Birth of the
Symbol.14 In this book, Struck makes a distinction between what he calls the
‘rhetorical tradition’, associated with Aristotle, and in the Latin world Horace and
Quintilian, which focused on the metaphor, and saw literature, and poetry, as
concerned primarily with communicating ideas to the reader, or audience, and
therefore with clarity of conception, and how to communicate with the reader/
audience and inspire appropriate emotions for the reception of what was being
communicated: fear or pity, delight or wonder. In contrast, Struck identified
another tradition of writing and interpreting literature and poetry that sought in
literature the expression of deep truths in the form of riddles or αἰνίγματα that
were veiled in a deliberate obscurity, and required patient untangling in order to
11 For a good account of the apophatic dimension of Clement, see Henny Fiskå Hägg, Clement of
Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford, 2006).
12 Celestial Hierarchy 2. 2. 3; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 13, 9–13.
13 I made a brief attempt at exploring Dionysian symbolism and its relationship to the Neoplatonic
tradition in my article, ‘Symbolism and the Angels in Dionysios the Areopagite’, Studia Patristica
58 (2013), 109–15, which I have drawn on in what follows.
14 Peter T. Struck, The Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton
University Press, 2004).
yield their meaning. Struck traced this tradition from Pythagoras, through the
Stoics, to the Neoplatonists. One advantage of Struck’s approach is that symbol-
ism and allegory are not presented as devices for eliciting unlikely meanings from
improbable sources, as is the tendency for any literary approach that starts from
the rhetorical tradition of classical and late antiquity. Rather, it is an approach to
poetry and literature that values obscurity and the need for its patient unravel-
ling; and it need hardly be said that it is a tradition that has its own place in the
history of literature in many cultures, from Anglo-Saxon riddle poems, to the
deliberate veiled obscurity of the poets called ‘metaphysical’ in English literature,
to the Romantics, the Symbolists, and the Modernists, for all of whom difficulty,
obscurity, is a necessary step to the grasp of truths beyond the trivial, and espe-
cially to truth that claims to be sacred. As Mallarmé put it: ‘Toute chose sacrée et
qui veut demeure sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère’.15
In his discussion of Proklos, Struck begins with a brief word about Proklos’
ontology, and in particular the way in which his understanding of procession
from the One bestows on matter a certain dignity, for matter, in its simplicity,
participates more directly in the One than more complex beings such as plants,
living beings, and even human beings. It is for this reason that, as Struck puts it,
‘matter now plays a pivotal role in the larger structures of the cosmos’.16 It is this
that makes it possible for symbolism to provide access to divine reality: poets,
through their tales and the use of symbols and divine names, sculptors, and other
artisans through the making of cult statues. Language-making, in the hands of
the poets, is parallel to the making of cult statues: something is caught in the sym-
bolism of the poetic language that can be traced back to the One itself, and can be
a means by which lower beings are drawn up towards the higher. This focuses on
the use of divine names. The way this operates, however, is not by words—the
divine names—performing some kind of mimesis, imitation, but rather by words
invoking the divine presence attested by the divine names. The rejection of
mimesis has an important consequence, which can be seen from this passage
from Proklos’ commentary on the Republic:
How could one call the poetry that interprets divine matters by means of sym-
bols ‘imitation’? For symbols are not imitations [mimemata] of those things of
which they are symbolic. For things could never be imitations of their opposites,
the shameful of the beautiful, the unnatural of the natural. But the symbolic
mode indicates the nature of things even through what is most strongly anti-
thetical to them.17
15 Hérésies artistiques—‘L’art pour tous’, in Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres completes, ed. Henri
Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Gallimard, 1945), 257.
16 Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 233.
17 Proklos, In rempublicam (ed. Kroll), I. 198. 13–19; translation in Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 239.
Symbols can function as symbols while being quite opposite to that to which they
refer. Symbols have some kind of ontological link, revealed in the divine name,
and they function by being invoked, not because they resemble the reality to
which they refer. The poet, then, functions as what Struck calls a ‘cog’ in the
machinery of emanation: the recitation of his poetry sets off a sort of resonance
with the divine reality to which it refers and draws the one who recites or listens
into a kind of communion with the divine reality referred to by the symbol. In
some way, the symbol participates in that to which it refers; there is established a
kind of sympathy that draws the worshipper into the divine orbit; the poet passes
beyond being merely a theologian, who says something about the gods, rather his
words establish a link with the gods: the poet becomes a theurgist.18
Even from such a bare summary, it is evident that Dionysios’ understanding of
symbolism is indebted to Proklos, or his tradition. The only difference seems to
be that Dionysios seems to keep divine names and symbols in separate compart-
ments: the divine names are conceptual for the most part—goodness, being, life,
wisdom, etc.—while the symbols are drawn from material reality. Symbols in
Celestial Hierarchy 2 are presented as necessary props if we are to use material,
sensible reality to describe the spiritual realm, whereas divine names are concepts
that are used to make some sense of God who transcends intelligible reality. But
the distinction is not one that Dionysios maintains consistently: in his discussion
in Divine Names 1. 6 of how God is hymned ‘both as nameless and from every
name’, he passes seamlessly from divine names such as being, life, goodness, to a
list of sensible names (or symbols) such as ‘sun, star, fire, water, wind, dew, cloud,
rock itself and stone, all beings and none of the beings’.19 As Eric Perl points out,
the metaphysical basis for his theory of symbols is the same as for his theory of
divine names, for God transcends utterly both the realm of the senses and the
realm of the intellect.20 The parallel between (sensible) symbols and (intelligible)
divine names is underlined by the correspondence between apophatic and kata-
phatic theologies (or ways of naming God) and unlike and like symbolism; in
both cases the two opposites are held together and the negative form—apophatic
theology and unlike symbolism—held to be more fundamentally true (or less
false). So Dionysios’ distinction between divine names and symbols scarcely
marks him off from Proklos. To Proklos’ poets correspond Dionysios’ theologoi,
the Scriptural writers, though these are not the only people who praise God by
the divine names, according to Dionysios: that is the special role of the hierarchs,
not least the revered Hierotheos, and seems to be the function of any bishop when
celebrating the Eucharistic liturgy. Furthermore, Proklos’ understanding of
18 The past few paragraphs are a rather banal summary of Struck’s presentation in his chapter on
Proklos: Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 227–53.
19 Divine Names 1. 6 (in Suchla, ed., Corpus Dionysiacum I, 119. 7–9).
20 Eric D. Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (SUNY, 2007),
ch. 7 (‘Symbolism’), 101–9 passim.
poetry as invocation is perfectly reflected in Dionysios’ understanding of the

divine names (and by extension symbols) as means by which we do not describe
God (which would entail some notion of language as mimetic), so much as praise
him: ὑμνεῖν. All that is true. It remains the case, however, that, although Dionysios
makes effective use of Proklos’ theory of language as invocation, rather than imi-
tation, the tradition of using language as invocatory is something Dionysios
inherited from within Christian practice, not something he introduced to the
Christian tradition. One only need recall the opening words of the anaphora of
St John Chrysostom (which may not be Chrysostom’s, but is likely to be older than
Dionysios): ‘It is right and fitting to hymn you, to bless you, to praise you, to give
you thanks, to worship you in every place of your dominion; for you are God,
ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever existing, eternally the
same. . .’. My immediate point here is the assertion of God’s incomprehensibility in
the anaphora of St John Chrysostom, but I cannot help adding that the ancient
anaphoras of the Church have a strikingly incantatory dimension, created in this
passage by the use of the rhetorical figure of anaphora with the repeated alpha,
moving from the alpha-privative to the initial letter of ἀεί, eternal: incantation,
which is often ignored when considering these prayers.
But the angels? Angels, or celestial beings (because, for Dionysios, strictly
speaking, angels are the names of the lowest rank of celestial beings), seem to
fulfil several roles in Dionysios’ theology. They are intermediary beings, leading
human beings to God, and conveying from God divine enlightenment. Already
well before Dionysios’ time, the role of the angels had been developed as precisely
intermediary between God and human kind: sharing with God the property of
being beyond our understanding, and with us the conviction that God is beyond
any conception they or we can form of him. In his homilies on the
Incomprehensibility of God, St John Chrysostom had incorporated the angels
into his theology of the transcendent unknowability of God.21 Dionysios, how-
ever, goes much further, principally by introducing his notion of hierarchy. As
Dionysios defines it (and it seems to be his coinage), hierarchy is ‘in my view’
(κατ’ ἐμὲ) ‘a sacred order and knowledge and activity that assimilates to the dei-
form as far as is possible and analogously leads up with the enlightenments
bestowed on it from God to imitation of God’.22 Hierarchy is not primarily what
we nowadays call hierarchy—a system of graded ranks—but a process by which
beings are assimilated to God. This involves, as Dionysios unfolds it, his system of
ranks of celestial beings ranked three by three—three ranks of three graded
beings—where the threefold element expresses and effects the threefold process
that leads to union with God or perfection: the process of purification, enlighten-
ment, and union or perfection. It is interesting to note that, whereas mimetic
language had been set aside, in accordance with Proklos, in his discussion of
21 See Jean Chrysostome, Sur l’incompréhensibilité de Dieu, Sources Chrétiennes 28bis (1970).
22 Celestial Hierarchy 3. 1; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 17. 3–5.
unlike symbolism, here the language of mimesis once again finds a place in
Dionysios’ thought: hierarchy leads up ἐπὶ τὸ θεομίμητον, ‘to imitation of God’.23
What has happened, I think, is that the ‘unlike’ has been incorporated in the pro-
cess of purification, enlightenment, and union; purification has something of a
moral dimension, but its real function is epistemological, to prepare the created
mind to receive the enlightenment that leads to union, and part of that, presum-
ably, is recognizing the ‘unlike’ element in symbolism, so as to interpret the sym-
bols in the right way, that is, in the way that enables the symbols to lead one to
participation in that of which they are symbols, and furthermore to impress upon
one that revelation is not ‘objective’ as a kind of divinely guaranteed information,
but is rather a matter of transformative initiation. As Dionysios puts it,
If anyone says that theophanies take place directly and immediately to certain of
the holy ones, let him learn, and that clearly from the most sacred oracles, that
‘no one has seen’, or shall see, the hiddenness itself of God as it is, and that the-
ophanies occurred to the pious in accordance with manifestations fitting to God
through certain sacred visions analogous to those who saw them. The all-wise
theology naturally calls that vision, which manifests depicted in itself the divine
likeness as a shaping of the shapeless, a theophany, from the leading up of those
who behold towards the divine as through the divine enlightenment itself that
comes upon those who behold, and from their being sacredly initiated into
something of the divine.24
But this process, as Dionysios makes clear, is not some individual, intellectual
process, but something mediated by angels, and also by the community of the
Church, primarily, though not, I think, exclusively, the sacred ministers. Chapters
4 to 14 of the Celestial Hierarchy explore various aspects of the process of assimi-
lation to the divine mediated by the principle and reality of hierarchy, and then
there follows the final chapter 15, which deals in detail with the symbolism used
to understand the realm of celestial intelligible beings, and beyond that God
Himself. It is striking that in this final chapter all the cautions about the necessity
of paying attention to unlike symbolism seem to be set on one side. All the sym-
bols introduced, from fire onwards, are interpreted in what seems to me a mimetic
way. So, of fire, he says,
the fiery, therefore, I think manifests that which is most deiform in the heavenly
intellects. For the sacred theologians often describe the being beyond being and
shapeless in terms of fire, as possessing many images, if one may say so, of the
thearchic property, as in visible things.25
23 Celestial Hierarchy 3. 1; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 17. 5.
One finds the same in the explanation of how the parts of the (human? animal?)
body are applied to God; the principle of interpretation is mimesis.
This movement away from the apophatic/unlike symbolic to mimesis, imita-
tion, becomes even more striking in the treatise, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Paul
Rorem, in his first monograph, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-
Dionysian Synthesis, drew attention to the apparent neglect, if not rejection, of
negation and the preference for unlikeness in the treatment of symbols in the
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. He remarked,
Not only are liturgical images and symbols never called incongruous or dissimi-
lar, a silence striking by itself, but they are explicitly considered ‘precise’ and
ascribed ‘with appropriateness’. Either the Areopagite does not apply to the lit-
urgy his firm principles that even the loftiest images are insufficient and need
interpretation including negation, or else that principle is at this point so
assumed that it is never mentioned.26
Perhaps we should not be completely surprised, as we have already noticed that,

although his understanding of the apophatic in relation to concepts and of unlike
symbolism in relation to images seem based on precisely the same principles,
when it comes to symbolism, Dionysios’ practice seems to diverge from his the-
ory. It is partly a matter of discernment. Take, for example, the case of the ser
aphim: the name (‘to those who know Hebrew’) indicates that they are ‘kindling
or burning’, and he goes on to explain that
the naming of the seraphim plainly teaches their ever moving around things
divine, and constancy, and warmth, and keenness, and the seething of that
persistent, indomitable, and inflexible perpetual motion, and the vigorous
assimilation and elevation of the subordinate, as giving new life and rekindling
them to the same heat; and purifying through fire and burnt-offering, and the
light-like and light-shedding characteristic which can never be concealed or
consumed, and remains always the same, which destroys and dispels every kind
of obscure darkness.27
The depiction of the seraphim as fiery beings circulating the Godhead is purified
of spatial and material associations, but its symbolic associations—purifying,
warmth, fervour, ceaselessness—are affirmed.
With the sacraments (not a very happy term with Dionysios, who is really con-
cerned with various sacred rites) the negative notions associated with the
26 Paul Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis (Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 96. The references are to Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 2. Theoria, 6, 7;
Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 77. 8, 24. Rorem returns to this later: 119–21.
27 Celestial Hierarchy 7. 1; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 27.14–28.2; trans. Parker.
apophatic and unlike seem to fall away, as Rorem notes. Perhaps the reason for
this is that we are moving from a fundamentally intellectual understanding of
knowing to something rather different. So far, the discussion of the apophatic
in relation to the conceptual and the unlike in relation of symbols and images
has been concerned with an intellectual process of understanding; we are tracing
an ascent of knowledge, a knowledge that proceeds beyond what we would
normally count as knowledge to knowing by unknowing, as Dionysios puts it.
Another way of putting this would be to say that we are passing beyond a
notion of knowledge conceived on analogy with seeing—something very difficult
to avoid in Greek where the verbs to know and to see as so close as to become
entangled. If seeing is the analogy for knowing, then knowing will be like
seeing: there will be, ideally, clarity about the object of knowledge, which is
separated from us by distance (it is over there; if we get too close we can no
longer see it). But there are other senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing. Especially
with the first three of these senses, we have a notion of apprehension very different
from the apprehension we receive through sight: what we perceive is present,
but often very difficult to describe. If sight suggests a form of knowing that is
clear, distinct, objective; touch, taste, and smell suggest forms of knowing that
are unclear, indistinct, subjective, but nonetheless convincing, compelling.
Gregory of Nyssa explored something of this, not least in his homilies on the
Song of Songs. As the soul, the bride finds herself encompassed by the divine night,
she can no longer make out what or who is revealed to her, but has, nonetheless, a
‘certain sense of his presence’ (αἴσθησιν μέν τινα . . . τῆς παρουσίας).28 The Song
of Songs encouraged Gregory to explore knowledge of God in terms of taste,
touch, and smell: to explore a knowledge of God with the different characteristics
we have already mentioned.
When we read Dionysios on the sacraments or sacred rites, what is striking is
his lack of interest in what is said. Yes, there are hymns and prayers, but he virtu-
ally never says anything about their content (or not directly). What he pays atten-
tion to is, first of all, movement: the movement of the hierarch as he moves round
the church censing it. Then the materials used in these sacred rites: water, oil,
myron, or chrism, bread, wine, incense; he even mentions something like icons,
decorations, depictions, presumably in form and colour. He is no longer much
interested in the conceptual and his interest in the symbolic is no longer con-
cerned with verbal images drawing on the visible. He is concerned directly with
the material things themselves . . . and their symbolism. In his letter to the Apostle
John, he asserts that ‘truly visible things are manifest images of the invisible’.29 It is
through engagement in the visible world—the physical world of the materials
28 Gregory of Nyssa, In Cant. 11; Hermann Langerbeck, ed., Gregorii Nysseni Opera VI (Brill,
1960), 324.10–11.
29 Ep. 10; Heil and Ritter, eds., Corpus Dionysiacum II, 208.9–10.
used in the sacraments, but also (implicit, I think, in his notion of hierarchies, all
consisting of groups of heavenly and earthly beings) with people through their
relationships with each other. The sacraments or sacred rites undergird the
apophatic for they are concerned with a form of knowing that is not conceptual,
but the knowing that comes about through participation in the material
symbols and communion with fellow participants in the rites and ceremonies
of the Church: a knowledge that is essentially participatory, and only secondarily
conceptual.
What I am suggesting is that the apophatic stands at the centre of Dionysios’
theology, which he presents as his interpretation of the theology of his mentor,
the apostle Paul, but also stands at the centre of his interpretation of the whole
sacramental life of the Church, summed up in the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist.
The apophatic, then, forms an axis about which the whole theology of the
Areopagite revolves. It is not simply a corrective to the theology of affirmation:
affirmation of the revelation of God found in the Scriptures; it is, in truth, the
necessary undergirding for any valid theology of affirmation. The truth of this is
laid bare—experienced—in the Divine Liturgy, for there we pass beyond theology
as some way of providing an accurate account of God, as if that were possible to
the finite minds of creatures, both human and angelic; we pass beyond such
theology to a theology in which we participate in God by participating in the
mystery of Christ, a mystery in which God is revealed as beyond knowledge
(cf. ep. 3: ‘hidden . . . in his manifestation’, κρύφιος . . . ἐν τῇ ἐκφάνσει). This apophatic
dimension swallows up the author himself, who no longer lives as what we guess
to be a sixth-century Syrian monk (maybe, monk-bishop), but whose identity in
Christ is wholly contained by the judge of the Areopagos, Dionysios, whose
conversion by the Apostle Paul we read of in Acts 17.
20
St Maximus the Confessor between
East and West
According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, St Maximus the Confessor is ‘the

philosophical-theological thinker between East and West’—‘der philosophische-
theologische Denker zwischen Ost und West’.1 It is a view often echoed in the
scholarly literature on Maximus, though with a more restricted meaning than
that intended by the great Swiss theologian. For Balthasar goes on to say: ‘he
(Maximus) shows in his humble serenity, and also in the daring of his truly free
spirit, how and whence both come together. And East means not only Byzantium
and West not only Rome, but East really means Asia and West das Abendland—
the whole of the West’. Few scholars attempt such a world-historical breadth of
canvas: between East and West mostly means between the Greek East and the
Latin West. Even in the Western Middle Ages when Maximus was perceived as
little more than the scholiast of Dionysius the Areopagite, he was respected as
someone who linked in his person Byzantium and the West. As Dom Polycarp
Sherwood affirms, such veneration for Maximus in the West was due in part to
‘his belonging to the “Catholic”, that is ecumenical tradition of an earlier period
when East and West were still part of one undivided church’.2 More recently there
has been a tendency to stress parallels between Maximus and St Thomas Aquinas:
a tendency that seems to have begun in 1907 with an article by Straubinger3 and
became very popular in the 1970s in a series of books by Catholic scholars, mainly
Dominicians, especially Juan Miguel Garrigues who spoke of ‘eastern and west-
ern tradition being united in the persons of their most important witnesses,
Maximus and Thomas Aquinas’.4 Maximus became a kind of honorary Byzantine
Dominican, or Thomist, at any rate. This idea of a spectrum between East and
West that Maximus evokes, and on which he represents a significant position,
accessible from both ends, so to speak, is clearly very compelling, and often the
source of striking shafts of illumination. To return to Balthasar—he finds in
1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, 2nd edn (Johannes Verlag, 1961), 12.
2 As reported by D. J. Geanakoplos, ‘Some Aspects of the Influence of the Byzantine Maximos the
Confessor on the Theology of East and West’, Church History 38 (1969), 150–63, here 160.
3 H. Straubinger, ‘Die Lehre des Patriarchen Sophronius von Jerusalem über die Trinität, die
Inkarnation und die Person Christi. Mit Besonderer Berticksichtigung seiner Beziehungen zu
Maximus Confessor in ihren Hauptpunken zugleich verglichen mit den Sätzen des hl. Thomas’, Der
Katholik, dritte Folge, 35 (1907), 81–109, 175–98, 251–65.
4 J. M. Garrigues, Maxime le Confesseur. La charité avenir divin de l’homme (Beauchesne, 1976), 7.
Maximus a decisive point in the development of a tradition which makes the

oriental at home in Western consciousness, something he finds again in the
Russian novelist, Dostoevsky:
A supracosmic and mystical conformity with God on the one hand, and nature
envisaged as sin on the other: there are here two aspects that constitute an essen-
tial rhythm of the oriental religious sentiment, a rhythm that we unquestionably
find in The Brothers Karamazov and The Devils, but which is already there in
Origen, in the two Gregories and in Maximus . . . The rhythm of such a vision of
the world can only be an ecstatic rhythm, let us say even irrational and emo-
tional, because the object of final approbation is absolutely the same as the
object of repudiation, because it carries in its very essence as if engraved with
red-hot iron, the mark of grace and reprobation. The ecstatic joy over the world
in Gregory of Nyssa and his mental flight beyond the sensible are an exact
anticipation of Alyosha’s ecstatic kissing of the earth and his angelic character,
liberated from sense.5
It is not, however, such world-historical parallels, exhilarating though they are,

that I wish to pursue in this lecture. As an historical theologian, I have set myself
the rather more prosaic task of trying to take this notion of a spectrum between
East and West back into the historical reality of Maximus’ own earthly life. Even
in such an investigation I think we shall find some surprises.
‘May you live in interesting times’: that is said to be a Chinese curse. But
Maximus himself certainly lived in ‘interesting times’. He was born in 580 in a
Roman Empire that was still basking in the successes that had been achieved dur-
ing the reign of the Emperor Justinian. Justinian, who had died fifteen years earl
ier, had sought to restore to the Roman Empire something of its former glory as a
Mediterranean empire, and to some extent he had succeeded: he had reconquered
North Africa and Italy and even established Roman rule in the south of Spain. He
had also rebuilt much of Constantinople, including the Great Church, the cath
edral of the Holy Wisdom, that still stands today. But by the time of Maximus’
death, in 662, the empire had lost its Eastern provinces—Syria, Palestine, and
Egypt—to a newly established Arab Empire that had its capital in Damascus and
already stretched East as far as the valley of the Oxus. Asia Minor was regularly
subject to raids by the Arabs, and Constantinople itself was soon to face an Arab
blockade. The reigning emperor, Constans II, had settled in Sicily and was in fact
contemplating moving his court there permanently. The Arab conquest, however,
5 Taken from the French translation of the first German edition (the only access to that which I
have): H. U. von Balthasar, Liturgie Cosmique (Aubier, 1947), 136–8. It is somewhat modified in the
second edition, and related much more closely to Maximus as the mediator with the Asian East:
187–9 (n.1).
St Maximus the Confessor between East and West 213
was only a further blow to the Roman Empire. Constantinople had already lost its
Eastern provinces for some twenty years between 610 and 630 to its traditional
Eastern neighbour and enemy, the Persian Empire. The latter half of the sixth
century had seen repeated outbreaks of plague in Asia Minor and Constantinople,
and consequent depopulation. The first two decades of Maximus’ life had seen the
over-running of the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs and the Avars, with a conse-
quent breakdown of land communications between Constantinople and Italy,
with the result that Justinian’s new empire was split in two. Alongside all this—as
consequence, or maybe cause—the traditional basic unit of the civilization of the
Mediterranean world, the city, had decayed, and with it the traditional educa-
tional and career structure. Constantinople—and a weakened Constantinople, at
that—came to dominate what remained of a once-great Roman Empire, that had
felt in contact with its traditional greatness not all that long before. All this must
have raised huge questions of identity for the inhabitants of the Roman or
Byzantine Empire: and these questions were to remain, at least until the ninth
century and maybe for the rest of its long life. But it is in the seventh century, the
century of Maximus’ maturity, that these questions are first posed with their full
force. This is my first main observation: that the seventh century is not a century
where people felt at home with a comfortable tradition; it was a century where
there were few, perhaps no certainties, and where a sense of identity (or of iden
tities) needed to be fashioned afresh.
This must lead us to question some of the assumptions that lie behind the kind
of judgements about Maximus ‘between East and West’ that I quoted at the begin-
ning of this lecture: at least if these judgements are to be taken as reflecting any-
thing of the historical reality of the seventh century. Let us take, to begin with, the
idea that veneration of Maximus in the Western Middle Ages had to do with his
belonging to a period ‘when East and West were still part of one undivided
church’. If there was any period when the Church was ‘undivided’ it can hardly
have been the seventh century. This was a century in which an Ecumenical
Council anathematized not only four patriarchs of Constantinople and a patri-
arch of Alexandria, but also the bishop of Rome, Pope Honorius!
Or take an appellation that all ascribe to Maximus, wherever they place him on
the East-West spectrum: ‘Byzantine’. In the context of the seventh century that
would be a decidedly odd term to apply to Maximus. He may have been born in
Byzantium, that is Constantinople, and have been ‘byzantine’ in that sense, but
the ‘byzantine theologians’ of the seventh century were the Monothelite theolo
gians of Constantinople, those who brought about his condemnation, mutilation,
and death, and maybe even managed to make sure that when Maximus’ teaching
was finally vindicated in Constantinople at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in
680‒681, that vindication did not extend to his person. Though having said that,
one thinks of a curious passage towards the end of the account of Maximus’ first
trial in 655. Maximus was asked by the sacellarius, ‘Why do you love the Romans
and hate the Greeks?’, meaning why has he cast his lot with the church of Rome
and the Lateran Council that had condemned monothelitism in 649, and refused
to enter into Eucharistic communion with his fellow Greeks in Constantinople?
But it is a puzzling question, for the Greeks of Constantinople, the new Rome,
thought of themselves as Romans, Ῥωμαίοι, and later on even adopted the Latin
word, Romani, in Greek to designate those who belonged to the city of Rome (so
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his de administrando imperio).6 And yet here a
highly placed Roman official uses his own proud self-appellation of those he
regards as traitors. Maximus’ reply was: ‘We have a precept, not to hate anyone:
I love the Romans as sharing the same faith, and the Greeks as sharing the same
language’. Perhaps in that reply Maximus was defining Roman—Byzantine—in
terms of faith in a way that foreshadows its later use. At any rate this exchange
gives some impression of confusion of identity in seventh-century Constantinople.
Or finally, take the very notion of a spectrum between East and West, that
Maximus is said somehow to bridge in his own person and theology. It seems to
me that to talk of East and West in the context of the seventh century is to allow
oneself too few points of the compass. West may be Rome, but what about North
Africa (not to mention Spain)? It was only a few decades earlier that the North
African Church had anathematized Pope Vigilius for his subservience to the
Emperor Justinian over the matter of the Three Chapters. And where is the East?
Constantinople? Syria? Palestine? Egypt? Armenia? The Church of the East
itself—the so-called ‘Nestorian’ Church—mainly in Iraq? No single point of the
compass will embrace all the differences represented by these geographical areas
(and even the geographical designations obscure local differences). I am not sim-
ply suggesting that it is all more complicated than convenient labels indicate: you
would all expect that to be the case. What I really want to argue is that the seventh
century was a period in which historically important understandings of (differ-
ent) Christian identities were being fashioned, and in particular that Maximus
the Confessor played a decisive role in the fashioning of one of these senses of
identity: that which has come to be called ‘Byzantine’ or (though unfairly, so far as
many Oriental Christians are concerned) ‘Eastern Orthodox’. Maximus’ apparent
accessibility to many Western Christians is not because he in some way stands
aside from the ‘Byzantine’ tradition, thus understood: rather it says something
about the richness of that theological synthesis, the lineaments of which he and
others forged in the ‘interesting times’ of the seventh and eighth centuries, in
Maximus’ case, at the cost of his life.
Perhaps the easiest way to pursue this will be to take that last point—about the
need for more points of the compass than just East and West. Let us move around
clockwise: from New Rome to Old Rome.
6 E.g. Balthasar, Liturgie Cosmique, 29; in Constantine Porphyogenitus, De Administrando Imperio,

ed. G. Moravesik, 2nd edn, Dumbarton Oaks Texts, 1 (Dumbarton Oaks, 1967), 122.
First, Constantinople. As a recently published volume of Grillmeier’s massive

and impressive work has revealed—part 2 of vol. 2 of his Jesus der Christus im
Glauben der Kirche7—Constantinople played an enormously important role in
the development of Christology in the sixth century. This was mainly because of
the lead taken by the emperor in such matters, and especially the Emperor
Justinian. For the Council of Chalcedon had left the Christian emperor with a
divided empire on his hands. Many Christians in the East felt that that council
had betrayed St Cyril of Alexandria, veneration for whom was such that he was
later to be known as the ‘Seal of the Fathers’; they were called monophysites (that
is, those who believed that Christ had one sole nature) by their enemies, and for
convenience, but with some reluctance, I shall so call them. What took place in
Constantinople in the sixth century was a serious attempt to allay their anxieties.
The condemnation of passages from three theologians of the Antiochene School,
Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrus, and lbas of Edessa, two of whom
had been accepted as orthodox by the council of Chalcedon—the so-called con-
demnation of the ‘Three Chapters’, which was endorsed at the Fifth Ecumenical
Council—was part of this attempt to reassure the monophysite followers of Cyril.
Most important, however, was the endeavour to read the Definition of Chalcedon
in terms of the theology of Cyril—it had, after all, been acclaimed by the Fathers
of the Council as faithful to Cyril—an attempt sometimes called Neo-
Chalcedonianism, though better called, following John Meyendorff, Cyrilline
Chalcedonianism.8 This involved making clear that the hypostasis that had
become incarnate was indeed the eternal hypostasis of the Son, something that it
can be argued is not crystal clear in the Chalcedonian Definition. But Justinian
went further than this. One of the flash-points between the monophysites and the
Chalcedonians had been the so-called Theopaschite addition to the Trisagion.
This hymn—Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us—had
become part of the liturgy of Constantinople and the East in the fifth century. In
Syria it was understood as addressed to the Second Person of the Trinity, and the
Syrian monophysites had added to it the clause ‘who was crucified for us’. In
Constantinople, however, the Trisagion was understood to be addressed to the
Trinity as a whole, and such an addition would imply the heretical notion of the
passibility of the divine substance. Despite this, the theopaschite addition became
the badge of monophysite piety, and Justinian’s predecessor but one, Anastasius,
had signalled his monophysite sympathies by ordering the monophysite form of
the Trisagion: this provoked a riot and nearly cost him his throne. Gibbon, as you
might expect, devotes a splendid page to this incident:
7 Alois Grillmeier, Jesus der Christus im Glauben der Kirche, Band 2/2, Die Kirche von
Konstantinopel im 6. Jahrhundert (Herder, 1989). The English translation has just appeared (1995).
8 See, e.g., John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (Fordham
The Trisagion, with or without this obnoxious addition, was chanted in the
cathedral by two adverse choirs, and, when their lungs were exhausted, they had
recourse to the more solid arguments of sticks and stones; the aggressors were
punished by the emperor, and defended by the patriarch; and the crown and
mitre were staked on the event of this momentous quarrel.9
Justinian did not compromise over the Trisagion, but he did accept the theopas-
chite formula—‘One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh’—incorporating it in the
canons of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and perhaps more significantly in the
hymn Ὁ μονογενὴς υἱὸς, ascribed to the emperor himself, and now a fixed part of
the Byzantine liturgy, which includes the words: ‘You were crucified, Christ God,
by death trampling on death, being one of the Holy Trinity, . . . save us!’10
This Christological development was fully accepted by Maximus. But not the
further developments that were essayed in the seventh century. For Justinian’s
efforts had made little impact on the monophysites. On the contrary, by the time
of Justinian’s death there was a separate monophysite hierarchy of bishops serving
the needs of those who refused to accept Chalcedon: they were strong especially
in Syria and Egypt, and the persecution they had suffered at the hands of the
imperial forces can hardly have strengthened their loyalty to the imperial throne.
When Chosroes, the Persian shah, invaded the Eastern provinces of the Roman
Empire at the beginning of the seventh century, he tried to capitalize on these
religious differences. The response from Constantinople was to try again to make
Chalcedonian orthodoxy acceptable to the monophysites. Sergius, the patriarch
of Constantinople, took some care over this, approaching one of the monophysite
bishops of Egypt, George Arsas, for theological ammunition. The proposal this
time was what has come to be called monenergism: the doctrine that in Christ
there are two natures of divinity and humanity, united in one person and
expressed through a single activity, or energy. It must have seemed a brilliant
solution, for not only would it allay monophysite fears about Chalcedon under-
mining Christ’s unity, it was also a formula that could be accepted by the Church
of the East, those Christians who had refused to accept the condemnation of
Nestorius at the council of Ephesus in 431 and had found a home in the Persian
Empire. When Heraclius returned from defeating the Persian Empire at Ctesiphon
in 628 and recovering the true Cross, that had been taken from Jerusalem after its
surrender to the Persians in 614, it was his doctrine of monenergism—and the
possession of the relic of the Cross—that formed the basis for the incorporation
of the Armenian Church into the Imperial Church in 630, and union with some
monophysites at least in Syria and Mesopotamia a little later.
9 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, World Classics edn,
vol. 5 (1904), ch. 47, 155.
10 Translation taken from The Divine Liturgy of our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom
(Oxford, 1995), 11.
It is not then surprising that Constantinople became attached to monenergism,

and later to the refinement of that doctrine called monothelitism, according to
which the two natures of Christ were united in one person and one will. Although
it lost imperial support in 680, when the sixth Ecumenical Council was convened,
and monothelitism condemned (without, as we have seen, any mention of the
confessors who had opposed it with their lives, Pope Martin and the monk,
Maximus), it again became imperial policy at the beginning of the eighth century
and gained support from distinguished Byzantine churchmen, including the
future Patriarch Germanus and St Andrew of Crete. Monothelitism, then, became
the hallmark of the theology of the capital in the seventh century. Apart from that
we know little. But we do know from Maximus that theologians in the capital
were criticizing Rome over the matter of the filioque: and that Maximus defended
the Roman doctrine, arguing that it does not make the Son a source (αἰτία) of the
Spirit, but simply means that the Spirit proceeds through (διά) the Son, and citing
Cyril of Alexandria in support. Two centuries later a theologian in Constantinople—
Photius the patriarch—was to accuse Rome of heresy over the filioque clause in
the course of the heated exchanges between Rome and Byzantium during the so-
called Photian schism: one wonders if there was not here the resurfacing of a
long-standing tradition about the errors of Rome from the theologians of the
Byzantine court.
Let us now move round the compass to Syria. We have already learnt some-
thing about the theological situation here. For a few years Antioch had provided a
patriarchal throne for Severus, the greatest monophysite theologian, and indeed
the greatest theologian of his age. But Syria produced another theologian, whose
works survive under the name of St Paul’s convert and disciple, Dionysius the
Areopagite. These works were destined to exercise a vast influence on Christian
theology, both in the East and the West, but they first appear on the historical
stage in Constantinople in 532, cited by the Severan monophysite theologians in
support of their argument that, as there was a single divine-human (theandric)
energy in Christ, so there must be a single nature (φύσις). This reading is found in
none of the Greek manuscripts of the fourth letter of Dionysius, which all read ‘a
certain new theandric energy’. But that leads us further round the compass to
Palestine.
For Palestine was a centre in the East of loyalty to Chalcedon. This is largely
due to the monks, but is also doubtless due to the importance of Jerusalem as a
centre for pilgrimage and a place that enjoyed much imperial patronage. It is
important for Maximus, for though he may never have set foot in Palestine
(though according to the Syriac life he was born in Samaria and began his monas-
tic life at the Old Lavra), his spiritual father was Sophronius, originally a monk of
the monastery of St Theodosius, and later patriarch of Jerusalem. It is the
Palestinian experience—of monasticism and attachment to Chalcedonian ortho-
doxy—that lies behind Maximus. It was Sophronius who first raised the alarm
about monenergism, initially by his personal protests, and then by his Synodical
Letter, his confession of faith sent to the other patriarchal sees after his election as
patriarch of Jerusalem in 634. But Palestine is important for Maximus in another
respect. For the works of Dionysius the Areopagite were edited by the learned
bishop of Scythopolis, John, who published the Corpus Areopagiticum in a critical
edition, with a prologue and scholia. The purpose of this edition—as will become
clear in Beata Suchla’s eagerly awaited edition of the prologue and scholia to the
Dionysian Corpus, and in the English translation and discussion of John’s scholia
prepared by Paul Rorem and John Lamoreaux—was to present Dionysius as a
Cyrilline Chalcedonian, and wrest him from the hands of the monophysites.
Maximus continued this work of commentary on Dionysius, and indeed the
scholia and prologue were eventually all ascribed to him. What Dionysius gives to
Maximus is a vision of the whole created order as a cosmic liturgy celebrating the
love of God. But Palestine is not only important to Maximus as providing perhaps
the firmest anchor of his spiritual and intellectual life, it is also important as
building on the work of synthesis that we find in Maximus. But more of that later.
If we move further round the compass, we come to Alexandria. At the begin-
ning of the seventh century, a friend of Sophronius, John the Merciful, had been
the much-loved Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria: after his death, Sophronius
and another friend, John Moschus, had written his life. But John had served a
small minority of the Christians of Egypt: most of them were monophysites and
rejected his authority. In 631, however, Cyrus, a native of Lazica on the Black Sea,
where Maximus finally ended his life, and a friend of the Constantinopolitan
patriarch, Sergius, was appointed patriarch of Alexandria and augustal prefect of
Egypt with the job of reconciling the local monophysites to the imperial policy
of monenergism. He achieved a remarkable success, and in 633 published a pact of
union, a carefully worded statement of monenergist orthodoxy, and presided over
the reconciliation of many monophysite clergy. But it was this statement,
denounced as Apollinarian by Sophronius, that sparked off the Christological
controversy that was to end in Maximus’ exile and death.
If we move still further round the compass, we come to North Africa. The
North African Church, that had been restored to the bosom of the Roman Empire
as a result of the overthrow of the Vandal occupation by Justinian’s general,
Belisarius, in 534, still remembered its greatest luminary, Augustine, and regarded
itself as a pillar of orthodoxy. As we have seen, a century earlier it had excommu-
nicated a pope, Vigilius, for his participation in the condemnation of the Three
Chapters. Maximus lived there for at least fifteen years, after his flight from the
monastery at Cyzicus on the Sea of Marmara before the Persian advance on
Constantinople in 626. When the monothelite controversy finally broke out after
the publication of the imperial edict, the Ecthesis in 638, the North African
Church supported Maximus and the cause of orthodoxy in a series of synodical
acts. It was with this support that Maximus made his way to Rome in 645 or early
646. Maximus’ relation to the Church of North Africa is a puzzle. It was a Latin-
speaking Church, and Maximus lived in North Africa in a Greek monastery
founded by his spiritual mentor, Sophronius. But it is hardly likely that he was
ignorant of Latin (he even seems to have had some knowledge of Slavonic: the
only source I can think of for his occasional pun on the name Severus as indicat-
ing something Northern, frozen and deprived of light),11 and yet he never men-
tions Augustine by name, and there is no absolutely convincing evidence of any
kind of Augustinian influence on the theology of Maximus. It was, however, the
North African Church that first supported Maximus in his fight against
Monothelitism.
We had better let our compass swing round rather quickly through Spain and
Gaul, not that there was nothing of theological interest going on in that corner of
the compass, far from it. There may even be a Maximian connection, in that it is
possible, even likely, that Theodore of Tarsus, archbishop of Canterbury
(668‒690), had come to know Maximus during the Lateran Council of 649.12 But
that brings us to Rome, where our compass comes to rest. It was there that
Maximus went, as we have seen, in 645 or 646, and there that the Lateran Council
took place in 649, which condemned monothelitism. Earlier (and later) Rome did
not stand so firm. It was Pope Honorius in his reply to Sergius who had first used
the phrase ‘one will of our Lord Jesus Christ’, the key term of the monothelite
confession. Curiously, Maximus is resolute in his defence of Honorius, arguing
that the pope meant simply that there was a single undivided human will in
Christ, in contrast to the divided will found in fallen humanity.13 And later, after
the deposition of Martin by the emperor, his successors, Popes Eugenius I and
Vitalian, seem to have compromised and entered into communion with the mon-
othelite patriarch of Constantinople, Peter, who had presided at the trial of
Martin. It was the same patriarch, Peter, who challenged Maximus’ ecclesial
standing in terms of the theory of the Pentarchy, since by then, with the defection
of Rome, he was no longer in communion with any of the five patriarchates.14
This almost literal tour d’horizon has depicted a world of complex and shifting
religious allegiances. What was it that Maximus created out of his life and wit-
ness? There are some odd features, not least what seems at first sight a startling
contrast between Maximus and his spiritual father, Sophronius: whereas
Sophronius immediately denounces monenergism when he encounters it in 633
11 See opusc. 3 (PG 91.52A); opusc. 7 (PG 91.72A). This pun would make sense if Maximus was
aware of the Slavonic word for the north, sever. Such knowledge is not perhaps impossible. If Maximus
was protoasecretis from 610, he may have picked up some words of the language of the Slav tribes who
had by then settled in the Sklaviniae, and with whom diplomatic sources in the capital will certainly
have had some contact and presumably knowledge of their language.
12 See Michael Lapidge, Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and Influence
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22–3.
13 In the Dialogue with Pyrrhus: PG 91.329AB. 14 PG 90.132A.
(and if he had spent most of the previous decade in North Africa, it may well have
been his first encounter with it), Maximus does not begin to raise his voice against
the imperial religious policy until after the publication of the Ecthesis in 638. And
it is not that he had no occasion, or that he was in some way unqualified. So far as
qualification is concerned, even before he arrived in Africa (sometime, therefore,
between 626 and 630), he was already known as a champion of Chalcedonian
orthodoxy, for while on the island of Crete he had engaged in discussions with
Severan bishops.15 So far as occasion is concerned, in late 633 or early 634
Maximus had replied to a letter of Pyrrhus, later patriarch, about Sergius’ patri
archal judgement, in response to Sophronius’ protest—the psephos—that forbade
mention of either one or two energies in Christ, and supported Sergius’ psephos as
a rejection of the Alexandrian pact of union. This is almost as extraordinary as his
attitude towards Pope Honorius, for Sergius’ psephos was no repudiation of the
Alexandrian pact, but rather covert support. Nevertheless, the actual exposition
of Christological doctrine that this letter contains is entirely consistent with his
later teaching. There is then no question that Maximus in any way failed to recog-
nize the error of monenergism and monothelitism from the beginning, but it was
not until the promulgation of the Ecthesis that he began to speak out.
I think there are two points to make about this reluctance. The first has to do
with any approach to the history of Christian doctrine from a Catholic or
Orthodox perspective: from such a perspective we know where we are going, so
that it is often difficult for us to realize that to those whom we are studying it may
not have been so clear. The Christological issues of the sixth and seventh centur
ies separated various Christians one from another, but the differences were often
very slight—a matter of words and phrases in which were concentrated centuries
of deeply felt allegiance. It is not, indeed, obvious that Cyrus’ pact of union is
wrong: it is very carefully phrased, and if crucial terms are ambiguous—notably
the key term, ἐνέργεια—it is not least because such terms had only recently come
to bear the weight of theological reflection. It is just this point that Maximus
makes in his letter to Pyrrhus. Just how close streams of Christological reflection
can run emerges from his nearly contemporary Ambigua ad Thomam. The fifth of
that later set of difficulties discusses Dionysius’ notorious fourth letter that
includes the phrase about a ‘theandric energy’. In that discussion Maximus gives
an interpretation of Christ’s walking on water:
Clearly water is unstable, and cannot receive or support material and earthly
feet, but by a power beyond nature it is constituted as unyielding. If then with
unmoistened feet, which have bodily bulk and the weight of matter he traversed
the wet and unstable substance, walking on the sea as on a pavement, he shows
15 As Maximus himself says: opusc. 3 (PG 91.49C).

through this crossing that the natural activity of his own flesh is inseparable
from the power of his divinity.16
This is reminiscent of Severus’ own interpretation of the same episode:
For how will anyone divide walking upon the water? For to run upon the sea is
foreign to the human nature, but it is not proper to the divine nature to use bod-
ily feet. Therefore that action is of the incarnate Word, to whom belongs at the
same time divine character and humanity indivisibly.17
Perhaps the strength of Maximus’ theological synthesis lies partly in his capacity
to sense the truths affirmed by those with whom he ultimately disagrees, and to
accommodate that in his own more careful formulation. That, too, might explain
his caution and apparent reluctance to engaged in controversy.
But there may be something deeper here that could emerge if we put this cau-
tion in speaking out in the context of his whole writing life. Maximus’ writings fit
into a relatively short span: apart from documents connected with his trial in 655,
everything is contained in the period from 624 to 649, twenty-five years. His
earliest writings are all spiritual exhortation—eithers letters or treatises like his
Centuries on Love. His main theological works—the Mystagogia, Ambigua,
Quaestiones ad Thalassium—belong to half-a-dozen years from the late 620s to
635, and most of his controversial theological tracts belong to the first half of the
640s. All his non-controversial theology comes first, and virtually all of this takes
a form that is suited to catechesis, especially monastic catechesis—it is rooted in
his life as a monk, and it is directed towards the monastic life, or let us say more
directly the Christian life. His Centuries, such as his Centuries on Love, take over a
genre that was especially popular in monastic circles: a hundred brief paragraphs,
mainly exhortatory, sometimes capturing the essence of some aspect of Christian
teaching, presented as food for pondering, for meditation. His favoured theo
logical genre is not the traditional one of the commentary (though he wrote com-
mentaries on Ps 59 and the Lord’s Prayer), but of discussion of difficult
passages—in Scripture or the Fathers (in fact, overwhelmingly Gregory of
Nazianzus, the Theologian). In the case of the earlier Ambigua, or ‘Difficulties’, we
are told that they grew out of discussion with the local bishop, John of Cyzicus. It
is theology as conversation, though conversation with one possessing a well-
stocked memory and very sharp mind. The Ambigua are interesting, for not only
are they about tradition, in the form of passages from the Fathers, but they are
often composed of tradition, in that Maximus endlessly quotes (often very freely)
16 PG 91.1049BC.
17 Severus, Ep. I ad Sergium; translated in Iain R. Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of
Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Canterbury Press, 1988), 154.
and alludes to those he calls ‘the saints’. In this Maximus is part of a tradition: a
tradition that reaches back through the florilegia of the fifth and sixth centuries to
the Philokalia put together by Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, and con-
tinues in the painstaking efforts of the councils of the seventh and eighth centur
ies (the sixth Ecumenical Council has been called ‘the council of antiquarians and
palaeographers’)18 and scholars such as St John Damascene. Such theology is
about tradition, the preservation and identifying, as well as the rethinking of
tradition. It is essentially unsystematic, though it may, as it does with Maximus,
serve the articulation of a vision of God, creation, and the human person. Explicit
theological controversy is much less important: to be engaged in reluctantly, and
only when matters of fundamental importance are at stake.
Maximus’ connection with Sophronius is significant: for Sophronius belongs
to the tradition of Palestinian monasticism, a tradition that in the great monaster-
ies around Jerusalem kept the patriarchate a beacon of Chalcedonian orthodoxy,
even if sometimes tarnished in the person of the patriarch himself. I have already
suggested that it was the monasteries of Palestine that kept faith with Maximus: it
was certainly through John Damascene, that monk of the Great Lavra, that sev-
eral of Maximus’ insights became the property of the Church as a whole. But the
importance of the link with Palestine is this: it was in Palestine that Christians
committed to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, as interpreted at the sixth and seventh
ecumenical councils, worked out what Byzantine orthodoxy stood for, in this tak-
ing Maximus as their guide (so that such Christians were known, by their
enemies, as ‘Maximians’).19 For after the Arab conquest, Chalcedonian Christians
found themselves stripped of power: no longer able to rely on the secular arm,
they had to defend their beliefs against monophysites, monothelites, Nestorians,
not to mention Jews and eventually Muslims. Controversy with the monothelites,
especially, spawned an interest in logic, for as is evident from Maximus’ tracts
against the monothelites, much turned on definitions of terms. It was for these
purposes that hand-books of logic, evidently intended for Christians, were pro-
duced in the seventh century (some of them masquerade as some of Maximus’
‘theological opuscula’).20 They had to scour the tradition for support for disputed
questions, and in this they built on the already existing florilegia. All these ten-
dencies reach their apogee in John Damascene’s ‘Fount of Knowledge’. It is not
until the ninth century that the Queen City of Constantinople became interested
in all this, once it had finally repudiated iconoclasm. How late Maximus came to
be known in Constantinople is evident from Photius’ Bibliotheca, for codices
192‒5 deal with various works of Maximus that he has read, and absent from
18 N. G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (Duckworth, 1983), 62, citing an unnamed authority.

19 See, e.g., A. Guillaumont, Les ‘Kephalaia Gnostica’ d’Évagre le Pontique, Patristica Sorbonnensia,
5 (Éditions du Seuil, 1962), 176.
20 See Mossman Roueché, ‘Byzantine Philosophical Texts of the Seventh Century’, Jahrbuch der
Österreichischen Byzantinistik 23 (1974), 61–76; and other articles by the same scholar.
them is perhaps the most important of Maximus’ works, the earlier Ambigua ad
Joannem.
It is only then, in the ninth century, it seems to me, that we can begin to speak
of ‘Byzantine’ orthodoxy, and we need to recognize that the lineaments of that
orthodoxy were hammered out by Palestinian monks faithful to Maximus and
their Christian heritage, living under the rule of the caliphs.
Hans Urs von Balthasar began the first edition of his work on Maximus with
these words:
The vision of the world that Maximus the Confessor has left us in his writings is,
from more than one perspective, the final achievement and the full maturity of
Greek mystical theological and philosophical thought. It appears at that happy
and fugitive moment which unites for the last time, before the decomposition
that is already close at hand, the riches patiently acquired and developed by the
effort of an entire culture: like a rose in full bloom which awaits only the next
breath of air to shed its petals, or the serenity of a cloudless autumn day, whose
decline is already proclaimed by the gathering shades and a light mist.21
And Balthasar goes on to speak of the ‘decadence and sterility of Byzantine scho-
lasticism’ with ‘its dead and mechanical accumulation of the past in florilegia,
anthologies, encyclopaedias, that Maximus multiplied in the margin of his works’.
On the contrary, it seems to me that Maximus is not so much the end as a begin-
ning, and that he is most faithfully understood by those who appreciate his
method of rethinking the fruits of the tradition by commentary and pondering.
What are these florilegia to which Balthasar referred so scornfully? They should
be taken as including some of the finest liturgical poetry of the Byzantine church,
much of which is composed as a kind of catena of citations from patristic ser-
mons.22 And later on these Byzantine compilations include the remarkable
Evergetinos, compiled in the eleventh century by Paul Evergetis, and the even
more remarkable Philokalia, compiled in the eighteenth century by St Nikodimos
of the Holy Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth (the fourth volume of the
English translation of which has just appeared).23 It is a tradition that is far from
dead thirteen centuries after the time of its demise as announced by Urs von
Balthasar, and if it is true that this vast tradition—not least the Byzantine litur
gical tradition—is not much studied, that is at least in part because there are bet-
ter things to do with it than subject it to scholarly scrutiny.
21 Von Balthasar, Liturgie Cosmique, 11. Omitted from the second edition, but quoted by
I.-H. Dalmais in his prefact to Maximus the Confessor, Selected Writings, trans. G. C. Berthold (Paulist
Press, 1985), xi.
22 See St Nikodemus of the Holy Mountain, Ἐορτοδρόμιον (most recent edition: 3 vols.,
Thessaloniki, 1987).
23 Both first published in Venice: the Evergetinos in 1783, the Philokalia in 1782.
Among the names of those scholars cited as having brought about what is often
called a ‘Maximian renaissance’ in this century, there is one glaring omission, that
of the great Romanian theologian, Fr Dumitru Staniloae—may his memory be
eternal! Fr Dumitru devoted his life to the study of Maximus in the spirit of Saint
Maximus: to translation, commentary, elucidation. Some of that vast work is now
becoming available in the West: his commentaries on the Ambigua were pub-
lished in French translation only last year.24 This, I would suggest, is the way we
should approach Maximus: not as the end of some distant historical epoch, but as
one who played a supreme role in shaping a tradition of Christian reflection and
prayer that embraces not only East and West, but several other points of the com-
pass: the tradition of Byzantine or Eastern Orthodoxy that was formed in the
crucible of political defeat and reaches up to the present day.
24 Saint Maxime le Confesseur, Ambigua, intro. Jean-Claude Larchet, avant-propos, trad. et notes
Emmanuel Ponsoye, commentaires le Père D. Staniloae (Suresnes, 1994).
21
From the Doctrine of Christ to
Person of Christ
St Maximos the Confessor on
the Transfiguration of Christ
Throughout the Eastern Christian theological tradition—from its first flowering

with St Irenaeus in the second century to the gathering up of the tradition by St
Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, and beyond—the mystery of the
transfiguration has been central.1 We find Irenaeus’ most famous utterance in the
course of a series of reflections focused by the mystery of the transfiguration:
gloria enim Dei vivens homo: vita autem hominis visio Dei (for the glory of God is
a live human being: and human life is the vision of God).2 Origen pondered on
the transfiguration long and frequently.3 In the Makarian Homilies, the transfig
uration of Christ is seen as a prefiguration of the precisely bodily transformation
that the saints will finally experience.4 Patristic homilies generally dwell on the
way in which the transfiguration reveals the doctrine of the Trinity and the mys
tery of the incarnation and foreshadows—both in what is said and who is there—
the mystery of the agony in the garden and the paschal mystery of death and
resurrection; but they also see it as prefiguring the future hope—a hope that
embraces both soul and body—of those who follow Christ. The mystery of the
transfiguration in these homilies concentrates the whole of Christian faith and
hope in a single image.5 Depictions of the transfiguration in sacred art are
1 I acknowledge my debt, especially for the insight into the christological turn of apophatic the
ology in Maximus, to the brilliant essay by Ysabel de Andia, ed., ‘Transfiguration et théologie négative
chez Maxime le Confesseur et Denys l’Aréopagite’, Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en
occident. Actes du Colloque International, Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994, Collection des Études
Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 151 (Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997), 293–328, which I heard
at the colloquium in 1994. My essay was written, however, before I had sight of the published version,
and I have made no attempt to take account of it here, as my approach is, for the most part, rather
different from De Andia’s.
2 Irenaeus, Haer. 4.20.7.
3 Origen, Comm. Matt. 12.36–43; cf. Cels. 1.48, 2.64–5, 4.16, 6.68, and Hom. Gen. 1.7.
4 Makarios, Hom. 15.38, cf. 20.3, 1.3; from the standard collection, Collection II: H. Dörries,
E. Klostermann, and M. Kroeger, eds., Die 50 Geistliche Homilien des Makarios, Patristische Texte und
Studien 4 (Walter de Gruyter, 1964).
5 For a collection of translated extracts from the Fathers on the transfiguration from Irenaeus to
John of Damascus (and Gregory Palamas at the end of the Greek section), with an introductory part,
mainly on the New Testament text and its interpretation, but including a brief chapter on patristic
important and striking as well: one thinks of the apse of S. Apollinare in Classe in
Ravenna, where the transfiguration is depicted symbolically as bordering on
paradise; or the spare and arresting apse in the monastery of St Catherine on
Sinai, which has been so illuminatingly interpreted by Jaś Elsner as the culmin
ation of a spiritual ascent modelled on that of Moses, who appears—standing
before the burning bush and receiving the Law in the cleft of a rock—in roundels
on either side of the apse.6 Beneath this apse worshipped John of Sinai, the author
of the Ladder of Divine Ascent (hence called John Climacus), the most influential
work in the Byzantine monastic tradition. As John reaches the final step of the
ladder, he says, with a plausible allusion to the mystery of Mount Tabor (maybe
even an allusion to the depiction in the apse):
And now, for the rest, after all that has been said, there remain these three, bind
ing tightly and securing the bond of all: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of
these is love, for God is so called. But I, so far as I can understand, see one as a
ray, one as light, one as a disc, and all as one radiance and one brightness . . .7
The transfiguration is central to the vision of St Symeon the New Theologian at

the turn of the millennium.8 For the Byzantine hesychasts—monks who claimed
that in their prayer the Uncreated Light of the Godhead was revealed to them—
the transfiguration became a central symbol of the reality of that transfiguring
vision of the Uncreated Light, defended by St Gregory Palamas.9
This is the dominant tradition concerning the transfiguration in the Byzantine
East. And it is easy to think that it is the only tradition, but this would be a mis
take. In Origen there is another interpretation of the transfiguration with rather a
different emphasis. In his Contra Celsum we read:
Although Jesus was one, he had several aspects; and to those who saw him he
did not appear alike to all. That he had many aspects is clear from the saying,
“I am the way, the truth and the life,” (Jn 14:6) and “I am the bread,” (Jn 6:53) and
“I am the door,” (Jn 10:9) and countless other such sayings. Moreover, that his
interpretation, cf. J. A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition, Studies in
the Bible and Early Christianity, vol. 9 (Edwin Mellen, 1986).
6 Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to
Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 99–123.
7 John Klimakos, Ladder of Divine Ascent 30.1. My translation from Ioannou tou Sinaïtou, Klimax,
ed. Fr. Sophronios (Astir, 1979), 167.
8 Cf., for instance, the autobiographical Catechesis 22; B. Krivochéine and J. Paramelle, eds.,
Catéchèses 6–22, SC 104 (Cerf, 1964), 364–92; or, even more significantly perhaps, the title of
Archbishop Krivochéine’s book on Symeon: Dans la lumière du Christ, Collection Témoins de l’Église
indivisé, vol. 1 (Éditions de Chevetogne, 1980).
9 Cf. Saint Gregory the Sinaïte, Discourse on the Transfiguration, ed. David Balfour (off-print from
the Athens quarterly Theologia 52.4–54.1 (1981/3), Athens, 1983), and Gregory Palamas, Hom. 34 (PG
151.423–36), translated in McGuckin, Transfiguration of Christ, 225–34.
From the Doctrine of Christ to Person of Christ 227
appearance was not just the same to those who saw him, but varied according to
their individual capacity, will be clear to people who carefully consider why,
when about to be transfigured on the high mountain, he did not take all his dis
ciples, but only Peter, James, and John. For they alone had the capacity to see his
glory at that time, and were able also to perceive Moses and Elias when they
appeared in glory, and to hear them conversing together, and the voice from
heaven out of the cloud.10
The emphasis on the way in which Christ appeared to different people in different
forms, according to their spiritual aptitude, reflects Origen’s concern to make
credible the idea of a finite manifestation of the infinite: the infinite is manifest in
manifold ways, and we can see this in the case of the incarnation, the transfigur
ation being a crowning example. But a corollary is that there can be no adequate
image, or icon, of Christ. This is the line taken by Eusebius of Caesarea, the proud
inheritor of Origen’s tradition, in his letter to Constantia Augusta, the Emperor
Constantine’s half-sister, who had requested a picture of Jesus. Eusebius’ reply is
that the different forms in which Jesus appeared during his earthly ministry
belong to the past, while his present glorified form was prefigured by the transfig
uration, in which his appearance was so transformed that the apostles could not
look upon him, because of the splendour that, in its ineffability, surpasses the
measure of any eye or ear and consequently cannot be depicted by lifeless colours
and shades.11 This letter is preserved because it was cited by the eighth-century
iconoclasts in a patristic florilegium and thus found its way into the Acta of the
Seventh Ecumenical Council. Georges Florovsky saw in this letter evidence of an
Origenist tradition, native to Greek theology, and hostile to icons.12
My central concern in this paper is St Maximus the Confessor, who, I shall
argue, should be seen as inheriting and in fact reconciling both these traditions of
interpreting the transfiguration. Until very recently Maximus the Confessor was
known, if at all, as the “Confessor,” the Eastern monk who in the seventh century,
together with Pope Martin I, resisted the imperial policy of monothelitism, the
last of the classical Christological heresies, ultimately at the cost of his life. Over
the last few decades—mainly as a result of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a
Swiss Catholic, Polycarp Sherwood, an American Benedictine, and Lars
Thunberg, a Swedish Lutheran—a much fuller picture of Maximus has become
known in the West.
10 Cels. 2.64. Translation by Henry Chadwick in Origen, Contra Celsum (Cambridge University
Press, 1965), 115.
11 Paraphrase of Eusebius’s letter to Constantia, in H.-J. Geischer, ed., Der Byzantinische Bilderstreit,
Texte zur Kirchenund Theologiegeschichte, vol. 9 (Gerd Mohn, 1968), 15–17.
12 Georges Florovsky, ‘Origen, Eusebius, and the Iconoclast Controversy’, Church History 19 (1950),
77–96; reprinted in his Collected Works, vol. 2 (Nordland, 1974), 101–21 (notes on 236–40).
Maximus, born in 580, educated probably in Constantinople, and briefly a very

senior civil servant in the early years of Herakleios’s reign, became a monk in his
early thirties and remained one for the rest of his long life. Until he was drawn,
with some reluctance, into theological controversy, all his works grew out of that
vocation: his theological vision is grounded in his commitment to and under
standing of the Christian life, lived in his case as a monk.
We find Maximus’s reflections on the transfiguration in his writings composed
long before the outbreak of the Monothelite controversy. In fact, in his writings
on Christology, the mystery of Christ that lies at the centre of his reflections is
not the transfiguration but rather the closely related mystery of the agony in the
garden. Maximus turns to the transfiguration in three works that cannot be
exactly dated, but that belong to the decade from the mid-620s to the mid-630s.
During this period Maximus left his monastery on the Sea of Marmara, close to
Constantinople, in flight before the marauding troops of the Persians, and settled
in North Africa, where he was to remain for fifteen years or so.
The first treatment of the transfiguration is found in the second “century” of
his Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation—“centuries” refers to a monastic
genre in which thoughts, both theological and ascetical, were presented in brief
paragraphs for meditation. At the end of II.13, Maximus introduces the transfig
uration as God’s final manifestation in his own form. For, he says, there are differ
ences among those who stand before the Lord, and the Lord appears in different
forms “according to the measure of each person’s faith.” The Mount of the
Transfiguration is a symbol of the spiritual life: at its foot the Lord appears in the
form of a servant, at its summit in the form of God, “the form in which he existed
before the world came to be.” The meaning of the transfiguration is stated very
briefly: the Lord’s face shines like the sun, and his garments appear white, “that is
to say, the words of the Gospel will then be clear and distinct, with nothing con
cealed.” Maximus briefly comments on the significance of Moses and Elias—they
signify the law and the prophets—and the three tents, in which Maximus sees a
reference to the three stages of salvation: virtue, spiritual knowledge, and the
ology, typified by Elias, Moses, and the Lord, respectively.
The extent of Maximus’s debt to Origen here is unmistakable: note the emphasis
on the chameleon-like nature of the Word made flesh, the way the garments of
Christ symbolize the gospel, and the identification of Moses and Elias with the
law and the prophets.13 The three stages represented by virtue, knowledge, and
theology is also found in Origen.14
In Maximus’s other two attempts to expound the mystery of the transfigur
ation, however, we find something that we might even call original—not what one
13 Cf. the passages from Origen translated by McGuckin, Transfiguration of Christ, 151–64.
14 Cf. my Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Clarendon Press,
1989), 57–61.
expects in Byzantine writers. Origenist themes are still developed, but we begin to
hear Maximus’s own voice.
The first of these attempts occurs in questions 191 and 192 of the newly dis
covered Questions and Answers (Quaestiones et dubia, as its first editor called it).
Question 19115 begins by addressing the discrepancy between the Gospels about
when the transfiguration took place: whether after six days, as in Matthew and
Mark, or after eight days, as in Luke. The six days, Maximus argues, indicate the
six days of creation, so that “after six days” signifies passing beyond ta phainomena,
the created order as it appears to our senses. Luke’s eight days, by contrast, include
a beginning and an end: “the first day in which the Lord spoke and the last of the
transfiguration.”16 But both ways of reckoning are taken up in the spiritual
interpretation (kata tên theôrian) which he presents as follows:
Since the human being through transgression has been reduced to a state
opposed to nature, it is necessary that one who wants to ascend by the Word to
the mount of theology first, as it were on one day, passes beyond what is opposed
to nature and, as it were in six days, traverses nature and comes into a state
beyond nature, that is the eighth, for this underlies time and characterizes the
state that is to come.
Here Maximus affirms one of the basic principles of his theology, namely, the
integrity of the natural, which has been established by God: our normal state,
fractured by the Fall, is unnatural, and redemption and asceticism are concerned
to restore a natural state.
After reflecting on the apostles Peter, James, and John, who signify the three
virtues of faith, hope, and love, Maximus comes to consider the transfigur
ation itself:
The Word leads those who possess faith, hope, and love up on to the mountain
of theology and is transfigured before them, so that to call him God is no longer
to affirm that he is holy, king, and suchlike, but to make denial of him according
to the fact that he is beyond God and beyond holy and everything said of him
transcendently.
What Maximus is doing here is assimilating the ascent of the Mount of the
Transfiguration—
Mount Tabor— to Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai, as it is
15 Maximus, Quaestiones et dubia, ed. José H. Declerck, CCSG 10 (Brepols, 1982), 132–4.
16 Note the rather different interpretation provided by St. John Damascene in his sermon on the
transfiguration, where 6 is a perfect number and 8 is a type of the age to come (Homilia in
Transfigurationem 8, in Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, 5 vols., ed. P. Bonifatius Kotter,
O.S.B., Patristische Texte und Studien, vol. 29 (W. de Gruyter, 1988), 446–7).
interpreted by Gregory of Nyssa17 and especially by Dionysius the Areopagite in

his Mystical Theology,18 as a symbol of the ascent of the soul to God. (In this, he
follows the suggestion of the mosaics in the apse of the monastic church of the
Monastery of the Burning Bush—as it was called in his day, now the Monastery of
St Catherine— on Mount Sinai, though there is no reason to suppose that
Maximus ever saw these mosaics.) Both Gregory and Dionysius make the point
that, as Moses ascends the mountain, he passes beyond affirming those images
and concepts in which God is revealed—symbolized by the sounding of the
trumpets and the light flashing from the summit—and enters the dark cloud that
shrouds the summit, where he can no longer see anything: this is a symbol that he
can now only know God by rejecting what his senses can perceive and his mind
grasp. Dionysius had borrowed Neoplatonic terminology and called the theology
of affirmation “kataphatic theology,” and the theology of denial “apophatic
theology.” Maximus uses this language to describe the ascent of the Mount of the
Transfiguration: one passes from saying things about God derived from our
knowledge of the created order and of God’s revelation (“that he is holy, king, and
suchlike”) and is led to the rejection of images and concepts, and thus to silent
wonder. In the blinding radiance of the divinity of the transfigured Christ, mani
fest on Mount Tabor, the disciples are reduced to silence, the silence of apophatic
acknowledgement of the transcendence of divinity.
But when Maximus goes on to remark that “the face of the Word, that shone
like the sun, is the characteristic hiddenness of his being,” I think we should pick
up an allusion to something deeper. The Greek word I have translated as “face”
(prosôpon) could equally well be translated “person,” and what Maximus is allud
ing to is the fact that the radiant face of Christ reveals the divine person that He
is: “the face of the Word . . . is the characteristic hiddenness of his being,” that is, of
the being of God. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had endorsed a definition
according to which, in the incarnate Christ, there are two natures—the divine and
the human— united in a single person. The fifth ecumenical council (of
Constantinople, in 553) clarified this by affirming that that one person is divine,
“one of the Trinity.” In a way that seems typical of Maximus, the precise words he
uses allude to the exact distinctions of the Christology of the councils. But there is
more; if, on the Mount of the Transfiguration, the blinding radiance of the face/
person of the Word reveals the “characteristic hiddenness” of the being of God,
then apophatic theology—the theology of denial—is our acknowledgement of the
divinity of Christ. The language of apophatic and kataphatic theology is the lan
guage of Dionysius, but the use to which it is put, and thus the meaning, is
Maximus’s own. For Dionysius, apophatic and kataphatic theologies spelt out the
17 Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 152–69; J. Daniélou, ed., SC 1, 3rd edn (Cerf, 1968), 202–16.
18 Cf. Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology 1; G. Heil and A. M. Ritter, eds., Patristische
Texte und Studien, vol. 36 (W. de Gruyter, 1991), 141–4.
dialectic involved in our predicating attributes or names of God: the dialectic of

affirmation and denial steered a way between the twin errors of anthropomorph
ism and agnosticism in our attempt to say something about God. But for
Maximus, the terminology of apophatic and kataphatic theology seems to be
bound up with our confession of the union of divine and human natures in the
single divine person of the incarnate Word: acknowledgement of the divine radi
ance of the face of Christ draws us into apophatic theology, for the dazzling
radiance of the face of Christ is beyond affirmation and can only be regarded
in silent—apophatic—wonder. In Maximus’ novel use of Dionysius’ terminology
of apophatic and kataphatic theology, there is what I would like to call a
“Christological turn.”
This is confirmed as Maximus considers Christ’s body and garments that
became resplendently white in the transfiguration. The body refers to the “sub
stance of the virtues” and the garment to the words of Scripture, or to the works
of the cosmos: the whiteness of the garments means that both the divine words of
Scripture and the divine works in the cosmos become transparent to those who
have ascended to contemplation of Christ, and their beauty is revealed. But to
understand the words of Scripture and the works of the cosmos is precisely what
is involved in affirmative—kataphatic—theology. So while the face of Christ
draws us into apophatic theology, the body and the garments of Christ speak of
kataphatic theology. The “Christological turn” means that the terminology of
apophatic and kataphatic, formulated by Dionysius to describe the dialectical
nature of our knowledge of God, is applied by Maximus to express the truth of the
union of the divine and human natures in the divine person of the Son. The whole
of our knowledge of God, therefore, is summed up in the apostles’ beholding of
Christ on the Mount of the Transfiguration.
Question 192 follows from this and considers the meaning of the three tents
Peter thought should be set up.19 They signify—as in the Centuries on Theology
and Incarnation—the three stages of the Christian life, only here Maximus uses
the more traditional terminology for these stages that goes back to Evagrius, the
late-fourth-century Origenist and theorist of the eremitical life of the Desert
Fathers: namely, praktiké (the active life of ascetic struggle), physiké (contempla
tion of the natural order), and theologia (theology as contemplation of God). Elias
corresponds to praktiké, Moses to physiké, and the Lord himself to theologia.
Maximus does not elaborate, and therefore it would be rash for us to do so; how
ever, it is clear that this comment entails an understanding of the transfiguration
as embracing the whole span of the Christian life.
These two early questions are relatively brief, amounting to about two and a
half pages. The Origenist background is evident, but two factors are, I think,
19 Declerck, ed., Quaestiones et dubia, 134–5.

striking: first, the use of the terminology of the developed Byzantine Christology
of the sixth century set out in the decrees of the fifth ecumenical council; and,
second, Maximus’ strikingly original use of the Dionysian distinction between
apophatic and kataphatic theology in relation to our understanding of Christ. The
apophatic points to the person of Christ: it is in a personal relationship with the
incarnate Word that God’s unknowability is not only registered but experienced.
Origen had reconciled God’s ineffability with his manifestation in the incarnation
by emphasizing the manifold ways in which the manifestation of God is appre
hended, with the consequence, drawn explicitly by Eusebius in his letter to
Constantia (quoted earlier) that the notion of the inexhaustibility of God rules
out any true depiction of the Incarnate One. For Maximus, on the contrary, the
ineffable, the inexhaustible, is actually found in the face-to-face, person-to-person
experience disclosed by the incarnation. This “Christological turn,” then, trans
forms the theology of negation: apophatic theology is an acknowledgement of the
overwhelming reality of the person of God, rather than a principle of denial that
qualifies and limits our affirmation of the revealed images and concepts of God.20
The final attempt of Maximus to expound the mystery of the transfiguration is
found in the tenth and longest of his Ambigua, or Difficulties, so called because
all of the questions concern difficult passages in the writings of Gregory of
Nazianzus or, in the single case of Ambiguum 5, of Dionysius the Areopagite. The
transfiguration forms the centre of gravity of this long and fascinating question-
and-answer passage.21 The central thread of this “difficulty” concerns what is meant
by “passing over”—diabasis. Maximus tackles this question from a bewildering
variety of perspectives, including a long list of examples from the Bible (mainly
the Old Testament), culminating in the transfiguration.
Maximus’s treatment of the Transfiguration22 begins by focusing on the face of
Christ: the natural focus in any icon of the transfiguration, or indeed any icon at
all. This comes as no surprise after what we have already seen in the Questions
and Answers. We know how much is concentrated in the image of the face of
Christ, the prosôpon or (divine) person of Christ. The radiance from the face sig
nifies Christ’s divinity, and that divinity dazzles—it both reveals and blinds.
Maximus then explains why he has evoked the transfiguration in Ambiguum 10:
this “difficulty” is concerned with diabasis (passing over), and in the transfigur
ation the disciples “passed over” from seeing Christ as “without form or beauty”
(Isa 53:2) to seeing him as “fair with beauty beyond the sons of men” (Ps 44:3)—an
20 This understanding of apophatic theology is very much that of Vladimir Lossky: “La voie apo
phatique de la théologie orientale est le repentir de la personne humaine devant la face du Dieu
vivant” (Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’orient (Aubier, 1944), 237).
21 Ambiguum 10 can be found in PG 91.1105C–1205C; English translation in my Maximus the
Confessor, Early Church Fathers (Routledge, 1996), 96–154.
22 Amb. 10.17: PG 91.1125D–1128D (English trans., Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 108–10).
Origenist theme we have already encountered.23 Maximus interprets this as a

passing over from understanding Christ primarily as the “Word made flesh” to
understanding him as the “One in the beginning, with God, and God”—a passage
from the end of the Johannine prologue to its beginning, so to speak. He unfolds
a little more what was contained in a single brief allusion in the earlier Questions
and Answers. He calls this “passing over” from the “Word made flesh” to the
“Word, in the beginning, with God” a movement of apophasis, negation or denial,
and this apophasis, he says, the disciples have learnt from—or perhaps better,
experienced in beholding—the blinding radiance of the face of the transfigured
Lord. He then moves on to interpret the whitened garment of Christ, which—as
we saw in Questions and Answers—he takes as referring to the words of Scripture
or to creation itself, and is led into a long digression in which he expounds the
parallelism of Scripture and cosmos. The cosmos is like a book, and the Bible is
like the cosmos: both consist of words, logoi, which, though diverse, when read
with understanding form a single harmonious whole, the meaning of which is the
mind of God Himself. Maximus insists very strongly on the absolute equivalence
of the written law and the natural law: the written law does not mark an advance
on the natural law, it simply reveals what has been obscured as a result of the Fall.
This idea of the cosmos and Scripture as mutually reflecting each other—an idea
that extends both to what they mean and how we are to understand them—is
central to Maximus’s thought: he returns to it in the introductory chapters of his
Mystagogia.24
Maximus then proceeds to explore further the two sides of the transfiguration,
symbolized by the two figures who appeared with Jesus, Moses and Elias.25 He
does so at length, in seventeen meditations. Some of his discussion is already
familiar, such as Moses and Elias symbolizing the law and the prophets, much of
it is arcane and fascinating, but I shall skip everything save for a few points in the
last six meditations. There is an exposition of the difference between apophatic
and kataphatic theology, in very Dionysian terms. This is followed by what I have
already called the “Christological turn,” in which the distinction between apo
phatic and kataphatic theology is focused on the person of Christ, the silent won
der of apophasis being a response to the dazzling radiance of Christ’s face. Here
Maximus says that, through accepting a human form, the Word has become a
“symbol of himself,” in order
23 Cf. also Origen, Cels. 6.77, where the citation from Isaiah is related to the disciples’ experience at
the transfiguration.
24 Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia 1–7, esp. 7 (C. Sotiropoulos, ed., 2nd edn (Athens, 1993);
English translation by G. C. Berthold, in Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, Classics of Western
Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1995), 183–225).
25 Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 10.31: PG 91.1160B–1169B (English trans. Louth, Maximus the
Confessor, 128–34).
through this manifestation of himself to lead to himself in his complete and

secret hiddenness the whole creation, and while he remains quite unknown in
his hidden, secret place beyond all things, unable to be known or understood by
any being in any way whatever, out of his love for humankind he grants to
human beings intimations of himself in the manifest divine works performed in
the flesh. (Amb. 10.31c: 1165D–1168A).
Note that what Christ grants to humankind he grants for the sake of the whole
creation—a characteristically Maximian stress on the cosmic. The next medita
tion affirms the primacy of apophatic theology in christological terms: “the light
from the face of the Lord, therefore, conquers the human blessedness of the apos
tles by a hidden apophatic theology” (Amb. 10.31d: PG 91.1168A). Three medita
tions then explicitly expound kataphatic theology in terms of the cosmic
dimension of the Word made flesh (Amb. 10.31 e–g: PG 91.1168B–D).
In this Ambiguum, then, Maximus sees in the transfiguration a thoroughly
Christocentric theology, a theology that leads to and from the person of Christ,
and finds in everything illumined by the uncreated light of his radiance the reve
lation of Christ in nature and in Scripture. But it is also theology expressed in an
icon, so to speak: it is a series of meditations on aspects of the mystery or picture
contemplated, all held together by the central figure of Christ.
At the beginning of this essay, I pointed out that while the dominant interpret
ation in the Eastern Christian tradition holds that the transfiguration is one of the
most profound icons of Christ, an Origenist interpretation used the transfigur
ation as prime evidence of the manifold forms taken by the incarnate Word, to
show that there could now be no icon of Christ. When controversy eventually
broke out in the Byzantine world about the legitimacy of icons and their vener
ation, the letter written by the Origenist Eusebius to Constantine’s half-sister,
Constantia, was cited as key evidence of patristic disapproval of icons by the
iconoclasts.
Maximus’s interpretation of the transfiguration shows, I think, that without
denying the Origenist approach to this mystery, he sets it in a different context.
The manifold manifestations of the ineffable God belong to the theology of
affi rmation, or kataphatic theology: everything in Scripture and the created cos
mos reveals some aspect of the inexhaustibility of God. But the ineffable, inex
haustible nature of God is more surely revealed in the dazzling radiance of the
face, or divine person, of Christ: beholding that, we pass beyond utterance and
gaze in silent wonder—we enter the realm of apophatic theology. This approach
does not discard the icon as inadequate, but rather affirms its validity by under
lining the central significance in theology of beholding, looking, and contemplat
ing. The “Christological turn,” understood in this manner, effects a transition
from the doctrine of Christ, carefully honed by the definitions of the councils, to
the icon of Christ, the symbol—in the fullest sense—of encounter with Christ,
and in this transition the doctrine is not left behind. Far from it: rather, the care
fully honed doctrine of Christ guides our understanding of the icon.
If there is such a transference of the doctrine of Christ to the icon of Christ in
the theology of St Maximus, then we are well on the way to understanding why
the icon was invested with such profound significance by Byzantine Christians,
and in particular, why the question of the icon, when it became a matter of
controversy, was understood as a matter of precisely Christological controversy.
We cannot enter into this question now, but let me suggest two hints of the connec
tions that I think exist between Maximus’s theology and the icon as a central sym
bol of the incarnation.
First, a key passage occurs in Maximus’s interpretation of the transfiguration in
Ambiguum 10. There he says, and I quote more fully a statement quoted above:
For it was necessary,26 without any change in himself, to be created like us,
accepting through his immeasurable love for humankind to become the type
and symbol of himself, and from himself symbolically to represent himself, and
through the manifestation of himself to lead to himself in his complete and
secret hiddenness the whole creation . . .27
In the incarnation, the Word became a “type and symbol of himself.” One can
perhaps hear an echo of this phrase in one of the central iconophile arguments of
St Theodore of Stoudios, who, together with the deposed patriarch Nikephoros,
became the most important champion of the veneration of the icons in the sec
ond period of iconoclasm in the first half of the ninth century. Theodore argues
that, in the incarnation, Christ becomes “the archetype of his own image,” proto-
typos tês heautou eikonos.28 It follows that it is not simply possible for there to be
an image of Christ, and it is not simply possible for an artist to depict an image of
Christ, through which Christ can be encountered and worshipped: because Christ
is manifest in the incarnation as “the archetype of his own image,” acknowledge
ment of the incarnation actually makes necessary the making of images to con
tinue the access to the archetype entailed in the incarnation.29 The premise of
Theodore’s argument is, it seems to me, provided by Maximus when he says that
the Word became a “type and symbol of himself.”
Another hint is found in Maximus’s use of studied ambiguity—almost a play
on words—when referring to the prosôpon of Christ: either “face” or “person.”
26 Amending (on the suggestion of my former pupil Adam Cooper) eidei to edei.
27 Amb. 10.31c: PG 91.1165D; my translation (modified) from Maximus the Confessor, 132
(emphasis added).
28 Theodore of Stoudios, Antirrheticus 2: PG 99.356A; 3: PG 99.428C (I translate prototypos as
“archetype,” because the English “prototype” means something different). I owe this reference to my
former pupil the Reverend Dr Gary Thorne.
29 Cf. Kenneth Parry, ‘Theodore Studites and the Patriarch Nicephoros on Image-Making as a
Christian Imperative’, Byzantion 59 (1989), 164–83.
When we look at the face of the transfigured Christ, from which radiance flows,
we behold the person of the Godhead: that is why the radiance dazzles, and that is
why apophatic theology interprets the vision here.30 Many years ago, in his Der
Logos am Kreuz,31 Alois Grillmeier drew attention to the depiction of the cruci
fied Christ in the sixth-century Rabbula Gospels, where Christ is depicted on the
cross with his eyes open. Grillmeier suggested (drawing, among other things, on
the Physiologus, which mentions the legend that the lion sleeps with its eyes open
and applies this to the idea of Christ as the “lion of Judah” (cf. Gen 49:9; Rev 5:5))
that the open eyes indicate the divinity of Christ awake, while the humanity of
Christ submits to death.32 If the eyes make the face, then St Maximus’s interpret
ation of the transfiguration is strikingly analogous to the iconography of the
“Logos on the Cross.”
What we find, then, in Maximus’s attempts to unfold the meaning of the
mystery of the transfiguration is a fascinating interweaving of a spiritual theme, a
theological theme, and a philosophical theme. The spiritual theme treats the
transfiguration as emblematic of the fullest possible human encounter with God;
the theological theme is drawn from the councils of the Church, where the
technical language of the conciliar decrees suggests a bold interpretation of the
radiant face of the transfigured Christ; the philosophical theme, drawn from
Dionysius the Areopagite, of the distinction between apophatic and kataphatic
theology, is focused on the person of the Incarnate One. In the mutual illumin
ation of these themes, there emerges the icon of Christ in whose contemplation is
found the fullness of theology. Theology as doctrine draws those addressed into
theology as contemplation: doctrine of Christ yields to contemplation of the icon
or image of Christ.
30 Cf. the interpretation of Questions and Answers 191 and Ambiguum 10.17 earlier in this chapter.
31 Alois Grillmeier, SJ, Der Logos am Kreuz (Max Hueber, 1956).
32 Cf. also Karl-Heinz Uthemann, ‘Christ’s Image versus Christology: Thoughts on the Justinianic
Era as the Threshold of an Epoch’. In The Sixth Century: End or Beginning? ed. Pauline Allen and
Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, Byzantina Australiensia, vol. 10 (Australian Association for Byzantine Studies,
1996), 197–223, esp. 216–20.
22
Eucharist and Church According
to St Maximos the Confessor
Direct evidence for St Maximos’ understanding of the Church is rather sparse in

the writings of the confessor.1, 2 But what there is is immensely significant. First,
there is his work on the Eucharistic liturgy, his Mystagogia, which is framed by
Maximos’ reflections on the nature of the Church, in both senses: the Church
itself, as community and mystery, and the church building.3 It is for this reason
that I have given my paper the title, “Eucharist and Church,” for Maximos’ most
explicit reflection on the Church emerges as he develops his understanding of the
Eucharistic liturgy. In some sense, then, we can think of Maximos’ ecclesiology as
a Eucharistic ecclesiology. Maximos’ understanding of the Church also emerges
in a rather different way in the practical working out of his beliefs in his oppos
ition to the Christological nostrums of the emperor— monenergism and
monothelitism—which culminated in his alliance with Pope Martin, their joint
involvement in the Lateran Synod of 649, and their subsequent arrest, trial, and
exile for the faith, for these events, as we shall see, tested his belief in the
catholicity and unity of the Church in the harshest terms. What I hope to do in
this brief paper is explore with you Maximos’ Eucharistic ecclesiology in the
Mystagogia and then trace the way in which his understanding of the Church was
tested—as by fire—in his witness, his martyria, under arrest and trial for the faith.
In doing this we are bringing into conjunction evidence widely separated in time:
1 This article reworks material already published in my article, ‘The Ecclesiology of Saint Maximos
the Confessor’, International Journal of the Study of the Christian Church 4 (2004), 109–20.
2 There is, therefore, little on Maximos’ ecclesiology in the secondary literature. The chapter on
ecclesiology in Jean-Claude Larchet, Saint Maxime le Confesseur (Éditions du Cerf, 2003), 198–210, is
limited in scope and is largely a summary of his discussion of the more polemical issue of the Roman
primacy in Maximos’ writings found in Jean-Claude Larchet, Maxime le Confesseur, médiateur entre
l’Orient et l’Occident (Éditions de Cerf, 1998), 125–201. There are useful discussions in the following:
Alain Riou, Le monde et l’église selon Maxime le Confesseur (Beauchesne, 1973), esp. 123–200; Nikos
Matsoukas, Kosmos, Anthropos, Koinonia kata ton Maximo Homologiti (Ekdoseis Grigori, 1980), esp.
219–52 (largely expository); Nikolaos Loudovikos, I Eucharistiaki Ontologia (Ekdoseis Domos, 1992),
251–72 (a sophisticated development of “eucharistic ecclesiology”). An older, but still useful, discus
sion of the Mystagogia (largely concerned with the information it gives about the celebration of the
liturgy) can be found in Réné Bornert, Les commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe
siècle (Institut français d’Études byzantines, 1966), 83–124.
3 For a critical text, see Charalambos G. Sotiropoulos, ed., I Mystagogia tou Hagiou Maximou tou
Homologitou, rev. edn (Athens, 1993) (this text has now been superseded by that of Christian
Boudignon in CCSG 69 published in 2011); English trans. (not always satisfactory) in
George C. Berthold, trans., Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (SPCK, 1985), 181–225.
the Mystagogia belongs to the beginning of Maximos’ writing life, to the period
around 630, when Maximos was a monk in exile in North Africa, before the
emperor’s Christological interests had been seriously put into effect; there are
fragments of letters closely associated with the Lateran Synod of 649;4 and finally
the trial documents and associated material belonging to the period between his
arrest in 655 and his death in 662.5 So we see convictions rooted in his commit
ment to the asceticism of the monastic life tested in the political turmoil of
his time.
The Church is first of all presented in the Mystagogia as One and Catholic, in
this oneness and catholicity reflecting the unity of God and his desire to draw all
creation into unity with himself. In these initial chapters, which are recapitulated
at the end of the treatise after the exposition of the events of the Liturgy, Maximos
presents an understanding of the Church as the central element in a series of ways
of understanding the relationship of God to the cosmos and to human kind. He
begins by discussing in chapter 1 how the Church may be seen as “an image and
type of God” by imitating and representing God’s activity (energeia). God has
brought everything into being, “contains, gathers and limits them and in his
providence binds both intelligible and sensible beings to himself and one
another”:
It is in this way that the holy Church of God will be shown to be active among us
in the same way as God, as an image reflects its archetype. For many and of
nearly boundless number are the men, women and children who are distinct
from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by race and lan
guage, by way of life and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and customs, by
pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics and
habits: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in
the Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and bestows one divine form and
designation: to be Christ’s and to bear his name. In accordance with faith it gives
to all a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition which does not allow us
to bring to mind the existence of the myriads of differences among them, even if
they do exist, through the universal relationship and union of all things with it.
It is through it that absolutely no one at all is in himself separated from the com
munity since everyone converges with all the rest and joins together with them
by the one, simple, and indivisible grace and power of faith. “For all,” it is said,
4 Preserved as Opuscula theologica et polemica 11, 12: text in PG 91:137C–140B, 141A–146A. French
translations from these, together with some other relevant passages, may be found in appendix II in
Riou, Le monde et l’église selon Maxime le Confesseur, 206–12.
5 Now conveniently available in a critical text, with English translation, in Pauline Allen and
Bronwen Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile
Church according to St Maximos the Confessor 239
“had but one heart and one mind.”6 Thus to be and to appear as one body formed
of different members is really worthy of Christ himself, our true head, in whom
says the divine Apostle, “there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek,
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither barbarian nor Scythian, nei
ther slave nor free, but he is all and in all.”7 It is he who encloses in himself all
beings by the unique, simple and infinitely wise power of his goodness.8
Maximos goes on to apply the analogy of the radii of a circle converging on the
centre to both God’s relationship to the created order and the Church’s relation
ship to its members, and concludes that, in both cases, there is achieved a union
that, though profound, does not confuse the beings joined, but preserves their
integrity. One can hardly fail to notice that the unity of the Church is defined in
similar terms to the union of Christ’s natures—unconfused in their integrity—
though I am more hesitant than I once was about talking about Maximos’
“Chalcedonian logic.”9
Maximos goes on in the succeeding chapters to show how the union of differ
ences found in the Church is also reflected throughout the created order. To begin
with, in chapter 2, he suggests that the Church may be seen as an image of the
cosmos, regarded as made up of visible and invisible beings. It is from this point
on that he thinks of the church as a building, and more precisely as a building
divided into two: the area for “the priests and ministers alone,” that is, the sanctu
ary (in Greek: hierateion), and the area for “all the faithful people,” which is called
the nave (naos).10 This distinction he finds echoed in the cosmos, in the distinc
tion there between the invisible part of the cosmos and the visible part. These two
parts are closely related; indeed, Maximos says, the church is not properly speak
ing divided by the differences between the two parts, but rather by the relation
ship between the two parts, so that, “the nave is potentially the sanctuary since it
is a holy place by reason of its relationship to the goal of sacred initiation (or:
mystagogy), and the sanctuary is actually the nave, since it is there that the pro
cess of its own sacred initiation begins.”11 So, too, with the cosmos: “for the whole
intelligible cosmos is imprinted in a hidden way on the whole sensible cosmos
6 Acts 4:32. 7 Col. 3:11.

8 Mystagogia 1 (Sotiropoulos, I Mystagogia tou Hagiou Maximou tou Homologitou, 152–4;
Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, 187; my translation).
9 For the reasons for my hesitancy now, see the work by my one- time pupil, Hieromonk
Melchisedec K. Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford
University Press, 2007), esp. 1–6.
10 It is worth noting that, in speaking of the Church, first, Maximos does not use any technical
term for the unordained laity (such as the already well-established term, laïkos), but instead refers to
“all the faithful people,” and second, naos means a temple, that is the whole building (and is still used
in that sense), so that the distinction is really between the building as a whole and a special part of it,
and analogously for the community.
11 Mystag. 2 (Sotiropoulos, I Mystagogia tou Hagiou Maximou tou Homologitou, 156; Berthold,
Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, 188).
through the symbolic forms, while the whole sensible cosmos can be understood
to be present to the intelligible cosmos through its principles (logoi) that reveal its
simplicity to the intellect.”12 The distinction found in cosmos and Church that is
the reason for one being an image of the other is matter of relationship rather
than separation; it is a matter of connection, and not division, and it is an ordered
connection, the visible pointing to the invisible realm, so that the visible finds its
meaning in the invisible, and the invisible finds its expression in the visible, in
this way reflecting the close relationship between sanctuary and nave in
the church.
The following chapters suggest further images of the church: in the visible
world itself, consisting as it does of heaven and earth (chapter 3), and then in the
human person, consisting of body and soul (chapter 4), and the soul, consisting
of soul and intellect (chapter 5). Chapters 4 and 5 develop a fairly detailed under
standing of the spiritual life, moving from the level of body, which is the level of
ascetic struggle, in which we learn moral wisdom, to the level of soul, which is the
level of natural contemplation, that is contemplation of the principles (logoi) of
the cosmos, which are all summed up in the Logos himself, Christ, and finally to
the level of intellect, the level of mystical theology, that is contemplation of God
himself (Maximos, while still using the image of the twofold church to interpret
the passage from one level to another, also combines them in a threefold image of
the church with nave, sanctuary, and altar, thusiasterion). Chapter 6 introduces a
further image of the Church:
just as, in accordance with contemplation that brings about ascent, he [the “old
man”, or geronta, to whom Maximos attributes his Mystagogia] called the Church
a spiritual human being and the human being a mystical Church, so he said that
the whole of holy Scripture is, in short, a human being, the Old Testament hav
ing the body, and the New Testament soul and spirit and intellect, or again, tak
ing the whole of holy Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, its body is the
historical letter, while the meaning of what is written and its purpose, towards
which the intellect strives, is the soul.13
The purpose of all these interlinking images seems to be manifold. It means that
anything that takes place in one context has its counterpart in another, so that the
meaning of everything that takes place in any of these contexts both borrows
from and contributes to the others. There are then profound interconnections
between Church, cosmos (understood both as embracing the spiritual and
material realm and as embracing the visible heavens and the earth), the inward
life of the human person, and even the Scriptures themselves. Spelling this out in
terms of ecclesiology, this means that the significance of the Church has cosmic
dimensions, but also that its significance reaches into the heart of each individual
Christian and his or her own pilgrimage towards union with God; it also means
that the Church, like Scripture, is a place where God has made himself known,
and this being made known is not just, or even, a matter of information, but
rather a matter of participation in God himself through his activities or energies.
This has implications both for the nature of the Church as a community, and for
the Church’s liturgical activity, in which the Church is made manifest at its deep
est and clearest. It is this latter that Maximos pursues in the Mystagogia, but a
word might be said first about the former.
It is evident from the way Maximos develops his understanding of the way in
which the Church is reflected as an image of God, cosmos, the human, the soul,
and the Bible, that Maximos conceives of the Church as a community that, on the
one hand, is a place where diversity contributes to a deep and rich unity. It is in
this drawing everything together into unity that the Church manifests itself as an
image of God, a God who creates beings in their extraordinary variety, but draws
them together into a wonderful harmony. Within this unity, everything—
everyone—counts, but this happens without everything being reduced to the
same level. For, on the other hand, Maximos’ vision of the Church is profoundly
hierarchical. That word, “hierarchy,” has been corrupted for us, and now carries
almost inevitable overtones of suppression and subordination, but for Maximos it
was a word, newly coined by the Christian known as “Dionysios the Areopagite,”
who flourished at the beginning of the century—the sixth—in which Maximos
was born. For Maximos, the etymological overtones of the word—a compound of
“sacred” and “source” or “beginning”—would presumably have registered, but
even more significant would have been the definition given this word by the one
who had invented it, Dionysios himself, who said, “by hierarchy I mean a sacred
order and knowledge and activity that is being assimilated, as far as is possible, to
the Godlike, and being raised up analogously by the illuminations given it from
God to imitation of God.”14 Hierarchy does mean order but, like the structure of
the church building as Maximos explains it, it is an order drawing and being
drawn up to union with God, and more than that it is a matter of knowledge and
activity. It is in this sense that the Church, for Maximos, is hierarchical: there is
order and structure, manifest not least in the ranks of the ministers, that enables
the church as a community to be ordered towards God, to be an instrument of
God’s outreach towards those that do not know him or misunderstand him, to be
a place where God’s activity is encountered and knowledge of God is shared.
14 Dionysios the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy 3.1; G. Heil, ed., Corpus Dionysiacus II, Patristische
Texte und Untersuchungen 36 (Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 17.
It is, however, the liturgical activities of the Church, pre-eminently in the

Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist, that capture Maximos’ attention in the
Mystagogia. Chapters 8 to 21 are devoted to explaining the meaning of the various
ceremonies of the Divine Liturgy. These begin with the entrance of the bishop
into the Church, accompanied by the people (in Maximos’ day, the Sunday liturgy
was evidently still preceded by a procession to the church). The entry of the
bishop into the church symbolizes Christ’s first coming into the world in the
Incarnation; the entry of the people symbolizes conversion—from unbelief to
faith, from vice and ignorance to virtue and knowledge. In the readings, we
encounter God’s desires and intentions for us; the singing symbolizes the joy of
our turning towards God; the bishop’s acclamations of peace before the readings
(“Peace to all—And to your spirit”) symbolize the help of the angels in our strug
gle to live a godlike life. Then Maximos comes to the Gospel—and everything
that follows it, for chapter 13 discusses not just the meaning of the reading of the
Gospel, but continues with a brief account of everything that follows it, even
though he is going to discuss these one by one in the next eight chapters. The
gospel reading itself “proposes to those who are zealous some suffering on behalf
of the Word”;15 a true hearing of the Gospel always entails the bearing of the
Cross in some practical way—as borne out in St Maximos’ own life. The purpose
of this suffering is to detach us from worldly matters and draw us more closely to
participation in the secret wisdom of God. All of this is brought out in the cere
monies that follow the Gospel reading: the closing of the doors, the exchange of
the kiss of peace, the recitation of the creed or symbol of faith, the singing of the
thrice-holy (the Sanctus),16 together with the holy angels, the uttering with our
lips the words of the Our Father in which we lay claim to communion with God,
and then, beyond that, the chant One is Holy, leading beyond knowledge to the
unknowable unity, “now that we are deified by grace, and assimilated to him by
participation in an indivisible identity, so far as this is possible.”17 After the
Gospel, the bishop descends from his throne, and dismisses the catechumens; this
symbolizes the Second Coming of Christ and the final judgement. Everything
that follows—the whole of the liturgy of the faithful—is then understood by
Maximos to take place after the Second Coming. The closing of the doors means
our passing, after the judgement, into the nuptial chamber of Christ, the entrance
into the mysteries our entrance into the final revelation of the divine wisdom. The
meaning of the kiss of peace, the recitation of the creed, the singing of the Sanctus,
Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, 202). Berthold is wrong in asserting (222, n. 107) that this
means the trisagion, which is sung in the Byzantine rite before the readings.
the saying of the Our Father, the singing of the One is Holy, and communion itself
in the divine gifts: all this Maximos has already explained, and his further explan
ations all underline their eschatological significance, with the coming together of
heaven and earth, and the deification of the human as the fulfilment of the
Incarnation of the Divine.
The proclamation of the Gospel is then, for Maximos, indeed the “end of
history”; to hear the Gospel is truly to pass beyond the eschaton. Maximos’ under
standing of the celebration of the Divine Liturgy is thoroughly eschatological; the
ceremonies after the reading of the Gospel all take place in the age to come.
Maximos does not mention the Eucharistic anaphora; by this time it was probably
said silently, and perhaps Maximos only commented on what a layman, such as he
seems to have been, would have heard—but his eschatological understanding of
the Divine Liturgy is fully in accord with the inclusion among the events recalled
in the anamnesis in the Byzantine rite of the “glorious and dread Second Coming.”
The way in which the early Church celebrated the Eucharist on the brink of the
age to come (cf. the fragments of the Eucharistic anaphora of the Didache)18 is
fully preserved in Maximos’ understanding of the Divine Liturgy. Moreover, Alain
Riou sees a deeper significance in Maximos’ omission of any mention of the
Eucharistic anaphora, which is worth mentioning here: “The true anaphora (the
configuring anamnesis and the eschatological epiclesis) of Christ is only consum
mated in the martyr himself: in that apophatic anaphora, the Christian and the
Church receive in communion and consummate in silence their transparency to
the paschal mystery.”19 Riou’s words remind one of the Eucharistic echoes of St
Polycarp’s prayer20 as the fires were lit; they also remind us that Maximos’ words
are the words of one who was to confess the faith to the point of death.
Maximos’ Eucharistic ecclesiology is then an eschatological ecclesiology. The
full significance of the words quoted earlier from the first chapter of the
Mystagogia, in which the Church was defined as an image of God, now become
apparent:
all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in the
Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and bestows one divine form and desig
nation: to be Christ’s and to bear his name. In accordance with faith it gives to all
a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition . . .
—which is ultimately that of the martyr, the witness for Christ, the witness to the
truth about Christ. And this eschatological ecclesiology has ramifications,
18 Especially, Didache 9.4, 10.6; in Karl Bihlmeyer and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, eds., Die
Apostolischen Väter I (J.C.B. Mohr, 1970), 6.
19 Riou, Le monde et l’église selon Maxime le Confesseur, 165.
20 Martyrium Polycarpi 14 (Bihlmeyer and Schneemelcher, eds., Die Apostolischen Väter I, 127–8).
through the multiple images that the Church bears, for the cosmos, for the inner
life of the soul, even for our understanding of Holy Scripture. We can see some
thing of what this means in a series of chapters from the First Century on Theology
and the Incarnate Dispensation.21 This group of chapters (51–70) form a series of
meditations on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days; Riou suggests, convincingly,
that they are a meditation on the Triduum—Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and
Easter Sunday. They provide a paschal interpretation of the Christian life, the
three stages of which—ascetic struggle, natural contemplation, and mystical the
ology or deification—correspond to the three days.22 This rooting of the stages of
the Christian life in the paschal mystery brings to light what one might call the
ecclesial dimension of asceticism. The cosmic dimension is manifest in the way
the transitus through these days leads to, and beyond, knowledge of created
things.23 The different chapters illumine different aspects of this mystery, but
characteristic is the sixty-seventh, which reads:
All visible realities need the cross, that is, the state in which they are cut off from
things acting upon them through the senses. All intelligible realities need burial,
that is, the total quiescence of the things which act upon them through the intel
lect. When all relationship with such things is severed, and their natural activity
and stimulus is cut off, then the Logos, who exists alone in himself, appears as if
risen from the dead. He encompasses all that comes from him, but nothing
enjoys kinship with him by virtue of natural relationship. For the salvation of the
saved is by grace and not by nature.24
This vision of the Church entering into the Paschal mystery highlights its eschato
logical nature, something also manifest in the way in which the Church is con
ceived of as coming into being through the power of the Spirit. This understanding
of the Church—cosmic, eschatological, Eucharistic, epicletic—gathers together
the central themes of Maximos’ theology.
For Maximos, however, the Church is not just a vision, it is a reality in which
the eschatological breaks into history, and that reality takes a specific historical
form, even, one might say, a political form. So we turn to look at those texts in
which Maximos expresses his ideas on the presence of the Church and its struc
tures in the political realm.
21 For the two Centuries on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation, see PG 90:1083A–1173A. There
is a translation in Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, 129–70, but I have used the transla
tion in G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. and eds., The Philokalia: The
Complete Text, vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, 1981), 114–63.
22 Cent. I.55 (PG 90.1104BC; Palmer et al., trans. and eds., The Philokalia 2:125).
23 Cent. I.66 (PG 90.1108AB; Palmer et al., trans. and eds., The Philokalia 2:127).
24 Cent. I.67 (PG 90.1108B; Palmer et al., trans. and eds., The Philokalia 2:127).
Our first texts are two fragments of letters that constitute opuscula 11 and 12.
Both of these speak in glowing terms of the central importance of the Church of
Rome. The first fragment, written shortly after the Lateran Synod, asserts:
All the ends of the inhabited world, and those who anywhere on earth confess
the Lord with a pure and orthodox faith, look directly to the most holy Church
of the Romans and her confession and faith as to a sun of eternal light, receiving
from her the radiant beam of the patristic and holy doctrines, just as the holy six
synods,25 inspired and sacred, purely and with all devotion set them forth, utter
ing most clearly the symbol of faith. For, from the time of the descent to us of
the incarnate Word of God, all the Churches of the Christians everywhere have
held and possess this most great Church as the sole base and foundation, since,
according to the very promise of the Saviour, it will never be overpowered by the
gates of hell, but rather has the keys of the orthodox faith and confession in him,
and to those who approach it with reverence it opens the genuine and unique
piety, but shuts and stops every heretical mouth that speaks utter wickedness.
For that which the creator of everything himself, our Lord and Master Jesus
Christ, established and built up—together with his disciples and apostles, and
the holy fathers and teachers and martyrs who came after—have been conse
crated by their own works and words, by their sufferings and sweat, by their
labours and blood, and finally by their remarkable deaths for the sake of the
Catholic and Apostolic Church of us who believe in him, they, through two
words,26 uttered without pain or death—O the long-suffering and forbearance of
God!—are eager to dissolve and to set at naught the great, all-illumining and
all-praised mystery of the orthodox worship of the Christians.27
Maximos’ words celebrate the faithfulness of the Church of Rome to orthodoxy,

and link this with the words of our Lord in Matthew 16:18f. They are, however,
words about the Church of Rome, not the papacy as such, and emphasize that the
faith signally endorsed by Rome is founded on the apostles and their successors—
the fathers and the synods where they declared their faith; that it has been tried in
the suffering of their lives, both the suffering of those who endured persecution
and martyrdom, and those who shone forth in the ascetic life.28 These words
make it clear that the institutional structures of the Church, expressed in the
priesthood and synodical convocations, were important for Maximos. Opusc. 12
25 The first five œcumenical synods, together with the Lateran synod; the same list of six synods is
to be found in Theodore Spoudaios’ Hypomnesticon, his summary of the sufferings of Martin and
Maximos (Hypomnesticon 8, in Allen and Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his
Companions, 160).
26 These “two words” must refer in some way to the imperial edicts (the Ekthesis of 638 and the
Typos of 648) that promoted monothelitism and forbade any discussion of Orthodox dyothelitism.
27 Opusc. 11 (PG 91.137C–139B).
28 For more detail, see Larchet, Saint Maxime le Confesseur.
only exists in the fragments preserved and translated by Anastasius the Librarian
into Latin, as part of a dossier drawing on the events of the mid-seventh century
to support exalted claims about the Roman see being made by Popes Nicholas I
and Hadrian II in the mid-ninth (to which opusc. 10 and 11 also belong). It speaks
in similar terms to opusc. 11 of
the apostolic see, which, from the incarnate Word of God himself, as well as, in
accordance with the holy canons and definitions, from all the holy synods of all
the holy Churches of God, which are in all the world, has derived and possesses
dominion (imperium), authority and power to bind and loose.29
This letter was written a few years earlier, and was concerned with what process
must be adopted by the one- time monothelite Patriarch of Constantinople,
Pyrrhos, if he wished to be received as Orthodox. Maximos insisted that he
needed to convince the pope of Rome, doubtless because in the hierarchy of the
Church, it was only the pope who was senior to the patriarch. It is most likely for
this reason that, in contrast with opusc. 11, opusc. 12 speaks directly of the sanctis-
simae Romanorum Ecclesiae beatissimum papam.30
Maximos’ enthusiastic celebration of the orthodoxy of the pope and Church of
Rome has, not unnaturally, often been taken as evidence of a much warmer atti
tude to the Church of Rome, and the notion of papal primacy, than has been cus
tomary in the Byzantine East. His words, however, need to be set in their historical
context. From 645, and probably earlier, until the accession of Pope Vitalian to
the see of Rome in 657, Rome seemed to Maximos a beacon of Orthodoxy in a
world darkened by heresy; alone among the patriarchal sees, Rome condemned
the heresies of monenergism and monothelitism, signally under Pope Martin at
the Lateran Synod of 649. During this period, Maximos’ feelings led him to be
strongly supportive towards the Church of Rome. Even Pope Honorius was
defended by Maximos, who interpreted his assertion of one will in Christ, not as a
denial of his human will but rather of their being two contradictory wills in
Christ31—not the view taken by the Fathers of the Sixth Œcumenical Synod in
681.32 Over the doubts expressed by theologians in Constantinople over Rome’s
view that the Holy Spirit also proceeded from the Father, Maximos was again
defensive of Rome, arguing that the Latin view was consonant with the language
of no less a theologian than Cyril of Alexandria.33 Maximos’ words on the
29 Opusc. 12 (PG 91.144C). On Anastasius Bibliothecarius, see, most recently, Bronwen Neil,
Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Studia
Antiqua Australiensia 2 (Brepols, 2006).
30 Opusc. 12 (PG 91.144C). 31 Opusc. 20 (PG 91.237C–245A).
32 See the Ekthesis of Constantinople III, in Norman P. Tanner, SJ, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical
Councils (Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:125.
33 Opusc. 10 (PG 91.136AB). On Maximos and the Filioque, see Larchet, Maxime le Confesseur,
médiateur, 11–75.
orthodoxy of the Church of Rome need to be seen in this context. It is also

important to note what Maximos does not say. What he says refers to the Church
of Rome, not to the pope as such. Furthermore, there is no suggestion that the
Church of Rome does anything more than support the faith of the whole Church,
“in accordance with the holy canons and definitions, from all the holy synods of
all the holy Churches of God, which are in all the world.” This is a long way from
the claim of such as Pope Nicholas I, in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Michael
III, possibly composed by Anastasius the Librarian himself, that “these privileges
given to this holy Church [i.e., Rome] by Christ, not given by synods, but only
celebrated and venerated by them, constrain and compel us ‘to have solicitude for
all the churches’ of God.”34
Nevertheless, however interpreted, these two fragmentary letters make it clear
that St Maximos’ eschatological and Eucharistic vision of the Church had quite
precise institutional implications.
It is in the events that followed on the Lateran Synod—Maximos’ arrest, his
two trials, his exiles, and his death (which could well be described in the terms he
used of the deaths of the Fathers in opusc. 11: “finally . . . their remarkable
deaths”)—that we see how Maximos’ ecclesiology was worked out in practice. The
Church is founded on the confession of Christ: to be a member of the Church is
“to be Christ’s and to bear his name,” in the phrase quoted several times already.
For Maximos, such confession is crucial, and entails accepting the confession of
Christ that we have received from the Apostles and the Fathers of the Church. So
in his trial, Maximos responds to the accusation that he has split the Church by
his stubbornness with the words: “if the one who states what is in Scripture and
the holy Fathers splits the Church, what does someone do to the Church who
annuls the teachings of the saints, without which the Church’s very existence is
impossible?”35 Later on, when asked about his own teaching, he retorts: “I don’t
have a teaching of my own, but the common one of the Catholic Church. I mean
that I haven’t initiated any expression at all that could be called my own
teaching.”36 At his trial he was pressed on the fact that he was not in communion
with the throne of Constantinople, something of utmost importance to Maximos,
since his ecclesiology, we have argued, is grounded in Eucharistic communion.
But such communion, for Maximos, is only genuine communion if it is commu
nion in the truth. So he explains his not being in communion with Constantinople
by reciting the ways in which the patriarch has rejected the faith defined by the
“holy synods”: by accepting the initial compromise at Alexandria in 633, and then
34 Nicholas, Letter to Michael the Emperor, conveniently excerpted in H. Denzinger and

A. Schönmetzer, eds., Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum, 36th edn (Herder,
1976), §§ 638, 640.
35 Relatio motionis 4; Allen and Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions, 58.
accepting, indeed formulating, the imperial compromises of the Ekthesis and

the Typos.37
Another important issue raised at his trial was the claim on the emperor’s
behalf that he was a priest, a claim again made by the iconoclast emperors in the
next century. Maximos’ rejection of this claim is outright; in response to the claim
that “every Christian emperor [is] also a priest,” he declares:
No, he isn’t, because he neither stands beside the altar, and after the consecration
of the bread elevates it with the words, The holy things for the holy; nor does he
baptize, nor perform the rite of anointing, nor does he ordain and make bishops
and presbyters and deacons; nor does he anoint churches, nor does he bear the
symbols of the priesthood, the omophorion and the Gospel book, [as he bears
the symbols] of imperial office, the crown and the purple.38
It is interesting, in view of the Mystagogia, that the argument is in terms of litur

gical function, though the consequences are political. In the dispute that took
place during his first exile, at Bizya, with a Bishop Theodosios, whose task was to
work a change of mind in Maximos, Maximos spells out one implication of the
emperor’s not sharing in the priestly office: namely, that the validity of an ecclesi
astical synod does not depend on the emperor’s ratification. The confessor lists
seven synods, called by emperors, which proved heretical.39 Clearly, for Maximos,
the Church, as defined by the true confession of faith, celebrated in the Divine
Liturgy of the Eucharist, is a sovereign body, with its own institutions. However
deeply bound up with the Christian empire it might be, it may not be confused
with it. A precious document for Maximos’ doctrine of the Church is the last
writing we have from his hand, a short letter written on 19 April 658 to Anastasios,
his disciple and spiritual child of by then forty years’ standing, who was exiled
apart from his master.40 Now Maximos and his few followers are on their own,
Rome, in the person of Pope Vitalian, having succumbed to imperial pressure
and entered into communion with the other patriarchal sees. In reply to the
question—or taunt—“What Church do you belong to? Constantinople? Rome?
Antioch? Alexandria? Jerusalem? See, all of them are united, together with the
provinces subject to them,” Maximos says he had replied, “The God of all pro
nounced that the Catholic Church was the correct and saving confession of the
faith in him when he called Peter blessed because of the terms in which he had
made proper confession of him.” The Petrine foundation of the Church is Peter’s
faith, which even his successor can abandon, as Maximos had just learnt. At the
39 Disputatio 4; Allen and Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his Companions, 88.
40 The letter can be found in Allen and Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his
Companions, 120–3.
end of the letter, there is a postscript from Anastasius himself, saying that this
letter, and the rest of the dossier, had been transcribed
to make them known to you most holy people, in order that, when you have
found out about the trial from these, you might all bring a common prayer to
the Lord on behalf of our common mother, that is the Catholic Church, and on
behalf of us your unworthy servants, for strengthening everyone and us also,
persevering with you in it, according to the orthodox faith rightly preached in it
by the holy Fathers.41
Like the rest of the theology of St Maximos the Confessor, his ecclesiology com
bines an inspiring vision with ramifications as broad as the cosmos and as deep as
the soul with practical implications that are uncompromising.
41 Ep. Maximi ad Anastasium; Allen and Neil, eds. and trans., Maximus the Confessor and his
Companions, 122–3.
23
The Views of St Maximos the Confessor
on the Institutional Church
The subject of this brief paper—the institutional Church in the theology of

St Maximos—is what I was asked to speak on, not a subject that I chose, or indeed
would have chosen. Initially, I was puzzled. It does not seem to me that
St Maximos reflected much at all on the institutional structures of the Church, the
focus of his ecclesiology seems to me to lie elsewhere, principally in the liturgy
and the symbolic structures it entails and through which it expresses itself.1 That
is a very rich theme, but—in my view—only very occasionally do the structures
of the Church come into view. That is not to say that Maximos’ views are theoret
ical; on the contrary, they are intensely practical, as we shall see, but he does not
seem to me to investigate very closely the ways in which the institutional
structures—the hierarchy of the Church or ways in which the Church is involved
in the political structures of the society in which it exists—promote his very prac
tical concerns. At the very beginning of the Mystagogia—the nearest thing to a
prolonged meditation on the Church in Maximos’ writings—he expounds the
way in which the role and purpose of the Church is modelled on the activity of
God himself, and finds this exemplified in the apostolic community as depicted
in the Acts of the Apostles:
It is in this way that the holy Church of God will be shown to be active among us
in the same way as God, as an image reflects its archetype. For many and of
nearly boundless number are the men, women and children who are distinct
from one another and vastly different by birth and appearance, by race and lan
guage, by way of life and age, by opinions and skills, by manners and customs, by
pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation, fortune, characteristics and
1 There is, therefore, little on Maximos’ ecclesiology in the secondary literature. The chapter on
ecclesiology in Jean-Claude Larchet, Saint Maxime le Confesseur (Paris, 2003), 198–210, is limited in
scope and is largely a summary of his discussion of the more polemical issue of the Roman primacy in
Maximos’ writings found in Jean-Claude Larchet, Maxime le Confesseur, médiateur entre l’Orient et
l’Occident (Paris, 1998), 125–201. There are useful discussions in the following: Alain Riou, Le monde
et l’Église selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris, 1973), esp. 123–200; Nikos Matsoukas, Kosmos,
Anthropos, Koinonia kata ton Maximo Homologiti (Athens, 1980), esp. 219–52 (largely expository);
Nikolaos Loudovikos, I Eucharistiaki Ontologia (Athens, 1992), 251–72 (a sophisticated development
of ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’). An older, but still useful, discussion of the Mystagogia (largely concerned
with the information it gives about the celebration of the liturgy) can be found in Réné Bornert, Les
commentaires byzantins de la divine liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1966), pp. 83–124.
St Maximos the Confessor on the Institutional Church 251
habits: all are born into the Church and through it are reborn and recreated in
the Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and bestows one divine form and
designation: to be Christ’s and to bear his name. In accordance with faith it gives
to all a single, simple, whole and indivisible condition which does not allow us
to bring to mind the existence of the myriads of differences among them, even if
they do exist, through the universal relationship and union of all things with it.
It is through it that absolutely no one at all is in himself separated from the com
munity since everyone converges with all the rest and joins together with them
by the one, simple, and indivisible grace and power of faith. ‘For all,’ it is said,
‘had but one heart and one mind.’2 Thus to be and to appear as one body formed
of different members is really worthy of Christ himself, our true head, in whom
says the divine Apostle, ‘there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek,
neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither barbarian nor Scythian, nei
ther slave nor free, but he is all and in all.’3 It is he who encloses in himself all
beings by the unique, simple and infinitely wise power of his goodness.4
But how does this vision express itself in the institutional structures of the
Church? There is not very much on this in his writings, but if we look at the
Confessor’s life, there are two occasions on which Maximos found himself
involved in the structures of the Church. The first occasion was his appeal to
Rome in the context of the Monothelite controversy, and his participation in the
Lateran Synod of 649. On that occasion he appealed to the hierarchical structure
of the Church in the person of Pope Martin to support Orthodoxy and oppose
heresy. There are fragments of letters by Maximos, preserved in Latin by
Anastasius the Librarian in the ninth century, that express something of his atti
tude to the Church of Rome in the wake of the Lateran Synod. The first fragment
I shall cite, found in Maximos’ works as Opusc. 11, asserts:
All the ends of the inhabited world, and those who anywhere on earth confess
the Lord with a pure and orthodox faith, look directly to the most holy Church
of the Romans and her confession and faith as to a sun of eternal light, receiving
from her the radiant beam of the patristic and holy doctrines, just as the holy six
synods,5 inspired and sacred, purely and with all devotion set them forth, utter
ing most clearly the symbol of faith. For, from the time of the descent to us of
the incarnate Word of God, all the Churches of the Christians everywhere have
held and possess this most great Church as the sole base and foundation, since,
2 Acts 4:32. 3 Col. 3:11.

4 Mystagogia 1, ll. 163–89 (ed. Christian Boudignon, CCSG 69, 2011).
5 The first five œcumenical synods, together with the Lateran synod; the same list of six synods is to
be found in Theodore Spoudaios’ Hypomnesticon, his summary of the sufferings of Martin and
Maximos; Hypomnesticon 8. In Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile, ed.
Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford University Press, 2002), 160).
according to the very promise of the Saviour, it will never be overpowered by the
gates of hell, but rather has the keys of the orthodox faith and confession in him,
and to those who approach it with reverence it opens the genuine and unique
piety, but shuts and stops every heretical mouth that speaks utter wickedness.
For that which the creator of everything himself, our Lord and Master Jesus
Christ, established and built up—together with his disciples and apostles, and
the holy fathers and teachers and martyrs who came after—have been conse
crated by their own works and words, by their sufferings and sweat, by their
labours and blood, and finally by their remarkable deaths for the sake of the
Catholic and Apostolic Church of us who believe in him, they, through two
words,6 uttered without pain or death—O the long-suffering and forbearance of
God!—are eager to dissolve and to set at naught the great, all-illumining and
all-praised mystery of the orthodox worship of the Christians.7
Maximos’ letter celebrates the faithfulness of the Church of Rome to orthodoxy,

and link this with the words of Our Lord in Matthew 16:18–19. It is, however,
about the church of Rome that he is speaking, not the bishop of Rome as such,
and he emphasizes that the faith signally endorsed by Rome is founded on the
apostles and their successors, the fathers and the synods where they declared
their faith; that it has been tried in the suffering of their lives, both the suffering of
those who endured persecution and martyrdom, and those who shone forth in
the ascetic life.8 These words make it clear that the institutional structures of the
Church, expressed in the hierarchy of the Church and synodical convocations,
were important for Maximos; it is, however, interesting to note that Maximos
places these institutional structures alongside the martyrs and confessors who
have suffered for the faith—the institutional structures do not stand alone.
These fragments—Opusc. 10, 11, 12—only exist because they were preserved
and translated by Anastasius the Librarian into Latin, as part of a dossier drawing
on the events of the mid-seventh century to support exalted claims about the
Roman See being made by Popes Nicholas I and Hadrian II in the mid-ninth.
Opusc. 12 speaks in similar terms to Opusc. 11 of
the apostolic see, which, from the incarnate Word of God himself, as well as, in
accordance with the holy canons and definitions, from all the holy synods of all
the holy Churches of God, which are in all the world, has derived and possesses
dominion (imperium), authority and power to bind and loose.9
6 These ‘two words’ must refer in some way to the imperial edicts (the Ekthesis of 638 and the Typos
of 648) that promoted monothelitism and forbade any discussion of Orthodox dyothelitism.
7 Opusc. 11 (PG 91.137C–140B).
8 For more detail, see Larchet, Saint Maxime le Confesseur.
9 Opusc. 12 (PG 91.144C). On Anastasius Bibliothecarius, see, most recently, Bronwen Neil,
Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Studia
Antiqua Australiensia 2 (Turnhout, 2006).
This letter was written a few years earlier, and was concerned with what process
must be adopted by the one- time monothelite patriarch of Constantinople,
Pyrrhos, if he wished to be received back as Orthodox. Maximos insisted that he
needed to convince the pope of Rome, doubtless because in the hierarchy of the
Church, it was only the pope who was senior to the patriarch. It is most likely for
this reason that, in contrast with opusc. 11, opusc. 12 speaks directly of the sanctis-
simae Romanorum Ecclesiae beatissimum papam.10
Maximos’ enthusiastic celebration of the orthodoxy of the pope and Church of
Rome has, not unnaturally, often been taken as evidence of a much warmer
attitude to the Church of Rome, and the notion of papal primacy, than has been
customary in the Byzantine East. His words, however, need to be set in their
historical context. From 645, and probably earlier, until the accession of Pope
Vitalian to the see of Rome in 657, Rome seemed to Maximos a beacon of
Orthodoxy in a world darkened by heresy; alone among the patriarchal sees,
Rome condemned the heresies of monenergism and monothelitism, signally
under Pope Martin at the Lateran Synod of 649. During this period, Maximos’
convictions led him to be strongly supportive of the Church of Rome. Even Pope
Honorius was defended by Maximos, who interpreted his assertion of one will in
Christ, as a denial not of his human will, but rather of their being two contradictory
wills in Christ11—not the view taken by the Fathers of the Sixth Œcumenical
Synod in 681.12 What Maximos says on the orthodoxy of the Church of Rome
needs to be seen in this context. It is also important to note what Maximos does
not say. What he says refers to the Church of Rome, not to the pope as such.
Furthermore, there is no suggestion that the Church of Rome does anything more
than support the faith of the whole Church, ‘in accordance with the holy canons
and definitions, from all the holy synods of all the holy Churches of God, which
are in all the world’. This is a long way from the claim of such as Pope Nicholas I,
in a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III, possibly composed by Anastasius
the Librarian himself, that ‘these privileges given to this holy Church [i.e., Rome]
by Christ, not given by synods, but only celebrated and venerated by them, con
strain and compel us “to have solicitude for all the churches” of God’.13
The other occasion on which Maximos found himself caught up in the institu
tional structures of the Church is found in the events that followed on the Lateran
Synod—Maximos’ arrest, his two trials, his exiles, and his death (which could
well be described in the terms he used of the deaths of the fathers in opusc. 11:
‘finally . . . their remarkable deaths’). Here we see how Maximos’ ecclesiology was
worked out in practice. The Church is founded on the confession of Christ: to be
10 Neil, Seventh-Century Popes and Martyrs. 11 Opusc. 20 (PG 91.237C–245A).

12 See the Ekthesis of Constantinople III, in Norman P. Tanner, SJ, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical
Councils (London, 1990), I, p. 125.
13 Pope Nicholas, Letter to Michael the Emperor, conveniently excerpted in Denzinger-Schönmetzer,
Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum, 36 edn (Rome, 1976), §§638, 640.
a member of the Church is ‘to be Christ’s and to bear his name’, in the phrase from
the Mystagogia already quoted. For Maximos, such confession is crucial, and
entails accepting the confession of Christ that we have received from the Apostles
and the Fathers of the Church. So in his trial, Maximos responds to the accus
ation that he has split the Church by his stubbornness with the words: ‘if the one
who states what is in Scripture and the holy Fathers splits the Church, what does
someone do to the Church who annuls the teachings of the saints, without which
the Church’s very existence is impossible?’14 Later on, when asked about his own
teaching, he retorts: ‘I don’t have a teaching of my own, but the common one of
the Catholic Church. I mean that I haven’t initiated any expression at all that
could be called my own teaching.’15 At his trial he was pressed on the fact that he
was not in communion with the throne of Constantinople, something of utmost
importance to Maximos, since his ecclesiology, as I have argued elsewhere,16 is
grounded in Eucharistic communion. But such communion, for Maximos, is only
genuine communion if it is communion in the truth. So he explains his not being
in communion with Constantinople by reciting the ways in which the Patriarch
has rejected the faith defined by the ‘holy synods’—by accepting the initial com
promise at Alexandria in 633, and then accepting, indeed formulating, the imper
ial compromises of the Ekthesis and the Typos.17
Another issue raised at his trial concerning the institutional structures of the
Church was the claim on the emperor’s behalf that he was a priest, a claim again
made by the iconoclast emperors in the next century. Maximos’ rejection of this
claim is outright; in response to the claim that ‘every Christian emperor [is] also a
priest’, he declares;
No, he isn’t, because he neither stands beside the altar, and after the consecration
of the bread elevates it with the words, The holy things for the holy; nor does he
baptize, nor perform the rite of anointing, nor does he ordain and make bishops
and presbyters and deacons; nor does he anoint churches, nor does he bear the
symbols of the priesthood, the omophorion and the Gospel book, [as he bears
the symbols] of imperial office, the crown and the purple.18
It is interesting to note that the argument is in terms of liturgical function, though

the matter is political. In the dispute that took place during his first exile, at Bizya,
14 Relatio motionis 4 (Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor, 58).
16 See my articles, ‘The Ecclesiology of Saint Maximos the Confessor’, International Journal of the
Study of the Christian Church 4 (2004), 109–20; ‘Eucharist and Church according to St Maximos the
Confessor’. In Einheit und Katholizität der Kirche, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, and Franz Mali, Gregor
Emmenegger, Pro Oriente XXXII, Wiener Patristische Tagungen IV (Innsbruck- Vienna,
2009), 319–30.
18 Relatio motionis 4; Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor, 56.
with a Bishop Theodosios, whose task was to work a change of mind in Maximos,
Maximos spells out one implication of the emperor’s not sharing in the priestly
office: namely, that the validity of an ecclesiastical synod does not depend on the
emperor’s ratification. The confessor lists seven synods, called by emperors, which
proved heretical.19
Clearly, for Maximos, the Church, as defined by the true confession of faith,
celebrated in the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist, is a sovereign body, with its own
institutions. However deeply bound up with the Christian Empire it might be, it
may not be confused with it. A precious document for Maximos’ understanding
of the institutional Church is the last writing we have from his hand, a short letter
written on 19 April 658 to Anastasios, his disciple and spiritual child of by then
forty years’ standing, who was exiled apart from his master.20 Now Maximos and
his few followers are on their own, Rome, in the person of Pope Vitalian, having
succumbed to imperial pressure and entered into communion with the other
patriarchal sees. In reply to the question—or taunt—‘What Church do you belong
to? Constantinople? Rome? Antioch? Alexandria? Jerusalem? See, all of them are
united, together with the provinces subject to them’, Maximos says he had replied,
‘The God of all pronounced that the Catholic Church was the correct and saving
confession of the faith in him when he called Peter blessed because of the terms in
which he had made proper confession of him.’ The Petrine foundation of the
Church is Peter’s faith, which even his successor can abandon, as Maximos had
just learnt. At the end of the letter, there is a postscript from Anastasius himself,
saying that this letter, and the rest of the dossier, had been transcribed
to make them known to you most holy people, in order that, when you have
found out about the trial from these, you might all bring a common prayer to
the Lord on behalf of our common mother, that is the Catholic Church, and on
behalf of us your unworthy servants, for strengthening everyone and us also,
persevering with you in it, according to the orthodox faith rightly preached in it
by the holy Fathers.21
So what conclusions are we to draw about the place of institutional authority in

the Church according to St Maximos the Confessor? There is no question that
Maximos regarded the institutional structures of the Church as important: his
involvement with Pope Martin in calling the Lateran Synod in 649 is evidence for
this. It is clear, too, that, despite the fact that all the so-called Œcumenical Synods
were called by emperors, Maximos did not regard the role of the emperor as
essential. Unlike most Byzantine churchmen he regarded the Church as sovereign
19 Disputatio 4; Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor, 88.

20 The letter can be found in Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor, 120–3.
21 Ep. Maximi ad Anastasium; Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor, 122–3.
in the affairs of the Faith: it was the role of the emperor to defend the faith of the
Church, but not to define it—that role belonged to the priesthood, residing
primarily in the bishops. St Maximos had, however, to face the most difficult of
circumstances: a situation in which authentic synodical authority, as he interpreted
it, had been laid aside by the supreme hierarchs of the Church, even the pope of
Rome. The principal witness here is the letter we have just discussed. In the
appendix to that letter, which seems not to be by Maximos and may be later, there
is a reference to ‘the seed of piety at least in older Rome’. However, in the letter
itself, Maximos does not repudiate the assertion that Rome has capitulated. The
truth is that the pope, both earlier in the person of Eugene I, and then in the
person of Vitalian, wobbled, though not irrevocably, but Maximos cannot
have known this, and during Maximos’ lifetime, it looked as if Vitalian had
capitulated to the emperor. The interpretation most favourable to Rome that can
be put on this letter, and its appendix, seems to me that its purpose was to stir up
the people of Rome to prayer in the hope that the pope would eventually stand
firm.22 One could argue that this prayer was answered. But Maximos could not
have known that, and had to accept that, like Athanasios before him, he was
standing virtually alone contra mundum. It seems to me that his understanding of
the place of the institutional Church is not undermined by this, for he had always
placed alongside the hierarchical structures of the Church—which had their
role—the witness of the martyrs and confessors, to whose ranks he was willing to
be enlisted. He may well have thought that, in the end, the truth would find
synodical support, and may well have thought that Rome and its pope would play
a central role in this final victory for the true faith, but in his lifetime this could
only be a matter of hope and prayer—which should not be underestimated.
22 This suggestion was put to me after the conference by Adam Cooper and, with the qualifications
expressed above, I find myself in agreement with him.
24
Virtue Ethics
St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared
To attempt to make such a comparison in a single paper is clearly absurd; all that it
is possible to do is to set these two giants of the Christian theological tradition—
St Maximos, the greatest of the Byzantine theologians and the most influential in
the later Orthodox tradition, and Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen
and the most influential in the later Catholic tradition—in the tradition to which
they both belong, and see how they received and interpreted that tradition, and
raise some questions about similarities and differences. The subject is ‘virtue
ethics’, as it has been called since the 1950s and the work of Oxford philosophers
such as Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, and not wider issues, in which such a
comparison would also be fruitful, and perhaps more important.1
For Foot and Murdoch, the recovery of virtue ethics was a challenge to and
critique of Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to ethics which focused on how
to make ethical decisions, how to decide in moral dilemmas, either by paying
attention to the intention behind the act or to the consequences of the decision:
concern with the intention mostly became, as with Kant, a question of deciding
on one’s duty, what one ought to do (and so: deontological); concern with conse-
quences was developed by the utilitarians, for whom ethical decisions were a mat-
ter of weighing up the consequences in terms of the quantity of happiness that
would follow from the decision. There were refinements. But Foot and Murdoch
wanted to return to the classical tradition as found in Plato and Aristotle whose
ethical reflection turned not on how we make decisions—by an act of will (the
concept of will is notoriously absent from discussions of ethics in classical and
Hellenistic philosophy)—but on what was involved in being good human beings,
a notion that was explored by the ‘excellences’, ἀρεταί, virtutes, ‘virtues’ that made
a human being good. This notion of virtue was not even primarily moral—
especially in Greek, for ἀρετή could be applied to objects that manifested excel-
lence: a sword could have ἀρετή, by being sharp and well balanced, for
example—but it was generally agreed that human excellence involved moral
1 For a detailed comparison on a fundamental subject, see Antoine Lévy, Le créé et l’incréé. Maxime
le Confesseur et Thomas d’Aquin (Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2006). On the ethical thought of
Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch, see Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Clarendon Press, 2001) and Iris
Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970).
qualities, even if it was not exhausted by them, though some philosophers—the

Stoics for instance, and arguably Plato—believed human excellence was intrinsic
ally moral (in contrast to Aristotle, whose ‘large-hearted man’, μεγαλόψυχος,
manifested his virtue in his wealth, his intelligence, even his way of walking and
conducting himself, as well as in strictly ‘moral’ qualities).
In the Symposium, when Agathon, the host, comes to give his speech in praise
of love, ἔρως, he speaks first of the god’s beauty and then of his goodness. The
discourse on his goodness treats one by one his virtues: justice, for he neither
gives nor receives injury; temperance, for ‘love, by controlling pleasures and
desires, must be eminently temperate’; courage or fortitude, ‘for we hear, not of
love caught by Ares, but of Ares caught by love—Aphrodite’; and wisdom, σοφία,
for it is through love, that Apollo, the Muses, Hephaestus, Athena and Zeus
inspire humankind in the crafts and music and poetry.2 The goodness of love is
manifest in δικαιοσύνη, σωφροσύνη, ἀνδρεία, σοφία: justice, temperance, courage
or fortitude, and wisdom, understood here clearly in a practical way. These were
to become the four cardinal virtues, and we find them again in Plato’s Republic,
this time related both to the tripartite structure of the soul and to the matching
tripartite structure of the city state, the πόλις. As the state consists of rulers,
guards or soldiers, and the peasantry or working class, so the soul consists of a
rational element— the mind, intellect, or νοῦς, an aggressive or powerful
element—the spirited or incensive part, the θῦμος, and the desiring element—the
ἐπιθυμητικόν. The rulers and the νοῦς need wisdom, σοφία; the guards and the
θῦμος courage, ἀνδρεία. Temperance is a matter of ‘the unanimity and concord’ of
all three parts, though it is especially necessary for the working class and the
desiring part of the soul. Justice, too, is concerned with the balance between the
three parts of the city or the soul: a balance achieved when each part is fulfilling
its own role and when the guards and the working class—or the θῦμος and
ἐπιθυμητικόν—are subject to the guidance of the rulers or the intellect.3 This brief
glance at Plato reveals two ways in which the virtues can be seen to operate: on
the one hand, in relation to the individual and the ordering of his love, and on the
other in relation to the functioning of society. Just as for Plato, and many philoso
phers of classical and late antiquity, there is a profound analogy between the
human and the cosmos, so too there is an analogy between the individual and
the city.
Aristotle developed Plato’s notion of virtue, and his refinements were to have a
far-reaching influence on later understanding of virtue. Aristotle’s treatment of
virtue is more analytic than Plato’s and concerned to explore differences.4
Whereas for Plato, virtue is ultimately indivisible—temperance requires wisdom
2 Plato, Symposium 196B–197B. 3 See Plato, Republic IV.441C–445B.

4 See Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, a commentary by H. H. Joachim (Clarendon Press,
1951), 113–15.
St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared 259
and courage and justice—for Aristotle the distinctions in the virtues are more
prominent. The principal manifestation of this is found in the first of the virtues,
the virtue of primarily the intellect, which Plato called wisdom, σοφία. Aristotle
makes a distinction between σοφία and φρόνησις, between intellectual wisdom,
contemplation, and moral wisdom, the understanding of our moral behaviour.
This expresses his distinction between intellectual virtue and moral virtue: the
cardinal virtues are the moral virtues, ἠθικαὶ ἀρεταί, concerned with our action,
πρᾶξις, in the world; beyond that is intellectual virtue, σοφία, concerned with the
contemplation of reality, at its highest with eternal reality.
In later philosophy, especially in late antiquity, both these approaches are
found, the one interpreting the other; it was remembered that Aristotle had been
a disciple of Plato, and his thought was often interpreted in terms of his master.
Within the Christian tradition, the reception of the notion of virtue has a variety
of contexts and caused a number of problems. We can only sketch these in now.
There are principally two contexts: the doctrine of virtues is used to interpret the
moral examples found in the Scriptures—a good example is found in Ambrose,
De Officiis I.115–21; but a more important context, employing both the doctrine
of virtues and the tripartite notion of the soul to which it is related by Plato espe-
cially, is that of ascetic literature. The principal problem is that the notion of vir-
tue could suggest that by our own efforts we could become good or virtuous,
which goes counter to the Christian conviction that humankind has fallen away
from its original condition and needs grace—the grace of the Resurrection
through the triumph over death on the Cross—in order to be restored to the state
for which it was intended by the Creator. Nevertheless, among Christians, when
the notion of virtue is maintained, there is always a—sometimes unstated—
presupposition that virtue is dependent on the operation of grace; sometimes this
presupposition is so silent as to be thought absent (as is the charge against
Pelagianism). It might be wondered why Christians rallied to the notion of virtue,
given that much of the Scriptures considers moral goodness in terms of obedi-
ence to commandments, rather than the formation of human virtue (an excep-
tion being the Wisdom literature, which was indeed highly valued in early
Christian ethical thought). Part of the reason is, paradoxically, connected with
their belief in the Fall of humankind: given that, and the consequences for
humankind, any approach to ethics that remained at the level of behaviour
seemed quite inadequate—ethical behaviour had to flow from a reconstructed
human nature: it was a matter of being, of ontology. Virtue ethics addresses the
question of goodness at this level, for it is concerned more with what human
beings are, rather than how they make moral choices, how they behave. This
awareness of the effect of sin and the need for grace is manifest in many ways,
especially in the ascetic tradition. On the one hand, there is much more system-
atic interest in the opposite of virtues—the vices, or, in the ascetic tradition, the
λογισμοί, the trains of thought that tempt and distract us. Evagrios, the first
‘philosopher of the desert’, as Guillaumont has dubbed him, devotes a good deal
of time to the λογισμοί, and their classification. This is not, I think, primarily a
doleful concern with the ravages of sin and the Fall; rather an awareness that what
we can do is less to cultivate the virtues than to struggle against the assaults and
distractions that the Christian is beset by; what we are doing is more clearing the
way for the operation of grace than building up the self through the virtues,
something beyond our sinful powers. Another manifestation of this awareness of
the need for grace can be found in how virtue is thought of. Although the trad
itional list that we find in Plato and Aristotle is acknowledged, more attention is
paid to other ‘virtues’, unacknowledged, at least directly, by the classical tradition:
virtues such as humility, obedience, love.
Virtue in St Maximos the Confessor
All this lies in the background of the tradition as St Maximos the Confessor5
develops it in his reflection on the nature of virtue. At one point in the Dispute
with Pyrrhos, the deposed patriarch remarks with amazement: ‘What then? Are
the virtues natural?’ (Aristotle had denied that the moral virtues are natural: Eth.
Nic. II. 1103a.18–20.) Maximos replies that they are. Pyrrhos comes back with the
objection that if the virtues are natural, why do they not exist equally in those of
the same nature? But they do, Maximos replies to the baffled patriarch (at least
according to most MSS). How do you account for such inequality amongst our-
selves? Pyrrhos retorts. Maximos responds: ‘Because we do not equally act out
what is natural. If everyone acted out what was natural in accordance with their
origin, then just as there is one nature manifest in all, so it would be with virtue,
and there would be no better or worse.’ Pyrrhos objects that ‘if what is natural to
us proceeds not from disciplined training [ἄσκησις], but from creation, and v irtue
is natural, why do we acquire the virtues, which are natural, through toil and
disciplined struggle?’ Maximos responds thus:
Disciplined training and the toils that go with it were devised simply for the
purpose of separating from the soul in those who love virtue the deceit that
infects it through the senses. It is not as if the virtues have been lately introduced
from outside. For they were inserted in us from creation, as has been already
said. Once therefore deceit has been completely expelled from us, at that
moment, too, the soul manifests the radiance of its natural virtue. He therefore
who is not foolish is sensible; and he who is not cowardly or foolhardy is
5 Some of this section on Maximos the Confessor is a reworking of material found in my article:
‘La lotta per la carità. Massimo il Confessore’. In La lotta spirituale nella tradizione ortodossa, ed.
Sabina Chialà, Lisa Cremaschi, and Adalberto Mainardi (Eidtioni Qiqajon 2010), 95–112.
courageous; and he who is not undisciplined is chaste; and he who is not unjust
is just. By nature reason is wisdom, discernment is justice, the incensive faculty
is courage, and the desiring faculty chastity. Therefore with the removal of what
is contrary to nature [παρὰ φύσιν] only what is natural [κατὰ φύσιν] is accus-
tomed to be manifest. Just as, if rust is removed, there is manifest the natural
gleam and lustre of iron.6
Virtue is natural; the cardinal virtues describe the lineaments of that nature. It is
only because of a deceit lodged in the soul that disciplined training and toil are
necessary. I have avoided translating ἄσκησις as asceticism, for that seems to me
to prejudge immediately issues that need consideration. The word ἄσκησις gener-
ally means training or exercise, so I have translated it ‘disciplined training’, but the
verb from which it is derived, ἀσκέω, originally meant to work with raw mater
ials, and I am attracted by the idea that the root meaning of ἄσκησις, too, is to
work with raw materials, the raw materials of our humanity, and out of it to make
something fine. It seems to me to accord with what Maximos meant by ἄσκησις,
for he saw humankind as created in the image of God with the purpose of attain-
ing the divine likeness. That working with the raw materials of our humanity—
even in paradise—would entail uniting our being and our eternal being, both
gifts of God, by means of being well, and so bringing into being an eternal well-
being in which the divine image attains the divine likeness. This triad—being–
well-being–eternal being—is a fundamental aspect of Maximos’s ontology of the
created rational being, and expresses Maximos’s idea that virtue, well-being,
unites God’s gifts of being and eternal being, leading to eternal well-being, the
eternal life with God for which created rational beings are intended.
This ἄσκησις is the principal concern of the first stage of the Christian life,
πρακτική, as Maximos calls it, adopting the terminology of Evagrios (I have
translated it ‘ascetic struggle’). The ultimate purpose of this is to learn how to
love. As to the structure of this ascetic struggle, there are two chapters, right at the
beginning of his Centuries on Love, that give a brief account of it. The two chap-
ters (2 and 3) manifest a chiastic structure:
Ἀπάθεια gives birth to love; hope in God to ἀπάθεια; patience and longsuffering
to hope; all-embracing self-mastery is the source of these; the fear of God is the
source of self-mastery; and faith in the Lord produces fear.
He who believes in God fears punishment; he who fears punishment masters

the passions; he who masters his passions endures tribulation; he who endures
6 Maximos, Dispute with Pyrrhos, 309B–312A. Text in Prp. Maksim Ispovednik, Disput s Pirrom
(Chram Sofii Premudrosti Bozhiey, 2004), 174–6.
tribulation will possess hope in God; hope in God separates off all earthly
inclination; the intellect separated from this will possess love towards God.
(Centuries on Love I. 2–3)7
The first of these chapters has the sequence: love–ἀπάθεια–hope–patience-and-

longsuffering–self-mastery–fear-of-God–faith-in-the-Lord; the second has the
matching chiastic structure: faith-in-God–fear-of-punishment–mastery-of-the-
passions–tribulation–endurance-of-tribulation–hope–separation-from-earthly-
inclination [= ἀπάθεια]–love-of-God. There are several points to note about this
sequence. First, it is a sequence; there is a way that leads to love. Love is some-
thing that we can learn. This is, it seems to me, an immensely heartening fact.
There is a whole discourse about love that regards it as a kind of inspiration; it just
happens, in some kind of amazing way we are swept off our feet. Maximos knows
about that, too, but he is also intensely practical: we want to love—this is how to
do it. There is a sequence, a progression that we can follow, that starts with faith
and leads to love. Another point to notice about these two chapters (not, I think,
generally pointed out) is that they are an expansion of Rom. 5:3–5. There the
apostle says:
Not only that, but we also boast in tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings
about endurance, and endurance testing, and testing hope; and hope is not
ashamed, because the love of God is poured out in our hearts through the Holy
Spirit that is given to us.
Note the sequence: tribulation–endurance–testing–hope–love. Maximos’s sequence

provides an introduction to tribulation from faith, via fear and self-mastery, and
makes ἀπάθεια the bridge from hope to love. The parallel is so close that it cannot
be chance coincidence. The main difference between the apostle and the monk is
that Paul envisages a situation of persecution—that is what θλῖψις, tribulation,
refers to—while Maximos envisages the life of a monk, where the tribulation
arises from the spiritual struggle of his monastic life, and so leads him to intro-
duce the classic monastic virtues of self-mastery, ἐγκράτεια and ἀπάθεια—calm,
detachment, serenity. The transition from martyr to monk is a commonplace in
scholarship about the rise of monasticism, and is discernible here.
Maximos makes no direct reference here to the gift of the Holy Spirit as the
source of the love of God in our hearts, which is the apostle Paul’s main point. The
allusion to the Pauline passage suggests however that this struggle is necessary if
we are to find in ourselves a heart open to receiving the Spirit of Love. If our
hearts are to become open to God, then they need a radical restructuring from
7 Maximos, Capita Caritatis I.2–3, ed. Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Verba Seniorum, NS 3 (Editrice
Studium, 1963), 50.
what they have become as a result of the Fall; it is a broken and contrite heart,
καρδίαν συντετριμμένην καὶ τεταπεινωμένην, that God will not despise. Maximos
expresses this in a characteristically dense passage in Ambiguum 41.
Since then human kind has not been moved naturally, as it was fashioned to do,
around the unmoved, that is its own beginning (I mean God), but contrary to
nature is voluntarily moved in ignorance around those things that are beneath it,
to which it has been divinely subjected, and since it has abused the natural
power of uniting what is divided, that was given to it at its generation, so as to
separate what is united, and in this way piteously endangering itself by moving
almost into non-being, therefore ‘natures have been instituted afresh’, and in a
paradoxical way beyond nature that which is completely unmoved by nature is
moved immovably, if I might so say, around that which by nature is moved, and
God becomes a human being, in order to save lost humanity. Through himself
he has, in accordance with nature, united the fragments of the universal nature
of all, manifesting the universal λόγοι that have come forth for the particulars,
by which the union of the divided naturally comes about, and thus he fulfils the
great purpose of God the Father, to ‘recapitulate everything both in heaven and
on earth in himself ’, ‘in whom everything has been created’. (Amb. 41: 1308CD)
This apparently rather dry and Aristotelian account is really about love and its
distortions. It is love that makes things change and move, and the ultimate source
of love is God, the unmoved mover, who causes movement by being loved: κινεῖ
ὡς ἐρώμενον. The story of the Fall is, for Maximos and the rest of the Fathers, a
story about man’s failing to move in love towards God, who created him and is
immovably at the centre of everything, and instead seeking to make himself the
centre of the world, though in reality subjecting himself to creatures beneath him.
Love for God is replaced by self-love, φιλαυτία, but this self-love leads to the love
of what is beneath man, and the whole metaphysical scheme of things is turned
upside down. Man therefore fails to fulfil his cosmic function of holding every-
thing together as the bond of the cosmos, as God constituted him, and thus he
drifts towards non-being, extinction. To remedy this, God does something that
seems utterly incredible. The unmoved mover, God himself, moves, makes the
creation, or more precisely man, the centre of his loving concern, and becomes
incarnate. God himself takes on in Christ humanity and the cosmic function man
was created to fulfil, and restores the cosmos to its original state of harmony. This
amounts to the ‘institution of natures afresh’, as Maximos puts it, using an expres-
sion from one of St Gregory the Theologian’s sermons. The ‘institution of natures
afresh’ is for Maximos a deeply troubling expression, which he returns to consider
several times, for nature, φύσις, is what God has made, and is inviolable. What
happens, as Maximos explains, is not that natures themselves are changed—that
would mean the destruction of their inner meaning and purpose, their
λόγος—rather it is their way of existence, their τρόπος ὑπάρξεως, their movement,

in the language of the passage just quoted, which had been distorted, that is radic
ally changed, so as to correspond to the λόγος φύσεως as originally constituted by
God. In the passage quoted Maximos uses three terms: κατὰ φύσιν, παρὰ φύσιν,
ὑπὲρ φύσιν—according to nature, against nature, above or beyond nature. The
original state of the cosmos is κατὰ φύσιν, its fallen state is παρὰ φύσιν; what is
needed to restore the cosmos is something that is ὑπὲρ φύσιν. This reveals some-
thing important about love: God created the cosmos and humanity out of love, he
redeems it out of love, but that redeeming love manifests the truth that the love of
God is something beyond nature, something that flows from the inner being of
God himself.
The language of nature is important to Maximos for two, closely related
reasons. First, the drama of redemption is not about superficial refashioning of
human behaviour; it is about something ontological, about the way things funda-
mentally are. That is why, I think, Maximos is so keen to express his understand-
ing of the drama of sin and salvation in metaphysical, cosmological language. The
story of human sin and redemption is a story about the cosmos, not just about
human decisions and motivation. But even at the level of the human we are deal-
ing with something better thought of as ontological, concerned with the way
things are, rather than something simply moral. What is needed if man is to attain
the destiny set before him by God when he created him is for his whole being to
be fundamentally restructured. It is not just a matter of learning to behave mor-
ally, nor a matter of accepting the truth about things: both these have to spring
from a surge of love within that transforms what it is to be human, indeed reveals
that the deepest human reality discloses an openness to God through which man
is transformed into the divine.
In summary, Saint Maximos’s understanding of the virtues is fundamental,
though expressed in somewhat different terminology from the philosophical
tradition on which he draws. Virtue is natural, because it is implicit in our being
created by God in his image and likeness. Ascetic struggle is necessary, because
we have departed from what is natural. Maximos quite naturally lists the cardinal
virtues as delineating the moral nature of man, but when he comes to the practice
of the virtues, we find other notions asserting themselves, terms more practical,
more immediate to the ascetic task in hand: tribulation, endurance, hope, detach-
ment, love.
Virtue in Thomas Aquinas
The notion of virtue occupies a huge place in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. It is

first mentioned in the first section of the second part (Prima Secundae Partis),
which is concerned with human beatitude and what is involved in our return to
that. This leads into a discussion of the passions that need to be redirected if
humans are to come to blessedness. Then follows a long discussion of virtue: its
nature, the distinctions between the virtues (especially the distinction between
moral and intellectual virtue, and between moral and theological virtue).8 The
discussion is fundamentally Aristotelian: virtue is not natural, but the result of
habit; to the Aristotelian discussion of intellectual and moral virtue is added the
Christian crowning of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love (caritas).
Aquinas returns to the notion of virtue in the second section of the second part,
which is devoted to the virtues, theological and moral or cardinal.9 The genius of
Aquinas’s account is the range of his discussion of the virtues. This is true particu-
larly of the cardinal virtues, and dramatically so in the discussion of justice, the
second of the cardinal virtues. It begins with topics that seem familiar enough:
justice itself, injustice, judgement, restitution, crimes against justice—murder,
injury, theft, false accusation, detraction, derision, cursing, fraud, usury. It con-
tinues with religion, which concerns justice in our relation to God—devotion,
prayer (which includes the striking understanding of prayer as ‘interpreting our
desires’: IIa‒IIae. 83. 1 ad 1), worship, sacrifice, tithes, vows, praise of God, super-
stition, idolatry, divination, and so on.
This is a very different discussion from what we find in Maximos: very differ-
ent, and yet fundamentally concordant. The virtues, for Aquinas, delineate the
nature of man, both in relation to his eternal destiny (the ‘theological’ virtues)
and in relation to his life in this world (the cardinal virtues). Although Aquinas
discusses them separately, and distinguishes them clearly, it is nonetheless clear
that in our actual experience of living a virtuous life as baptized Christians the
virtues interlock and interact. For all the influence of Aristotle, Aquinas is aware
of the truth that Plato recognized: that virtue is one and inseparable. For both
Maximos and Aquinas virtue is about nature, human nature—human nature
engaged in the natural order that God created. Nevertheless, there is a clear dis-
tinction for Aquinas between cardinal and theological virtues, and this distinc-
tion is hardly present in Maximos at all. There seem to me two reasons for this.
The first, and most fundamental, has to do with their understanding of nature.
For Aquinas, however qualified in practice (as we have noticed), there is a funda-
mental distinction between the realms of nature and grace, which is reflected in
the distinction between the cardinal and theological virtues. For Maximos, how-
ever, created nature is already graced, by virtue of creation; the nature of anything
is determined by its λόγος, and this λόγος is implicit in Christ, the Λόγος of God.
Maximos, it seems to me, can hardly conceive of the clear distinction Aquinas
draws between nature and grace, cardinal and theological virtues. The fact that
for Maximos virtues are natural, whereas for Aquinas they are a matter of habit,
8 Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia–IIae. 55–67. 9 ST IIa–IIae. 47–170.

also seems to be relevant here: Maximos instinctively taking an inclusive view of

nature, in contrast to Aquinas’s clear distinctions, in this case a distinction that
severs virtue from nature, however much virtue is concerned with what is nat
ural. Second, and maybe consequent on this, the treatment of the virtues in the
two thinkers seems to be utterly different. Maximos’s discussion is intensely prac-
tical: how do we pursue the virtues, how do we cultivate them (or weed the raw
material of our human nature so that virtue can flourish), how do we come to
love, to manifest the fundamental orientation of our nature as God created it? In
contrast, Aquinas’s discussion seems much more theoretical: he is concerned to
explore the way the virtues relate, and the entailments that follow from them; he
is concerned to root everything concerned with human living in the virtues that
represent the perfection of human nature, its characteristic excellences. Aquinas
is not unpractical, just as Maximos is not untheoretical. For Aquinas, however,
the practice of the virtues follows from a consideration of what they are, what
they entail, and—particularly important—the kind of human society promoted
by the practice of the virtues and in which the virtues can flourish; Aquinas—like
Plato and Aristotle—is acutely conscious of the way in which human beings are
social; it is hardly possible for virtue to be a simply individual endeavour. And
with Maximos, it is not that he lacks a theoretical dimension, far from it, but his
theory—his contemplation of the nature of reality—seems to consist of insights
glimpsed from the perspective of his concern to develop true ways of seeing:
insights that are the fruit of participation in the realities we understand, not some
sort of dispassionate analysis.
Virtue in Fr Stăniloae and Josef Pieper
We could take this discussion further by exploring more deeply the writings of
Maximos and Aquinas, but this would open up a vast field of study that could not
be distilled in the pages of an essay. Instead, I want to conclude this essay by doing
something rather different: to compare two thinkers of the twentieth century,
whose thought was indebted to one or other of the great theologians we have
briefly compared. The two thinkers are the Romanian Orthodox theologian, Fr
Dumitru Stăniloae, and the German philosopher, Josef Pieper. The choice of Josef
Pieper is obvious: he thought of himself as a Thomist, and his meditations on
Thomist philosophy and theology, expressed in mostly rather short treatises, pro-
vide insight into how Aquinas is to be interpreted in the twentieth century. The
choice of Fr Stăniloae is perhaps less obvious— his learning was vast and
extensive—but it has often seemed to those who read him that it was the cosmic
vision of St Maximos that most inspired his own theological vision. Their lives
spanned the twentieth century: Fr Stăniloae was born in 1903 and died in 1993;
Josef Pieper was born in 1904 and died in 1997. They both lived through the
darkest days of the twentieth century: Fr Stăniloae suffered under the communist
regime imposed on Romania at the end of the Second World War, and spent five
years (1958–63) in prison and concentration camps; Josef Pieper suffered under
the Nazi regime in Germany, banned from university employment.
Fr Stăniloae is one of the major Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century.
As well as studying in Romania, where he taught for most of his life, he studied in
Athens, Munich, Berlin, and Paris, where he wrote a thesis on St Gregory Palamas.
St Maximos was a major influence on Palamas, and though Fr Stăniloae’s engage-
ment with the Fathers is extensive—he translated an expanded version of the
anthology of Byzantine ascetic wisdom known as the Philokalia into Romanian,
with extensive notes, as well as many other Byzantine theologians—St Maximos
was especially important to him. To explore his understanding of the place of the
virtues thoroughly it would be necessary to examine his translations and com-
ments, as well as look at his own treatises, but there is no space for that here. His
treatises need to be read with care, for they were written to replace older text-
books of theology in Romanian during the communist period, and the censors
allowed Stăniloae little scope to reconfigure his presentation, which he would
surely have done, had he had the opportunity. There is therefore very little on the
virtues in his Teologia Dogmatică Ortodoxă;10 for such teaching it is necessary to
turn to his Spiritualitatea Ortodoxă: Ascetica şi Mistică.11 The structure of this
book has a passing reminiscence of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in that the sec-
tion on the virtues is preceded by one on the passions, the virtues being presented
as the means to the purification of the passions. The list of virtues presented, how-
ever, bears no relationship to the list of classical philosophy. It consists of: faith,
fear of God, repentance, self-control, the guarding of the mind, longsuffering,
hope, meekness and humility, and dispassion or freedom from passion (ἀπάθεια).
The list is modelled on the list we have already discussed, found in the first of
Maximos’s Centuries on Love, and indeed Fr Stăniloae refers to it.12 Fr Stăniloae
draws on many other writings than those of Maximos, notably the Ladder of
Divine Ascent by St John Climacus, the Xanthopoulos brothers’ Directions to
Hesychasts, and St Isaac the Syrian’s Ascetical Homilies, but his fundamental orien
tation is provided by Maximos. The virtues are means of purification of the pas-
sions, of the attachment to self and the world that is the result of the Fall. The
notion that the virtues disclose a sense of human excellence virtually falls from
view, though there is much about how the practice of the virtues discloses a vision
10 Teologia Dogmatică Ortodoxă, 3 vols., 2nd edn (Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al
Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1996–7); English translation as The Experience of God, vols. 1–3, 5 of six
(vols. 4 and 6 forthcoming) (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994–2012).
11 Dumitru Stăniloae, Spiritualitatea Ortodoxă. Ascetica şi Mistică (Editura Institutului Biblic şi de
Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1992); reissue of the original edition, Teologia Morală
Ortodoxă, vol. 3 (Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, 1981);
English translation: Dumitru Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality (St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002).
12 Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 123.
of the world as God created it, something that is developed further on in

Stăniloae’s discussion of illumination, which includes the contemplation of God
in nature.13 What Fr Stăniloae has taken from Maximos is very much what we
have found in him: an intensely practical guide to the development of a life of love
and prayer.
Josef Pieper’s engagement with the virtues is much more direct and explicit.
Over the course of his life he published several, mostly short, books on the
virtues, both the cardinal and the theological virtues. The first of these books,
published in 1934, the year after Hitler’s seizing of power, was, significantly, on
fortitude (or courage).14 Fortitude means, according to Pieper, the readiness to
die: ‘Fortitude that does not reach down into the depths of the willingness to die
is spoiled at its root and devoid of effective power’.15 It is not, however, a courting
of death, nor does it imply that life is regarded as of little worth; on the contrary,
fortitude is readiness to face the loss, ultimately of life itself, for higher goods ‘the
loss of which would injure more deeply the inmost core of human existence’.16
Fortitude is the third of the cardinal virtues, to be guided by prudence and justice.
Throughout this short book, Pieper takes attitudes that are misunderstood and
breathes new life into them. Fortitude is manifest in patience and endurance, but
this does not mean ‘an indiscriminate, self-immolating, crabbed, joyless and
spineless submission to whatever evil is met with, or worse, deliberately
sought out’.
To be patient means to preserve cheerfulness and serenity of mind in spite of

injuries that result from the realization of the good. Patience does not imply the
exclusion of energetic, forceful activity, but simply, explicitly and solely the
exclusion of sadness and confusion of heart. Patience keeps man from the dan-
ger that his spirit may be broken by grief and lose its greatness. Patience, there-
fore, is not the tear-veiled mirror of a ‘broken’ life . . . , but the radiant embodiment
of ultimate integrity.17
The fact that endurance and patience are so close to the nature of fortitude, rather
than aggression or self-confidence or wrath, is bound up with the nature of the
world in which we live:
Power is so manifestly of the very structure of the world that endurance, not
wrathful attack, is the ultimately decisive test of actual fortitude, which,
13 Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 203–23.

14 Josef Pieper, Fortitude and Temperance, trans. Daniel F. Coogan (Faber & Faber, 1955), from the
German originals published as two separate books: Vom Sinn der Tapferkeit and Zucht und Mass. For
Pieper’s own account of the context out of which Fortitude was written, see Josef Pieper, Noch wußte es
niemand. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen 1904–1945 (Kösel-Verlag, 1976), 100–13.
15 Pieper, Fortitude, 17. 16 Pieper, Fortitude, 21. 17 Pieper, Fortitude, 33–4.
essentially, is nothing else than to love and to realize that which is good, in the
face of injury or death, and undeterred by any spirit of compromise. It is one of
the fundamental laws of a world plunged into disorder by original sin that the
uttermost strength of the good manifests itself in powerlessness.18
It is not difficult to see how immediate such considerations were as Hitler’s

Germany began to take shape. In his last chapter, Pieper takes his reflections into
the very heart of the Christian life. Speaking of those who enter the darkness of
purification at the hand of God in prayer, he says:
The Christian who dares to take the leap into his darkness and relinquishes the
hold of his anxiously grasping hand, totally abandoning himself to God’s abso-
lute control, thus realizes in a very strict sense the nature of fortitude; for the
sake of love’s perfection he walks straight up to dreadfulness; he is not afraid to
lose his life for Life’s sake; he is ready to be slain by the sight of the Lord.19
Pieper’s consideration of fortitude is quite remarkable. Basing himself on

Aquinas’s discussions of fortitude, he wrote a tract for the times that was intended
to speak directly to the hearts of his fellow Germans, caught in the grip of unpar-
alleled evil. It was not simply a discussion of morality; it had political relevance,
and went beyond any merely pious concern for the cultivation of virtue.
Conclusion
It seems to me that our comparison of Stăniloae and Pieper paints in deeper col-
ours the contrast we have already noticed in our comparison of St Maximos and
Thomas Aquinas. St Maximos speaks from a tradition of ascetic, indeed monas-
tic, wisdom, full of the experience of those who have sought to live a life of faith-
fulness to God in prayer. Stăniloae follows his master closely in this. Aquinas, in
contrast, is concerned with the analysis of concepts, the concepts in which we
explore our understanding of the nature of the human person and of human soci-
ety: the political relevance of Aquinas is more immediate—his discussion of just
ice adumbrates in some quite practical ways the structures of a society conducted
in accordance with the nature of the human beings who constitute it. We find this
in Josef Pieper’s discussion of fortitude at the beginning of the darkest days of
Germany’s subjection to the Nazi ideology.
Perhaps what emerges from this discussion of different ways of approaching
virtue in one great theologian from the Christian East and another great
18 Pieper, Fortitude, 35–6. 19 Pieper, Fortitude, 42–3.

theologian from the Christian West is—beyond evident differences of approach—a

fundamental complementarity. Both approaches are committed to an understanding
of moral behaviour as fundamentally a matter of virtue; that is, the moral life is seen
less as a sequence of moral choices to be decided in accordance with some kind of
moral calculus, and more as the fruit of a moral vision that enshrines fundamental
moral and metaphysical values—less a matter of doing (though it is important to act)
and more a matter of being. Western thought, represented by Aquinas, explores the
nature of the world and society that will flow from commitment to such a life;
Eastern thought, as represented by Maximos and the Byzantine ascetical tradition,
explores the ways in which we may become human beings capable of recognizing
and striving for the values implicit in the world created by the God of Love.
25
St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoi
of Creation
St Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi of creation is one of the most distinctive features
of his teaching. It is also, it seems to me, somewhat isolated. Commentators have
long remarked that, as Thunberg puts it, in this doctrine we have something
‘developed much further, and in a much more systematic way, by Maximus than
by any of his predecessors’,1 though inspection of the long footnote indicating the
work of these predecessors does not reveal very much; the only significant prede-
cessors seem to be Origen, Evagrios, and Dionysios the Areopagite. In those
thinkers what we find are references to a doctrine of logoi, but little in the way of
explanation. Evagrios, in particular (with whom we find far more references than
the other two put together), seems to presuppose a traditional doctrine: in
Kephalaia Gnostica V.24 (S1), he tells us that ‘the Fathers say that the logoi of judg-
ment are second in relation to the logoi of movement’.2 That quotation introduces
another aspect of Evagrios’ doctrine, also picked up by Maximos, the notion of logoi
of (providence) and judgement, about which we learn little from Evagrios’ extant
writings. (Incidentally, the logoi of providence and judgement suggest a possible
source in Philo, with his notion of the beneficent and kingly powers of God, flanking
the Logos.) However, most of what we find in Evagrios relates to the idea of contem-
plation of the logoi of creation as a stage towards contemplation of God, or theologia,
corresponding to the spiritual ‘cloud’, which is ‘spiritual contemplation containing
the logoi of providence (or the oikonomia: S1) and judgment’ (KG V.24) and the
spiritual ‘mountain’, which is ‘lofty spiritual contemplation, when the nous arrives
above itself and comes to behold all the logoi which concern natures’ (KG V.40).
Another possible source of this notion of logoi of creation, not much remarked
on (to my knowledge) is Plotinos, who in his treatise on providence (Enn. III.2‒3
[47‒8]) introduces the notion of logoi, which are an activity of the all-Soul, and
responsible for the manifold nature of the universe and its harmonious unity,
though a unity of opposites.3 In contrast with our Christian sources Plotinus has
1 Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor,
2nd edn (Open Court, 1995), 73 (unchanged from p. 77 in the first edition (C. W. K. Gleerup / Ejnar
Munksgaard, 1965)).
2 Les Six Centuries des “Kephalaia Gnostica” d’Évagre le Pontique, ed. Antoine Guillaumont, PO 28
(1985), fasc. 1, no 134, 186.
3 Enneads III.3.1.5–9 (A. H. M. Armstrong, Plotinus III (Loeb Classical Library, 1980)).
a lot to say about these logoi, not altogether unlike what we find in Maximos.
In summary, Armstrong remarks, following Bréhier, that logos here is not to be
understood as a separate hypostasis,
but as a way of speaking of the living formative and directive pattern, derived
from Intellect through Soul in the usual pattern, which keeps the material uni-
verse in the best possible order and brings it into a unity-in-diversity of con-
trasting and clashing forces which, though far inferior to the unity of the
intelligible world, is its best possible image in the sharply divided world of space
and time.4
If Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi has little in the way of precedent, it has little,
too, by way of influence. There is no hint in St John Damascene of the doctrine,
even though he evidently knew Maximos’ work well, and indeed shares with him
(and most likely learnt from him) knowledge of Nemesios of Emesa, and how
invaluable he was as a resource for a Christian understanding of man and the
cosmos. I don’t know any Byzantine theologian who shows awareness of the doc-
trine of the logoi—though that is a vast field in which anyone could be overlooked.
Indeed it seems to me quite likely that it may well not have been until the last
century that Orthodox theologians began to see something worth recovering in
Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi.5
It is then a somewhat isolated doctrine. Over the last three-quarters of a cen-
tury, however, it has attracted the attention of Orthodox theologians, and has
been incorporated into some recent expositions of Orthodox theology, notably by
the Greeks, Christos Yannaras6 and John Zizioulas (Metropolitan John of
Pergamon),7 and by the Romanian, Fr Dumitru Stăniloae.8 It has also received
notable expositions in modern scholarship by such as Balthasar,9 Dalmais,10
4 Armstrong, Plotinus III, 39.

5 See Florovsky’s tentative treatment in The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century,
Collected Works 9 (Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 223; and Vladimir Lossky’s more confident treat-
ment in his Essai sur la Théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient (Aubier, 1944), 90–7. The new edition in
the series Patrimoines (Cerf, 2005), preserves the pagination of the original, which makes reference to
the first edition of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Kosmische Liturgie, 1941, and his treatment of the doc-
trine of the logoi there.
6 See Christos Yannaras, To Prosopo kai o Eros, 4th edn (Domos, 1987), 223–56.
7 See John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985), 67–122, esp. 95–8.
8 See Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 2: The World: Creation and Deification (Holy
Cross Orthodox Press, 2000), 27–43.
9 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, 2nd edn (Johannes-Verlag, 1961), 110–17.
10 Irénée-Henri Dalmais, ‘Le théorie des “logoi” des créatures chez s. Maxime le Confesseur’, Revue
des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 36 (1952), 244–9.
St Maximos ’ Doctrine of the Logoi of Creation 273
Sherwood,11 Thunberg,12 and more recently, Loudivikos,13 Törönen14 and

Tollefsen.15 Is there anything left to say? Maybe not, but I still find myself puzzled
over some aspects of the doctrine and in this paper will share these puzzles with
you in the hope of gaining enlightenment. I shall concentrate on Ambiguum 7,
and only make references to other passages when it seems useful; but this is not
much of a limitation, as the discussion in Amb. 7 is one of the fundamental dis-
cussions of the doctrine of the logoi in the whole of Maximos’ œuvre.
I want to start by quoting a remark of Sherwood’s: ‘As the Greek word is itself
polyvalent, so the doctrine attached to it is polymorphous’.16 That is obviously
true, but its consequences are worth pondering. Because the Greek word is poly-
valent, it is difficult to translate: word, reason, meaning, principle? If you choose
any of these you exclude meanings that a Greek might be expected to pick up on
hearing or reading the word. So we tend not to translate and just leave it in Greek:
logos. But that entails another danger, the danger of, on the one hand, assuming
that the word logos always appears ‘trailing clouds of glory’, or rather meaning,
and, on the other, of reifying the word: because the word is foreign, it is not trans-
parent to its meaning as genuinely English words are, which leads us to suppose,
even more than usual, that the meaning of the word is a thing, an error of which
Wittgenstein warned us.
In his discussion of logoi in Amb. 7, Maximos is countering an Origenist doc-
trine that saw everything beginning in a henad, or unity, of rational beings, which
failed in attentiveness to God, and fell away, coming into being as embodied
beings in the cosmos, there to engage in ascetic struggle and eventually to regain
their capacity for attention and be restored to unity in the contemplation of
God. As Dom Polycarp Sherwood remarked of the Ambigua, and especially
the seventh: ‘These Ambigua are a refutation of Origenism, especially of the
doctrine of the henad, with a full understanding and will to retain what is good in
the Alexandrian’s doctrine— a refutation perhaps unique in Greek patristic
literature.’17 So, Maximos corrects this Origenism by reversing its ontological
sequence of rest‒movement‒genesis, and replacing it with his own understanding
that creatures move through the triad genesis‒movement‒rest. And in relation to
11 Polycarp Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua of St Maximus the Confessor, Studia Anselmiana
36 (Centro Studi Sant’Anselmo, 1955), 164–80.
12 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 72–9 (ed. 1: 76–84); Lars Thunberg, Man and Cosmos: The
Vision of St Maximus the Confessor (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), passim and especially 132–40.
13 Nikolaos Loudovikos, I Efcharistiaki Ontologia (Domos, 1992), 85–164.
14 Melchisedec Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford
University Press, 2007), 127–42, 153–62.
15 Torstein Theodor Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford
University Press, 2008), esp. 64–137.
16 Sherwood, The Earlier Ambigua, 166.
17 Dom Polycarp Sherwood, An Annotated Date List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor, Studia
Anselmiana 30 (Centro Studi Sant’Anselmo, 1952), 3.
the doctrine of the henad, he is concerned to preserve the notion of unity-in-

diversity that the doctrine of the henad was intended to express. He starts by
affirming creation out of nothing, an understanding that ‘what exists was brought
out of non-being into being by God’ (1077C).18 This, for Maximos, is absolutely
fundamental: we start with God, not with some primal state of being. Turning to
the created order, and beholding ‘the infinite differences and variety of things as
they exist by nature’, he introduces the model, the logos, in accordance with which
everything is. All that is manifests both natural diversity and an overall unity, so
this model must be understood as one and many: as he puts it ‘the one Logos is
the many logoi’, and also the many logoi are the One Logos. The former is evident
in the incomparable differences among created things. For each is unmistakably

unique in itself and its identity remains distinct in relation to other things. He
[the one observing this] will also know that the many logoi are the one Logos to
whom all things are related and who exists in himself without confusion, the
essential and individually distinctive God, the Logos of God the Father.
Since Balthasar, at least, scholars have remarked on the use here of one of the
‘Chalcedonian’ adverbs— in this case ἀσύγχυτος, in its adjectival form— and
spoken of Maximos’ ‘Chalcedonian logic’. I am convinced by Fr Melchisedec
Törönen that this is probably unwarranted. The fascination with unity- in-
diversity antedates Chalcedon, even in Christian circles, and so is independent of
it, and Maximos nowhere suggests that there is anything ‘Chalcedonian’ about his
concern for the integrity of beings united.19
Maximos goes on to affirm the priority of the logoi to that of which they are the
logoi. This is an entailment of the doctrine of divine creation. ‘Because he held
together in himself the logoi before they came to be, by his gracious will he cre-
ated all things visible and invisible out of non-being’ (1080A)—and by ‘all things’,
he includes both universals and particulars.
Here we have our first interpretative crux. The logoi in some sense precede
creation, whereas all that exists in accordance with these logoi is created—
including, Maximos makes explicit, universals and particulars (τὰ καθόλου τε καὶ
τὰ καθ’ ἕκαστον: 1080A). One way of approaching the doctrine of the logoi—
Balthasar is an example, and Lossky seems to follow him in this—is to see it as
deriving in some way from the Platonic doctrine of the Forms. Plato’s forms, the
eternal models of everything that exists, come in Middle Platonism to be
identified with God’s ideas, the ideas in accordance with which God fashioned
18 I have generally followed the translation of Ambiguum 7 in St Maximus the Confessor, On the
Cosmic Mystery of Christ, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2003) (though see below). I have given references in parentheses in the text, however, by
column and section to the edition published in Migne, PG 91 (which are also given in parentheses
in Blowers and Wilken, trans., Cosmic Mystery).
19 See Törönen, Union and Distinction, 1–6.
the universe. These forms, from the time of Plato himself, are characterized by
logoi, definitions, and it is not difficult to see how this Middle Platonic notion
would be taken over by Christians who believed that God had created the uni-
verse through his Logos, so that the Logos comes to be thought of as the place of
the logoi (cf. Philo’s notion of God as the ‘place of the ideas’20), and the logoi as
manifold expressions of the Logos of God. There may well be something behind
this sketch, but it is misleading if brought to bear on Maximos without a good
deal of caution. For, as we have seen, the universals, to which the Platonic forms
correspond, are for Maximos explicitly created, in contrast to the logoi. Something
else must be going on in Maximos’ understanding of the logoi than the adoption
of the later Platonic notion of the forms as ideas of God. It would appear that, on
the one hand, Maximos is concerned to preserve a sense of the contingency of
creation (so even universals are created) with a sense of God’s intimate concern
for his creatures. But this may emerge more clearly from what follows.
Let us continue with Maximos. He now goes on to introduce another distinc-
tion in the notion of Logos. First, there is the Logos itself, ‘whose excellence is
incomparable, ineffable and inconceivable in himself [and who] is exalted beyond
all creation and even beyond the idea of difference and distinction’. Secondly, there is
this same Logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all the things that
have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being,
[who] recapitulates all things in himself. Through this Logos there came to be
both being and continuing to be, for from him the things that were made came
to be in a certain way and for a certain reason, and by continuing to be and by
moving, they participate in God . . . Consequently, each of the intellectual and
rational beings, whether angels or human beings, through the very Logos
according to which each was created, who is in God and is ‘with God’, is ‘called
and indeed is’ a ‘portion of God’ through the Logos that pre-existed in God as I
have already argued. (1080B)
We have another crux here, which turns, in the translation, on how you write
‘logos’—with a capital or not. I have followed Wilkens’ translation, but the last
reference to ‘logos’ could be taken as referring to one of logoi. Törönen’s transla-
tion of this passage (though it is said to be taken from Wilken and Blowers) reads:
Each of the intellectual and rational beings . . . , through the very logos according
to which each was created (logos that is in God and is ‘with God’) is and is called
a ‘portion of God’.21
Which is it—the Logos of God or the logos of being? In favour of Wilken’s transla-
tion is the echo of John 1:1, which directly applied to the Logos of God, but if the
20 Philo, De Cherubim 49. 21 Törönen, Union and Distinction, 130.

many logoi are the one Logos, then the reference could well be extended to them.
In favour of Törönen’s translation is, first, that the next sentence follows on much
more straightforwardly: ‘Surely then, if someone moves according to his logos, he
will come to be in God (ἐν τῷ Θεῷ γενήσεται: an Evagrian and Maximian phrase,
as Sherwood remarks22), in whom the logos of his being pre-exists as his begin-
ning and cause’ (1080C); Wilken has to take κατ’ αὐτὸν as referring to the Logos
of God, and then the next occurrence of logos as referring back to the logos of
being, as he makes explicit. It is also in Törönen’s favour that Maximos very often
speaks of the ‘logos in accordance with which a being has been created’, meaning
the particular logos, not the Logos of God: for instance later on in this Ambiguum
and in Amb. 15, cited by Wilken and Blowers in a footnote.23 It could be that
Wilken wants to underline that we are created in accordance with the Logos of
God, but for Maximos this is always equivalent to being created in accordance
with our own particular logos, and even Wilken’s translation goes on to affirm
this. This, of course, raises an acute question as to the status of these logoi. If they
are not created, they must be uncreated. Must they therefore be identical with
God Himself?
Lossky solves this by invoking a point Maximos will make a little later on in
this Ambiguum (and elsewhere), when he follows Dionysios the Areopagite who
identifies the logoi with predeterminations and ‘divine wills’—or ‘products of the
divine will’24—προορισμοί and θεῖα θελήματα, and also invoking the distinction
between the divine essence and the divine energies.25 Since they are described as
‘divine wills’, they are distinct from the being of God, and must therefore be iden-
tified with the divine energies. I don’t think that Maximos ever really makes this
identification, but let that pass. Others draw from Lossky’s interpretation the idea
that each of us has in our logos a point of identity with God. It seems to me pretty
clear that this is not what Maximos means; the point of his argument throughout
Ambiguum 7 is that, though the language of being a ‘portion of God’, found in
St Gregory the Theologian, is legitimate, it cannot be taken literally. My suggestion
for the moment is that these logoi, according to which we are created, are pre-
cisely God’s will and predetermination for each creature. They are not ‘things’,
ontic realities; they are what God intends for each of his creatures. Take a passage
like this one:
The logoi of all things known by God before their creation are securely fixed in
God. They are in him who is the truth of all things. Yes all these things, things
present and things to come, have not been brought into being contemporaneously
22 Sherwood, Earlier Ambigua, 169.

23 Amb. 7: 1081A and 15: 1217AB, cited in Blowers and Wilken, trans., Cosmic Mystery , 57, n. 34.
24 Adopting Brian Daley’s term from his translation of Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy: Blowers and
Wilken, trans., Cosmic Mystery, 61, n. 46.
25 Lossky, Essai sur la Théologie mystique, 91.
with their being known to God; rather each was created in an appropriate way
according to its logos at the proper time according to the wisdom of the maker,
and each acquired concrete actual existence in itself. (1081A)
What this means is that God’s intention for each of his creatures is not adventi-
tious, but part of his enduring plan for the oikonomia of creation.
This, it seems to me, is what Maximos is saying in the passages that follow. Not
untypically, Maximos seems to be paraphrasing in different ways his understand-
ing of the central problem addressed in this Ambiguum, namely, how, following
the use of St Gregory the Theologian,26 one can be called μοῖρα Θεοῦ, a portion of
God. He starts again from the ineffability of the Logos of God, but continues
saying that
nevertheless we affirm that the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are
One. Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual beings, creat-
ing and preserving them, the One is many. Moreover the many are directed
toward the One and are providentially guided in that direction. It is as though
they were drawn to an all-powerful centre that had built into it the beginnings of
the lines that go out from it and that gathers them all together. In this way the
many are one. Therefore ‘we are and are called’ a ‘portion of God’ because the
logoi of our being pre-existed in God. Further, we are said ‘to have slipped down
from above’ because we do not move in accord with the logos, which pre-existed
in God, through which we came to be. (1081BC)27
Living in accordance with our logos, which pre-existed in God, means living in
accordance with God’s intention for us, an intention that is not external to God.
Maximos suggests another way of looking at this by commenting on the apostle’s
word that ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).
For whoever does not violate the logos of his own existence that pre-existed in
God is in God through diligence; and he moves in God according to the logos of
his well-being that pre-existed in God when he lives virtuously; and he lives in
God according to the logos of his eternal being that pre-existed in God. (1084B)
First note that we are in God ‘through diligence’—or perhaps better ‘through
attention’ (διὰ προσοχῆς)—if we do not violate the logos of being, if we live, as it
were, in accordance with the grain of our created being, the intention with which
God created us. But then there develops a threefold logos: of being, of well being,
and of eternal being. Elsewhere, Maximos tells us that being and eternal being are
26 In Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14. 7 (PG 35.865C).

27 Wilken again translates the last logos with a capital.
gifts of God alone, while the middle one, well being, depends on our inclination
(Amb. 10. 3: 1116B). To be and to be eternal are simply gifts of God, but to be well
depends on us, depends on our not violating our logos of being. All these logoi of
being are said to ‘pre-exist in God’, for it is God’s intention, from before the cre
ation of the world, that we should exist, and as rational creatures exist eternally. It
is also God’s intention for us that we should link ‘being’ and ‘eternal being’ by
‘well being’, but that is an intention that depends on us. If we join being to well
being we shall come to eternal well being, the bliss of union with God. If well
being is not present, Maximos does not speak of eternal ill being (ἀεὶ φεῦ εἶναι),
but says that ‘the extremes [of being and eternal being] are designated in vain,
and the truth that is in the extremes cannot otherwise accrue to them or be
preserved, or even come to be’ (1116B)—God’s eternal intention, in some
mysterious way, is frustrated, but that state of frustration—
presumably
damnation—is not simply the opposite of the attainment of bliss.
It is in these terms that I am minded to interpret Maximos’ doctrine of the
logoi of creation: as a way of expressing how God’s ineffable will for the created
order manifests itself in a state of manifold difference and diversity that is intrinsic
to finite created being, and intrinsic, too, to its state of fulfilment in deification.
26
Mystagogy in Saint Maximus
Maximus’ Mystagogia
St Maximus treatise, Mystagogia, occupies a rather elusive position in his œuvre.

It is relatively short and well known; it is easily accessible in various editions and
translations; it brings together most, if not all, of the concerns of the Saint, uniting
as it does metaphysical considerations, teaching on the spiritual life, and instruc-
tion in the movement and structure of the Divine Liturgy. Moreover, the work
demonstrates his enthusiasm for the works ascribed to Dionysios the Areopagite,
and his sense that theological tradition is not just a matter of learning, but
involves relationship to a spiritual father, a certain μεγάλος γέρων, to whom he
attributes all that he has to say in this treatise. Despite all that, it is not a treatise
that has attracted a lot of attention, and what attention it has attracted has largely
been for reasons tangential to Maximus’ intention. Chapters 1–7 are regularly dis-
cussed in connection with Maximus’ understanding of what Eriugena called the
‘division of nature’, supplementing other discussions of Maximus’ metaphysics in
works such as various of the Ambigua (7, 10, 41, etc.); chapter 8–21 have been
drawn on by liturgists in their attempts to reconstruct the development of the
Byzantine Eucharistic Liturgy.1
However, Maximus’ concern in this treatise is not primarily metaphysical, nor
is he mainly concerned to provide information about the liturgy—it is often noted
how he jumps from discussing the Tersanctus in chapter 19 to the Lord’s Prayer in
chapter 20, with nothing at all to say about the Eucharistic anaphora. Maximus’
concern is clearly to help one to understand how to participate in the liturgy: he
opens up a symbolic space—which certainly has metaphysical foundations—in
which the spatio-temporal event of the liturgy unfolds, so as to enable his readers
to benefit more completely from participation in the liturgy.
I want to make another preliminary observation by way of moving towards my
main topic, and that is that I think it is sometimes helpful to consider the way in
which Maximus sums up earlier tradition, rather than looking ahead—whether
to St Gregory Palamas or St Thomas Aquinas. Of course, it is universally recog-
nized that Maximus does bring together the traditions that had developed at the
beginning of the seventh century: the dogmatic tradition of the Cappadocian
1 From at least F. E. Brightman in Liturgies Eastern and Western, vol. 1 (Clarendon Press,
1896), 534–9.
Fathers, the ascetic tradition of the Desert Fathers and their successors, and the
metaphysical tradition of Neoplatonism, mediated especially through the one
I prefer to call simply Dionysios the Areopagite. But I think my impression is justi-
fied that often it is what Maximus opens up that attracts most interest, rather than
what he sums up. And this is the case with the Mystagogia. It is indeed important
because it so influenced the later tradition. For parts of it were incorporated in
the treatise on the Divine Liturgy, nowadays generally attributed to St Germanos
of Constantinople (though I believe it to be correct that the MSS tradition rather
favours St Basil the Great), which sometimes came to form the preface to the
priest’s liturgical book, the Hieratikon.
Even so, the very title of the work suggests that we look back further, for ‘mys-
tagogy’ was something central to the experience of the early Church. Mystagogy
knew a remarkable flourishing in the fourth and fifth centuries, not only in the
catechetical and mystagogical homilies of such as St Cyril of Jerusalem, St John
Chrysostom, and Theodore of Mopsuestia, but also in the West in the equivalent
works by St Ambrose and St Augustine. These treatises (both those called mysta-
gogical and those called catechetical) are concerned with mystagogy, initiation
into the mystery of Christ, the foundation for which was laid in baptism, in con-
nection with which all these homilies were prepared. The rite of initiation—
including baptism, with various anointings, the one with myron later coming to
be thought of as separate sacrament, and participation for the first time in the
Eucharistic liturgy—was what these homilies prepared for and meditated on.
Baptism brought about a change, a change from being part of fallen humanity,
damaged by the heritage of Adam, to being incorporated into Christ, the Second
Adam, and finding a renewed humanity. It was thought of, not just as a change of
intention, but as a genuine, ontological change: it reached to the roots of our
being as humans. The baptized Christian regained ways of perception that had
been lost to him or her in their fallen state; they acquired ‘spiritual senses’. This
did not imply de-materialized senses, but senses that could grasp not just superfi-
cial reality but the inner heart of things. A whole new world opened to the bap-
tized Christian, and much of the efforts of the great Fathers of the fourth and fifth
century which I have named above were trying to retain the aspects of this very
sense of entry into a new world. For the distinction between the world and the
church—so vivid in the times of persecution—became elided: the difference
between the worldly and the devout became harder and harder to discern. In a
whole host of ways, the baptismal and Eucharistic rites of initiation were pre-
sented as dramatic, life-changing events. The sense of the baptismal change from
being at home in the pagan world to running the risk of martyrdom—which had
gone for good—was reinterpreted in terms of what the late Father Edward
Yarnold called ‘the Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation’. Dramatic symbolism was
evoked: the contrast of the darkness of the baptistery and the shining light of the
church in which the Eucharist was celebrated; the contrast between the
Mystagogy in Saint Maximus 281
exorcisms, being stripped of one’s clothes and the reviling and spitting on the
devil, on the one hand, and the clothing in white robes and being led, bearing
candles, into the assembly of the church and the presence of the angels, on the
other—all this together with a sense of secrecy, for the Eucharistic assembly was
forbidden to those not initiated, or to those who had spoilt their initiation. The
symbolism was built up to replace the sense of loss in becoming a Christian as the
Church became the religious organ of the Roman Empire.
The Lord’s Prayer in Maximus’ Mystagogia
Maximus was writing more than two centuries later, by which time the Church
had become thoroughly at home in the Roman Empire, an empire that was begin-
ning to crumble before the advance of Islam. Infant baptism was—probably—the
norm by then. The dramatic ceremonies of initiation performed principally at
Easter must have lost much of their impact. And yet there are still traces of the
sense of secrecy instilled by the Eucharistic liturgy. That is, I suspect, at least part
of the reason for Maximus’ failing to say anything about the Eucharistic anaphora,
and why he only alludes to the text of the Lord’s Prayer (though I agree with Alain
Riou there may be a deeper reason for the lack of mention of the anaphora2).
But this sense of secrecy is much diminished, as can be seen from his purely
symbolic interpretation of the deacon’s injunction that the doors be closed: they
no longer excluded anyone, for there was no one to exclude—the world had
become ‘Christian’ and was no longer opposed to the Church. And yet, I think
that here we find a clue to the meaning of mystagogy in St Maximus that I want to
pursue in the rest of this paper. For at the heart of the mystagogical instruction in
the catechesis of the fourth- and fifth-century Fathers was the prayer we call the
Lord’s, the Our Father, Pater noster, Πάτερ ἡμῶν. We need to reflect on this a
moment, before we explore the central role it occupies in St Maximus’ mystagogy.
In his introduction to his extraordinary book on prayer, Earthen Vessels, the
now-archimandrite Gabriel Bunge, remarks
Hence one can say, with some exaggeration: Only in prayer is the Christian really
himself. Christ himself is the best proof of this. For does not his essence, his
unique relationship to God, whom he calls ‘my Father’, become evident precisely
in his prayer, as it is portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels with restraint and then
by John with complete clarity? The disciples, in any case, understood this, and
when they asked him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray’, Jesus taught them the Our Father.
2 Alain Riou, Le monde et l’ église selon Maxime le Confesseur (Beauchesne, 1973), 165.
Even before there was a Creed to sum up the Christian faith, this simple text
epitomized what it means to be a Christian, precisely in the form of a prayer . . .3
As Father Gabriel suggests, there is something significant in the fact that what the
Lord left his disciples was not some summary of belief, nor even a piece of moral
wisdom, but a prayer. And this was not lost on the Fathers of the Church. Before
the Council of Nicaea, we have works on the Lord’s Prayer from Origen,
Tertullian, and Cyprian, and afterwards from Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and
Maximus, at least, not to mention the expositions contained in the catechetical
homilies. Reflection on the Lord’s Prayer took one to the heart of what was meant
by being a Christian. It is a prayer that preserves a sense of secrecy or intimacy: it
is striking that in Ambrose’s De mysteriis, the ‘published’ version, as it were, of his
sermons De sacramentis, the text of the liturgy, including the Lord’s Prayer, is only
indicated, not written out in full, for it was taught orally, only a few days before
baptism, to be learnt by heart as the secret prayer of the baptized Christian, and
pronounced—given back—in the redditio symbolorum at the beginning of the rite
of baptism. This element of the secret discipline, disciplina arcani, remained in
the practice of the Catholic Church right up to the reforms of Vatican II, for out-
side the Eucharist, where in principle only the faithful were present, in the more
public offices of the Church, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed were said silently,
only the opening and closing words being uttered.
The Lord’s Prayer is briefly mentioned by Maximus in the Mystagogia. He
begins the short chapter thus:
The all-holy and august invocation of the great and blessed God and Father is a
symbol of the personal and real adoption given according to the gift and grace of
the Holy Spirit.4
The prayer is a calling on God, an ἐπίκλησις, but it is more than an address, it is a

symbol of our adoption as sons and daughters through the Holy Spirit, an adop-
tion that Maximus emphasizes is ‘personal and real’ (ἐνυποστάτου τε καὶ
ἐνυπάρκτου). It is this ontological dimension that runs through his extended
exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in his Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer.
This comes out in a discussion that had become a regular part of the Greek
discourses on the Lord’s Prayer: a discussion about the difference between the
two words, εὐχή and προσευχή. Origen had discussed it, arguing that the two
words overlapped in meaning. With Gregory of Nyssa, we find a clearer distinc-
tion being drawn, which prepared the way for the distinction Maximus makes.
For Gregory, εὐχή means a vow, ‘a promise of something consecrated to the service
3 Gabriel Bunge OSB, Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Prayer according to the Patristic Tradition
(Ignatius, 2002), 11.
4 Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia, ed. Christian Boudignon; CCSG 69 (Leuven, 2011), ll 752–5.
of God’, whereas προσευχή, prayer, is ‘the offering to God of a supplication for

good things’.5 (In passing, it is worth noting that Gregory calls this a matter of
understanding τὴν θείαν μυσταγωγίαν, the divine mystagogy.) A vow is some-
thing we do; prayer, on the other hand, is a supplication for something good for
us. Maximus takes Gregory’s distinction a step further: a vow is ‘a decision to
keep the commandments, confirmed by a promise on the part of the person mak-
ing the vow’ or ‘a contest of virtue that God welcomes most readily whenever it is
offered to him’, while a prayer is ‘a petition by one who has kept the command-
ments that he may be transformed into the good things he has requested’, or ‘the
prize of virtue that God gives joyfully when the contest is won’.6 The crucial word,
distinguishing vow from prayer, is μεταποίησις, transformation: prayer is a
request that entails transformation. Mystagogy, for Maximus, is not about being
initiated in the sense of receiving information, but in the sense of being trans-
formed, so that everything is seen differently. By the time Maximus gets to the
topos of the difference between εὐχή and προσευχή, this has already been made
clear in his introduction to what the Lord’s Prayer entails. His very first sentence
after the lengthy dedicatory preface runs: ‘If the divine purpose of the divine
counsel is the deification of our nature, and the aim of divine thoughts is to sup-
ply the prerequisites of our life, it follows that we should both know and carry
into effect the power of the Lord’s Prayer . . .’7 He speaks of the Lord’s Prayer con-
taining seven mysteries, which are ‘theology, adoption as sons by grace, equality
with the angels, participation in eternal life, the restoration of human nature
when it is reconciled dispassionately with itself, the abolition of the law of sin, and
the destruction of the tyranny that holds us in its power through the deceit of the
evil one’.8 The list is clearly modelled—perhaps rather roughly—on the petitions
of the prayer; something Maximus makes clear after his expansion of the list. To
see the prayer as embracing seven mysteries, and to see our praying the Lord’s
Prayer as seeking initiation into these mysteries is unmistakably to see the Lord’s
Prayer as fundamentally mystagogical.
Entering into the Lord’s Prayer
I would like to underline a couple of things about the mystagogy which Maximus
understands as involved in entering into the Lord’s Prayer. The first is the
5 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord’s Prayer 2, ed. J. F. Callahan, GNO VII.2 (Leiden, 1992), 21.20–2;
Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer / The Beatitudes, ed. and trans. Hilda C. Graef, ACW XVIII
(Longmans, 1954), 36.
6 Maximus the Confessor, Expositio Orationis Dominicae, ed. Peter van Deun, CCSG 23 (1991),
ll 215–21; ET: G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, eds. and trans., The Philokalia:
The Complete Text, vol. 2 (Faber, 1982), 290 (modified).
7 Van Deun, ed., Expositio Orationis Dominicae, 50–4; Palmer et al., eds., Philokalia, 286.
implicit—and sometimes explicit—focus on the Incarnation. We pray the prayer

revealed to us by the Incarnate Christ, and pray it as those on whom adoption as
children of God, as sons and daughters in the Son, has been bestowed by the
Incarnate Word of God through the Spirit. So Maximus begins his explanation of
the prayer by saying that ‘theology is taught us by the incarnate Word of God,
since he reveals in himself the Father and the Holy Spirit’.9 It is, indeed, initiation
into the life of the Trinity. But this initiation takes place through the Son, and
there is a parallel that Maximus draws out between the Incarnation of the Son of
God and our adoption as sons and daughters of God: ‘by emptying themselves of
the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, delib-
erately emptying Himself of His own sublime glory, the Word of God truly
became man’.10 It was through self-emptying, κένωσις, of his sublime glory that
God became man; it is though emptying of the passions, τῇ κενώσει τῶν παθῶν,
that we are deified. The parallel between Incarnation and deification is a com-
monplace among the Fathers, but Maximus takes it a stage further with his paral-
lel between the divine kenosis and our answering kenosis. The point of the prayer
is, then, deification—transformation into God; and the way is a radical pursuit of
kenosis, in answer to the kenosis of the Word of God in becoming human, and
taking that experience of being human to death, death on the Cross.
Christ’s kenosis led him to the experience of human death; our kenosis is a
kenosis of the passions. St Maximus’ teaching on the passions is quite straightfor-
ward. A culpable passion, he tells us in the First Century on Love, is ‘a movement
of the soul against nature’.11 The qualification παρὰ φύσιν, against nature, suggests
that there are passions that are not against nature, which are presumably passions
that are not culpable. There is no question of destroying our capacity for feeling
and desire:
Let our reason, logos, then, be moved to seek God, let our desire be roused in
longing for Him, and let our incensive power struggle to keep guard over our
attachment to Him. Or, more precisely, let our whole intellect (nous) be directed
towards God, tensed by our incensive power as if by some nerve, and fired with
longing by our desire at its most ardent.12
Maximus is concerned with the direction of our feeling and desire, not their
uprooting. His teaching about the passions often sounds, and is, quite severe, but
that is because we have become so distorted owing to the Fall, not because the
aim of the ascetic exercise he recommends is to uproot our nature.
11 Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Capita de caritate I.35, Verba Seniorum, NS 3 (Editrice Studium, 1963).
12 Van Deun, ed., Expositio Orationis Dominicae, 539–45; Palmer et al., eds., Philokalia, 298,
modified.
Virtue and Intellect in the Mystagogia
Central to Maximus’ asceticism is the doctrine that we are created in the image of
God. In discovering that image within ourselves and bringing it to perfection, we
are returning to our own nature, to what we naturally are. The importance of
nature for Maximus can hardly be understated. One of his fundamental
principles—affirmed in his early ascetic writings, and which re-emerges when he
comes to explore what is meant by ‘human willing’ in his later Christological
treatises—is: nothing that is natural is opposed to God.13
In one of the last works of the saint to survive—his Dispute with Pyrrhos, which
took place in the year 645—Maximus argues that virtue is natural. The deposed
patriarch remarks with amazement: ‘What then? Are the virtues natural?’
Maximus replies that they are. Pyrrhos comes back with the objection that if the
virtues are natural, why do they not exist equally in those of the same nature? But
they do, Maximus replies to the baffled patriarch (at least according to most
MSS). How do you account for such inequality amongst ourselves then? Pyrrhos
retorts. Maximus responds: ‘Because we do not equally act out what is natural. If
everyone acted out what was natural in accordance with their origin, then just as
there is one nature manifest in all, so it would be with virtue, and there would be
no better or worse.’ Pyrrhos objects that ‘if what is natural to us proceeds not
from disciplined training [the Greek is ἄσκησις], but from creation, and virtue is
natural, why do we acquire the virtues, which are natural, through toil and discip
lined struggle?’ Maximus responds thus:
Disciplined training and the toils that go with it were devised simply for the
purpose of separating from the soul in those who love virtue the deceit that
infects it through the senses. It is not as if the virtues have been lately introduced
from outside. For they were inserted in us from creation, as has been already
said. Once therefore deceit has been completely expelled from us, at that
moment, too, the soul manifests the radiance of its natural virtue. He therefore
who is not foolish is sensible; and he who is not cowardly or foolhardy is cour
ageous; and he who is not undisciplined is chaste; and he who is not unjust is
just. By nature reason is wisdom, discernment is justice, the incensive faculty is
courage, and the desiring faculty chastity. Therefore with the removal of what is
contrary to nature [παρὰ φύσιν] only what is natural [κατὰ φύσιν] is accustomed
to be manifest. Just as, if rust is removed, there is manifest the natural gleam and
lustre of iron.14
13 See Maximus the Confessor, Opuscula 7 (PG 91. 80A).

14 Maximus the Confessor, Dispute with Pyrrhos, ed. Migne, PG 91: 309B–312A. Critical text:
Maximus the Confessor, Disput s Pirrom (Moscow, 2004), 174–6.
Virtue is natural; and love, the crown of the virtues, is the fulfilment of our nature.
It is only because of deceit lodged in the soul that disciplined training and toil are
necessary. I have avoided translating ἄσκησις as asceticism, for that seems to me
to prejudge immediately issues that need consideration. The word ἄσκησις gener-
ally means training or exercise, so I have translated it ‘disciplined training’, but the
verb from which it is derived, ἀσκέω, originally meant to work with raw mater
ials, and I am attracted by the idea that the root meaning of ἄσκησις, too, is to
work with raw materials, the raw materials of our humanity, and out of it to make
something fine. It seems to me to accord with what Maximus meant by ἄσκησις,
for he saw humankind as created in the image of God with the purpose of attain-
ing the divine likeness.
That working with the raw materials of our humanity—even in paradise—
would entail uniting our being and our eternal being, both gifts of God, by means
of being well, and so bringing into being an eternal well-being in which the divine
image attains the divine likeness. This triad—being–well-being–eternal being—is
a fundamental aspect of Maximus’ ontology of the created rational being. It
expresses Maximus’ idea that virtue, well-being, unites the gifts of God of being
and eternal being, leading to eternal well-being, the eternal life with God for
which created rational beings are intended. Maximus’ understanding of asceti-
cism naturally leads him to metaphysical reflection, for the goal of asceticism is
the discovery of who we really are, created, as each one of us is, in a unique way in
the image of God.
The intellect, restored to its natural state, in a soul restored, too, to its natural
state, is able to contemplate God the Holy Trinity. There is one place in his com-
mentary on the Lord’s Prayer in which he explains, at the doctrinal level, what it is
that ‘mystical theology’ teaches us, namely, ‘to recognize one nature and power of
the Divinity, that is to say, one God contemplated in Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.15
And it goes on in a passage that is full of the careful distinctions that had been
introduced into Greek theology by Maximus’ day, ending with the resounding
assertion that, in contrast to the various errors held by the heretics, we recognize
‘the same said to be and to be understood as truly monad and triad, the one by
principle according to being, the other by mode according to existence; the same
wholly monad, not divided by the hypostases, the same wholly triad, not con-
fused by the monad . . .’.16
This passage forms a literary point of contact between the commentary on the
Lord’s Prayer and the Mystagogia, for it reappears in a somewhat reworked form
in chapter 23 of the Mystagogia.17 In the Mystagogia, this account of the Trinity is
15 Van Deun, ed., Expositio Orationis Dominicae, 440–2; Palmer et al., eds., Philokalia, 295–6.
16 Van Deun, ed., Expositio Orationis Dominicae, 461–5.
17 The parallel passages are: Van Deun, ed., Expositio Orationis Dominicae, 440–65; Palmer et al.,
eds., Philokalia, 296; Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 23, 840–63.
given as the culmination of the soul’s experience of the Divine Liturgy—it corres
ponds in the brief summary of the Eucharistic rite to the act of Holy Communion.
In the conclusion of the Trinitarian passage, Maximus speaks of the ‘sole ray of
the one triply-radiant light, shining uniquely,’18 and goes on to comment of the
soul that perceives the Undivided Trinity that
in [this light] the soul now equal in dignity with the holy angels, having received
the luminous principles accessible to creation concerning the Godhead and having
learned harmoniously to praise with them the one Godhead un-silently and
triadicly, is brought to the adoption of a genuine likeness by grace. By this, having
in prayer God the hidden and only Father by grace, [the soul] will be united to
the One in his hiddenness by ecstasy from all things, and will experience, or
rather be known by, divine things in so far as it does not wish to be its own or to
be known from itself or by itself, nor to belong to anyone else, but solely for the
whole God to take up the whole of itself in a manner befitting goodness, and for
the whole of himself to penetrate the whole of itself in a manner befitting God,
deifying it wholly and transforming it irrevocably into himself . . .19
The juxtaposition of language here might well seem odd. The passage just cited is
full of language—ecstasy, the ‘One’—associated with ‘mysticism’. But the idea that
‘mystical theology’ might embrace some of the apparently driest technical lan-
guage of being and nature, person and hypostasis, must seem strange to those
who have encountered the notion in what we nowadays call mysticism and in
those called mystics. But this is a strangeness we must overcome, or at least
acknowledge, if we are to do justice to Maximus’ understanding of our transform
ation in God, deification.
The principal reason for this, I would suggest, is the way we have seen Maximus’
concepts and language moving inexorably towards the ontological. He is con-
cerned with reality, the way things actually are, not with feelings or behaviour. In
relation to the Trinity, what the soul comes to experience, or be experienced by, is
that which is discerned by the dogmatic definitions of the Church. Apophaticism
does not mean for Maximus any surrender of our understanding of God as
Trinity, for example, but rather the surrender of the ways we have of imposing our
own notions onto God (it is noticeable, particularly in the section on this in On
the Lord’s Prayer, that what dogmatic language ensures is not so much concepts
amenable to human manipulation, but a sense as to why the formulas condemned
by the councils of the Church are inadequate to the divine mystery).
18 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 23, 862–3.

19 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 23, 864–81; George C. Berthold, trans., Maximus Confessor:
Complete Writings (Paulist Press, 1985), 206, much modified.
Earth and Heaven, Church and Soul
It is not this that I want to pursue now. Rather I want to take a different tack. The
‘metaphysical’ chapters that begin the Mystagogia sketch out a series of parallels,
based on the structure of the church building, itself modelled on the function of
the Church as a community that reflects the activity of God himself. God has
brought everything into being, and ‘contains, gathers and limits them and in his
providence binds both intelligible and sensible beings to himself and one
another’.20 This is reflected in the Church which is
shown to be active among us in the same way as God, as an image reflects its
archetype. For many, and of nearly boundless number, are the men, women and
children who are distinct from one another and vastly different by birth and
appearance, by race and language, by way of life and age, by opinions and skills,
by manners and customs, by pursuits and studies, and still again by reputation,
fortune, characteristics and habits: all are born into the Church and through it
are reborn and recreated in the Spirit. To all in equal measures it gives and
bestows one divine form and designation: to be Christ’s and to bear his name.21
This uniting function is manifest in the structure of the church building, Maximus
goes on to argue, for the division between nave and sanctuary is there to indicate
the way in which those drawn into the church—into the nave—are orientated
towards the sanctuary. The two parts are closely related; indeed, Maximus says,
the church is not properly speaking divided by the differences between the two
parts, but rather by the relationship between the two parts, so that, ‘the nave is
potentially the sanctuary since it is a holy place by reason of its relationship to the
goal of mystagogy, and the sanctuary is actually the nave, since it is there that the
process of its own mystagogy begins’.22
The division between nave and sanctuary is further reflected, Maximus argues,
in the division between the visible and invisible parts of the cosmos (Myst. 2); in
the division within the visible cosmos between earth and heaven (Myst. 3); in the
division within the human between body and soul (Myst. 4); in the division
within the soul between the contemplative and the active activities of the soul
(Myst. 5). There follow two further chapters outlining how the Scriptures can be
said to be a human being (body and soul reflected in the Old and New Testaments,
or in the distinction between literal and spiritual exegesis: the analogy between
Scripture and the human goes back to Origen23), and how the cosmos itself can
be seen as a human being, and vice versa.
20 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 133–5; Berthold, trans., Complete Writings, 186.
21 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 163–74; Berthold, trans., Complete Writings, 187, modified.
22 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 223–5.
23 See Origen, De Principiis IV. 2.4; Paul Koetschau, ed., GCS 22 (Berlin, 1913), 19–21.
The longest of these chapters is that which reflects on the way in which the
division in the church between nave and sanctuary is reflected in the human soul.
And this is prepared for in chapter 4, which, though it is said to be about the
church as reflected in the human, so we expect the division into nave and sanctu-
ary to be reflected in the division between body and soul, in fact presents some-
thing more complex. For Maximus presents us with a threefold division: body
matching the nave, the soul the sanctuary, and the intellect or nous matching the
altar, θυσιαστήριον. This is because—as well as the parallel between the church
and the human—there is an even more fundamental relationship between God
and the human, for the human is created in the image and likeness of God.
It is this more fundamental likeness that is worked through in chapter 5, where
Maximus discusses at length the way in which the contemplative and active activ-
ities of the soul lead the soul to the apprehension of God by inculcating capacities
for truth, perceived by the contemplative faculty, and goodness, pursued by the
active soul. He traces a way in which there are five pairs of qualities—therefore
ten in all—involved in bringing the soul to truth and goodness. The contempla-
tive activity, which he was told is also called the intellect or nous (Maximus pre-
sents this chapter explicitly as the teaching of his geron, his spiritual elder), passes
from wisdom, to contemplation, to knowledge (γνῶσις), to enduring knowledge
(ἄληστον γνῶσις), to truth; while the active soul, also called logos, passes from
moral wisdom (φρόνησις), to practice, to virtue, to faith, and finally comes to
goodness. He speaks of these ten as the strings of a lyre that can be played to
produce harmonious melody in praise of God. He emphasizes that they exist in
pairs; one needs to pursue not just vision, but practical goodness. Ultimately,
there is no truth without goodness, no goodness without truth. The whole chap-
ter is full of allusive teaching, presented, as I remarked earlier, as the teaching of
his spiritual elder or geron, something that he is passing on, without, perhaps,
having fully plumbed its depths himself.
Concluding Remarks
One might wonder what this lengthy chapter on the spiritual life is doing in a
work ostensibly on the structure and meaning of the Divine Liturgy. That it is
more than a digression is clear from the way in which the concluding chapters
(23 and 24) pick up something of the same approach. Perhaps we shall see
Maximus’ point if we remind ourselves of what we have learnt from his compan-
ion work of mystagogy, On the Lord’s Prayer. There I emphasized how important
the ontological is for Maximus, how virtue is seen by him as laying bare the natural,
rather than being concerned with patterns of behaviour. It is this insistence on
the ontological that makes the parallels that he draws in the introductory chapters
of the Mystagogia more than striking, though perhaps not terribly relevant,
similarities. Because Maximus is concerned with the ontological, the parallels he

draws are real, not just imaginative. It is as if what takes place in the church
building—pre-eminently the Divine Liturgy—echoes throughout the cosmos, the
visible cosmos, the human, and the human soul.
The liturgical action is not just echoed, however. The bringing to union that
Maximus emphasizes in the first chapter as the fundamental way in which the
Church in its activity, including its liturgical activity, reflects God and his activity
in the world—this reconciliation—is actually furthered by the Divine Liturgy,
which recapitulates the reconciliation achieved by the incarnation, the Cross and
Resurrection. And it is worked out from the heights of the cosmos to the depths
of the individual soul. For that to be achieved, it is essential that each Christian
soul work out in itself the reconciliation represented in the Divine Liturgy. Lars
Thunberg, one of the greatest of Maximian scholars, once remarked of Maximus:
‘he often constructed his sentences like Chinese boxes, which have to be opened
slowly and with undisturbed attention, to reach the final truth he wanted to com-
municate to his readers’.24 Anyone who has tried to translate Maximus’ works will
recognize the truth of that. But it is not just sentences: it seems to me that these
prefatory chapters of the Mystagogia are like Chinese boxes, each of which can
only be understood in relation to the others. As we turn them round, one inside
the other, we begin to see how the cosmic relates to the historical, and both to the
depths of the soul (the ‘psychological’—except that that word has become trivial-
ized in English). Two of these boxes are crucial: the liturgical and the personal. In
chapter 4, Maximus gives a vision of how the two can come together, and I will
conclude by quoting it.
And again he said that in another manner of contemplation the holy Church of
God is a human being, having the sanctuary as its soul, the divine altar as its
intellect, and the nave as its body, existing as an image and likeness of the human
who has come into being in the image and likeness of God. By means of the
nave, as through the body, it proposes moral wisdom, while by means of the
sanctuary, as through the soul, it spiritually interprets natural contemplation
and by means of the intellect of the divine altar it manifests mystical theology.
Conversely, the human is a mystical church, because through the nave of the
body it is brightened in virtue by the active force of the soul through the obser-
vance of the commandments according to ethical philosophy; through the sanc-
tuary of the soul with the principles of sense purely cut off from matter in the
spirit it is conveyed to God by reason in natural contemplation; while through
the altar of the intellect it is summoned by the silence of Godhead in the
24 Lars Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos (SVS Press, 1985), 29. I was reminded of the quotation by
Deacon Michael Bakker.
innermost shrine abounding in songs of an unseen and unknown mighty sound

through another silence, rich in speech and tone; and as far as is possible to
humans, in accordance with mystical theology it is united in kinship with [the
Godhead], becomes such as is possible for one made worthy of the indwelling of
God, and is marked with his dazzling splendour.25
25 Boudignon, ed., Mystagogia, 264–84; Berthold, trans., Complete Writings, 189–90, much
modified.
27
The Lord’s Prayer as Mystagogy from
Origen to Maximos
Fr Gabriel Bunge remarks in the introduction to his book on prayer in the Fathers
that ‘Even before there was a Creed to sum up the Christian faith, this simple text
[the Our Father] epitomized what it is to be a Christian precisely in the form of a
prayer’.1 The Lord’s Prayer and the Creed came to form the heart of Christian
catechesis, the ‘Mystagogy’, the initiation into the mystery of Christ, by which the
early Christians became members of the Church, of the Body of Christ. Fr Bunge’s
remark could be rephrased by saying that what the Lord left to his Church was
not a philosophy or a body of moral teaching but a prayer—the Our Father—and
the Eucharist, itself a prayer or a prayer service. Becoming a Christian in the early
Church entailed a period of catechesis which concluded with being introduced to
the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, which in some parts of the Church, at least, were
handed over to the catechumens to be learnt by heart, and then given back in the
Church, when they were recited from memory—by heart, as we say in English—as
part of the baptismal rite: what was called in the Latin Church, traditio et redditio
symboli. This was the final stage of the Church’s mystagogia, initiation into the
mysteries, a term that was also applied to the Eucharist, for initiation into the
mystery of Christ, although in one sense a once-and-for-all event, is also a con-
tinuing process of ever-deepening participation in Christ, pre-eminently through
the Holy Mysteries, the Eucharist, the Divine Liturgy.
If we see the Our Father as the central part of the Church’s catechesis, then it
might seem interesting and profitable to explore this relationship between the
Lord’s Prayer and Christian initiation. And if so, then another question arises, for
catechesis, Christian initiation, was one aspect of the life of the early Church that
developed dramatically throughout the early centuries. In truth, we know all too
little about it in detail: catechesis took place, there is little discussion of the pro-
cess as such (an exception is Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus, and that is
limited to the role of the teacher). Nevertheless, the process of change is easy to
discern, because it is so deeply bound up with the changes that took place in the
Church between the beginnings in the first centuries and the settled ‘Christian’
society of (say) the sixth century.
1 Gabriel Bunge, Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer according to the Patristic Tradition
(Ignatius Press, 2002), 11.
The Lord ’ s Prayer as Mystagogy from Origen to Maximos 293
There are three clear periods. First, there is the period of persecution—up to
the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century and the sudden
change in the condition of the Church in the Roman Empire with the conversion
of Constantine. During this period persecution was erratic and local; it would be
a mistake to think of the Church as facing any sustained attempt to liquidate it.
Nevertheless, the Church assumed the features of a secret society; admission to
the Church, through baptism, preceded by catechesis, was controlled by the
bishop. Defection from the Church through apostasy was regarded as serious,
even irrevocable (though this is a complex issue, evidently dealt with in different
ways in different parts of the Roman empire).2
Second, there is the period immediately following, when Christianity began to
become popular. Faced with an influx of would-be Christians that the Church
was quite unprepared for, bishops clung to the patterns of the past. People who
wanted to become Christians were required to go through the same process as
before: a period of catechesis, maybe still of several years, ending with a solemn
rite of initiation comprising baptism, chrismation (in some form), and participa-
tion in the Eucharist, but it was not the same: these would-be Christians were
following the growing trend; they did not face social ostracism or even persecu-
tion, as had been the case before the peace of the Church. What had been a dan-
gerous step now became something socially acceptable, even advantageous. The
catechumens became a very different group of people after the conversion of
Constantine from what they had been before. The bishops responded by trying to
use the ceremonies of initiation themselves to instil a sense of the momentous
step being taken, partly, at least, through making the rites of initiation what Fr
Yarnold called (quoting St Cyril of Jerusalem) ‘awe-inspiring rites of initiation’.3 It
is this transitional period that we know most about: from catechetical homilies by
Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and
other catechetical material by such as Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine.
A further change occurred as the population in the Roman Empire became
more and more predominantly Christian, for gradually it ceased to be the
case that the normal way of becoming a Christian was as an adult convert. Most
Christians we know anything about in the fourth century seem to have embraced
Christianity as adults, but this was a passing phase (though interestingly
the Church continued to use a service intended for adults for the initiation of
infants, right up to the Reformation, and still today, in the Eastern Churches). For
Christian families came to have their children baptized in infancy, and by the
2 See Jean Daniélou and Henri Marrou, The First Six Hundred Years, trans. Vincent Cromin, The
Christian Centuries 1 (DLT, 1964), 67–73, 115–26; Paul F. Bradshaw, ‘The Gospel and the
Catechumenate in the Third Century’, JThS 50 (1999), 143–52.
3 Edward Yarnold, SJ, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of te Fourth Century
(St Paul Publications, 1972); and my ‘Fiunt, Non Nascuntur Christiani: Conversion, Community, and
Christian Identity in Late Antiquity’, printed as Chapter 25 in Selected Essays, volume II.
middle of the fifth century, adult converts had been reduced to a trickle, render-
ing the catechumenate obsolescent (by the seventh century, as is evident from
St Maximos’ Mystagogia, the reason for the deacon’s call for the closing of the doors
of the church after the departure of the catechumens from the Divine Liturgy had
been forgotten). Mystagogy, however, did not vanish; it was transmuted. From
being the process of becoming a Christian, it came to refer to the continuing pro-
cess of being/becoming a Christian, focused on participation in the Eucharist.
This transmutation coincided with a radical change in participation in the
Eucharist: frequent participation in the Eucharist became the reserve of the clergy
and the monks (maybe, too, the exceptionally devout laity). The divide between
the Church and the world came to fall within the Church: between the clergy,
together with the monks, and the laity.4
That development has been sketched in terms that are much too broad and
leaves out what must have been many exceptions, but it gives us a sequence of
periods to work with: the first period of the persecuted Church, the second of the
Church absorbing (or being absorbed by) society, and the third period when
Church and society had become a single entity, a ‘Christian Society’. The three
treatises on the Lord’s Prayer I shall discuss in this lecture belong, one by one, to
these three periods: Origen’s Treatise on the Prayer to the third century, and the
period of persecution; Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Lord’s Prayer to the
fourth century, and the period of transition; and Maximos the Confessor’s brief
treatise On the Lord’s Prayer, to the seventh century, and the period of the
Christian empire (now much threatened, but from outside).
These three treatises are interrelated: Gregory clearly knew Origen’s treatise,
and Maximos Gregory’s, and probably Origen’s as well. Nevertheless they are
rather different works, and these literary differences complicate the differences
due to the different periods they belong to. Origen’s is a treatise, at the heart of
which is an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, with an appendix about practical mat-
ters; though short, it is a good deal longer than the other two. Gregory’s is a set of
five homilies, devoted to the Our Father. Maximos’ is a short treatise addressed to
an apparently high-ranking devout Christian.
Origen
Origen’s treatise is addressed to Ambrose, who was Origen’s patron throughout

his life. Converted by Origen from Valentinianism, he encouraged Origen in his
biblical studies, and provided for him.5 The treatise is also addressed to Tatiana,
4 There are some suggestive remarks about this stage in Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy
(Dacre Press, 1945), 434–526.
5 For Origen’s treatise on prayer, and much else, see Lorenzo Perrone, La preghiera secondo Origene.
L’impossibilità donata (Editrice Morcelliana, 2011). I have only been able to absorb a small amount of
who cannot be Ambrose’s wife, but may have been his sister. The treatise On
Prayer seems to belong to the early period of his time at Caesarea, and therefore is
not directly part of his catechetical work. Nevertheless, we are told by Eusebius
that Origen was appointed, as a young man, by Demetrios, bishop of Alexandria,
to direct the catechetical school there in 202 or shortly after. The Alexandrian
Catechetical School must have been involved in the instruction of catechumens,
though its remit may have been wider: around 218 we are told he devolved on
Heraclas, later bishop of Alexandria, the elementary catechesis, to give himself
time devote himself to more advanced studies.6 The different aspects of Origen’s
teaching seem to me to be reflected in his treatise. The core of the treatise is
devoted to the Lord’s Prayer, which we have seen would have been central to cat-
echetical instruction. This is followed by a practical appendix, dealing with orien-
tation for prayer, and posture—all of which would have been part of Christian
initiation. The first part of the treatise is rather different. It begins with a magnifi-
cent exordium presenting prayer as, to use Lorenzo Perrone’s word, l’impossibilità
donata, ‘impossibility granted’:
Things which cannot be grasped by rational and mortal kind because they are
vast and transcend the human, and far surpass our perishable nature, neverthe-
less by the will of God become capable of being so grasped by reason of the
abundant and immeasurable grace of God poured out from him towards men
through Jesus Christ, the minister of boundless grace towards us, and through
the Spirit, his fellow-worker.7
Origen starts with paradox, a paradox that leads us into the mysterious life of the
Trinity. Prayer links heaven and earth, something beyond the mortal and cor
ruptible, but only made possible by the grace of God. This discussion is supported
by many scriptural quotations. Origen then moves on quickly to look at the way
in which the Scriptures talk about prayer. In the Greek Septuagint, there are two
different words used for prayer: εὐχή and προσευχή. There follows a careful dis-
cussion suggesting differences between these words, and indeed differences in the
use of each word. Origen does not, however, make too much of this, but very
quickly embarks on a philosophical defence of prayer, against objections deriving
from the notion of divine providence. Origen deals skilfully with these objections,
pointing out that those who object to prayer also abandon any belief in
this learned and detailed work. For the text, I have used the edition in Carl Heinrich Eduard
Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis Opera Omnia, vol. 17 (Berlin, 1844), 82–297, and consulted several
translations.
6 Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 6. 15.
7 De Oratione 1.1 (Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis, 82); ET, slightly modified: Eric George Jay, Origen’s
Treatise on Prayer (SPCK, 1954), 79.
providence, or even in God,8 and leading the discussion into the question of the
relationship between providence and freewill, an issue that Origen discusses
many times, for instance in On First Principles and Against Celsus; it is also the
subject of the last part of the Origenian anthology, the Philokalia, compiled by
Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian. The treatise On Prayer, therefore,
reflects faithfully Origen’s own engagement in the task of catechesis: both the
humble task of initiating would-be converts into a Christian understanding of
prayer and the more thorny problem of articulating Christianity in such a way
that it could engage with the intellectual culture of late antiquity. In the light of
this distinction, it is striking how uniform Origen’s method is. This is not a work
of apologetics, so Origen does not, as he does in Against Celsus, quote directly
from philosophical sources, though one can often detect the philosophical ideas
he is treating beneath the surface of his discourse: his reference to πατέρα καὶ
δημιουργὸν . . . τοῦ παντὸς9 recalls Plato’s Timaeus, but it is not a quotation. Rather
Origen quotes copiously from the Scriptures, even drawing out the questions
from the scriptural texts: the problem about the use of praying, if God knows
anyway, is set up by quoting from various books of the Bible. Again in his more
developed response to the question of the need for prayer, Origen develops an
understanding of what it is to be a rational human being by considering how
things are moved. Inanimate things, stones, are moved by some external force;
but there is movement that comes from within: plants grow because of their
intrinsic nature, which could also be called soul, ψυχή, they are moved ‘out of ’
(ἐκ) themselves, that is, by something within; animals have greater capacity of
movement, they are moved ‘from’ (ἀπό) themselves, i.e. they move themselves;
with rational beings we speak of movement ‘by’ (διά) themselves. In this latter
case, there are things that are ‘up to us’ (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν). The argument continues using
these terms.10 The terms are familiar: of Aristotelian origin, they are the terms
regularly used in discussion of human autonomy (perhaps a better way of putting
it than speaking of freewill) in discussion in Hellenistic philosophy. Origen uses
them freely and confidently, but feels no need to make explicit reference to the
philosophical sources that he evidently knows well.
We need to pass on to Origen’s discussion of the Lord’s Prayer itself. Unlike
other discussions, Origen discusses the two different texts found in the Gospels
(Matt. 6:9–13; Luke 11:2–4), rather than basing himself on the text as used litur
gically and noting variants (as we shall find in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximos).
This attention to textual detail is typical of Origen. His discussion of the prayer
itself is prefaced by consideration of proper disposition for prayer, basing himself
on Matthew’s account: prayer should be in secret, and not use many words.
8 De Oratione 5.1 (Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis, 102).

10 See De Oratione 6 (Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis, 107–14).
Characteristically Origen comments, ‘The word of God is one, but many are the
words that are foreign to God’.11
He begins his commentary proper by noting that, though God is referred to as
Father in the Old Testament, he is never addressed as Father in prayer, anticipat-
ing a debate that took place some decades ago about the uniqueness of Jesus’
addressing God as Father, and commanding his disciples to do so. Origen links
our calling God Father with the fact that we are images of God, through being
images of the one who is truly the Image of God, the Son: as sons in the Son, we
are images in the Image. ‘The saints, being the image of an image, and that image
the Son, take the impression of sonship, not only becoming of the same form as
the body of the glory of Christ, but also like unto Him who is in the body’.12
Calling God Father is seen by Origen to be bound up with the mystery of the
Incarnation. Dealing with the second phrase, the first petition, of the Lord’s
Prayer, ‘Hallowed by your name’, Origen develops a theology of the Name: the
name refers to the unique quality (ἰδία ποιότης) of the one named.13 In the case of
God, this unique quality is being, ‘ὤν’. As Origen moves through the petitions of
the Our Father, one guiding thread is the idea that those who pray this prayer are
images of the Heavenly One, Christ, who is the Image of the Father: hallowing the
Name, praying for the coming of the Kingdom, and the fulfilment of God’s will on
earth as in heaven. For this we need the ἐπιούσιος bread of the Eucharist, for
Origen takes ἐπιούσιος to mean, not daily, but transcending being, which makes
us the περιούσιος people of Exod. 19:5 (usually translated as a ‘peculiar people’).
‘The “true bread” is that which nourishes the true man, the man created after the
image of God, and through which he who is nourished by it is made to the image
of Him that created him’.14 Again the petition for forgiveness of sins, as we for-
give, is related to the fact that we are created in the image of God and are to reflect
God’s forgiving nature in our lives. Origen gives much space to the petition to be
delivered from temptation, distinguishing the different kinds of temptation, and
arguing that ‘temptations that come upon us serve the purpose of showing us
who we really are and to make manifest the things that are in our heart’.15
The exposition of the Lord’s Prayer is followed by a number of particular points
relating to prayer. We should pray standing, lifting up our hands to God. However,
when we acknowledge and confess our sins, we are to kneel and prostrate our-
selves. We are to pray facing East, even if we are in a room that faces in some
other direction. More important than these bodily aspects of prayer is our inner
disposition: the one who prays
11 De Oratione 21.2 (Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis, 169); ET: Origen, Prayer, Exhortation to
Martyrdom, ed. John J. O’Meara, Ancient Christian Writers 19 (Newman Press, 1954), 72.
12 De Oratione 22.4 (Lommatzsch, ed., Origenis, 175); ET: O’Meara, ed., Prayer, 75.
should put away from his mind all outside thoughts, and so come to prayer: he
should, so to speak, lift up his soul before lifting up his hands; lift up his mind to
God before lifting his eyes; and, before standing to pray, lift up his spirit for the
things of earth and direct it to the Lord of all.16
Origen concludes by setting out the four parts of prayer: glorifying God, thanking
him, confessing our sins, and making petition for oneself, one’s family and
friends.
Origen’s teaching on prayer combines the practical and the philosophical, but,
more than anything else, is based on his wide knowledge of the Scriptures on
which he draws throughout his treatise.
Gregory of Nyssa
Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Our Father17 appear to be homilies given to his
congregation in Nyssa; they are not at all elaborate in their diction, as are the
court sermons that he also gave, nor do we find the allegorical exegesis such as we
find in the Homilies on the Song of Songs. They clearly belong to the period of his
episcopate, so from 371 until he died in about 394. The manuscript tradition is
plentiful, with manuscripts in Syriac and Georgian; there are no problems, save
for a passage in or. 3 on the Trinity, which seems out of place—a sudden plunge
into technical Trinitarian theology—and is not, indeed, included in all manu-
scripts, though it seems clear that it belongs to the original. This is not really rele-
vant for what we are concerned with in these homilies, but I mention it, because it
may have, we shall find, relevance later on.
We cannot be sure of the original context in which they were delivered, save
that, as I have said, they seem homilies delivered to the congregation of which he
was bishop. Although they are on the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer was part
of the catechetical programme, there is no reason to suppose that they formed
part of a catechetical sequence, though there is no reason, either, to suppose that
they were not catechetical in intention, and certainly no reason to suppose that
Gregory would have treated the Lord’s Prayer any differently when he was
engaged in catechesis. So far as Gregory’s engagement in catechetical instruction
was concerned, we have some idea of how he treated Christian doctrine and the
sacraments from his Oratio catechetica; the Homilies on the Our Father comple-
ment the teaching found there, though they are very different in style.
17 For the critical text of these homilies, see Gregorii Nysseni, De oratione dominica. De beatitudini-
bus, ed. J. F. Callahan, GNO VII.2 (Brill, 1992).
The first homily treats of prayer in general, and in particular underlines the
necessity of prayer; the four following homilies work through the Lord’s Prayer:
homily 2 on the initial address, ‘Our Father in Heaven’; homily 3 on the petition,
‘Hallowed be your name; Your kingdom come’; the fourth on the petition, ‘Your
will be done, on earth as in heaven’, and goes on to discuss the petition, ‘Give us
today our daily bread’; while the final homily treats ‘Forgive us our debts, as we
forgive our debtor’, and concludes by discussing, ‘Lead us nor into temptation, but
deliver us from the evil one’.
Gregory begins his first homily by ascribing the teaching of prayer to the
Divine Word, referring to the disciples’ request to the Lord to teach them to pray.
However, Gregory immediately adds, his present congregation needs not so much
teaching on how to pray, as on why it is necessary to pray at all. Origen, in his
treatise, takes it for granted that Ambrose and Tatiana, and maybe all the catechu-
mens he had addressed, see the point of praying, so that he plunges directly into
the nature of prayer; the doubts he soon finds himself addressing are philosoph
ical doubts about the place of prayer. Gregory finds it necessary to start by per-
suading his congregation of the need to pray. He remarks, ‘for I see that in this
present life men give their attention to everything else, one concentrating on this
matter, another on that; but no one devotes his zeal to the good work of prayer’.18
Gregory goes on to give examples of what he means—the tradesman rising early
to display his goods, the customer arriving early to snatch the best bargains, the
lawyer concentrating on the speech he has to deliver in the court—in all these
cases, prayer is neglected with the result that God is forgotten, and our daily
affairs are full of sin, sin caused by the ruling motive of wanting more, covetous-
ness, πλεονεξία. This leads to disputes and arguments, and may end in bloodshed
and murder. The way to avoid this is to put prayer first, to seek God’s blessing on
our endeavours: in this way sin finds no entrance into the soul. As Gregory devel-
ops his theme, his homily becomes an encomium of prayer:
Prayer is conversation with God, contemplation of the invisible, the fulfilment

of what is longed for, equality of honour with the angels, advance in the good,
turning away from vices, correction of where we have sinned, enjoyment of the
present, the substance of what is hoped for.19
Gregory goes on in this vein and begins to speak about what we should pray for.
Faced with some of the bloodthirsty prayers in the Old Testament, he engages in
allegorical exegesis, guided by the principle that our prayer should measure up to
the nature of God. It makes no sense to pray for the death of our enemies, for
18 De Oratione Dominica 1, in GNO 7.2, 5.9–11; ET: St Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord’s Prayer: The
Beatitudes, ed. Hilda C. Graef, Ancient Christian Writers 17 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1954), 21.
19 De Oratione Dominica 1, in GNO 7.2, 8.30–9.4; ET: mine.
‘God did not make death’, quoting from the book of Wisdom (Sap. 1.13): how
then could one pray for the death of one’s enemies, seeing that God is stranger to
any death-dealing.20
In this first homily, we see Gregory addressing a congregation whom he sees to
be not at all vigilant about the faith: very much the mixed bag of human kind that
the growing social pressure to become Christian was producing.
If we needed confirmation that in these lectures Gregory is concerned with
mystagogia, we find it at the very beginning of or. 2, where he speaks of Moses’
‘mystagogy on the mountain’ (τῇ κατὰ τὸ ὄρος μυσταγωγίᾳ), with which he
compares Christ’s own work of mystagogy. In contrast with Moses,
[Christ], first of all, leads us not to a mountain but to heaven itself, which he has
rendered accessible [βατὸν, play on words with βάτος, the burning bush] to men
by virtue. Secondly, he gives them not only the vision of, but a share in, the
divine power, bringing them in a certain way to kinship with the transcendent
nature. Moreover, he does not hide the supernal glory in darkness, making it
difficult for those who want to contemplate it; but he first illumines the darkness
by the brilliant light of his teaching and then grants the pure in heart the vision
of the ineffable glory in shining splendour.21
Despite the simple diction of these homilies, the attentive reader will pick up allu-
sions, as in the passage just quoted, or a little later on what is nearly a direct
quotation from Plato, when he says, ‘Now the way which leads human nature
back to heaven is none other than that of avoiding the evils of the world by flight;
on the other hand, the purpose of fleeing from evil seems to me precisely to
achieve likeness with God’.22 This somewhat Platonic vein continues, and pro-
duces the beautiful image in or. 3: ‘He touches the earth but lightly with the tip of
his toes, for he is not engulfed by the pleasurable enjoyments of its life, but is
above all deceit that comes by the senses’.23 It is possible there is a reminiscence
here of Clement of Alexandria’s picture of the Gnostic rising on the tip of his toes
as he closes his prayer, though the verbal parallel is not very exact.24 Homily 3,
from which this comes, presents an interesting textual variant of the Lord’s Prayer.
According to Gregory, in his version of Luke’s Gospel, instead of ‘Your kingdom
come’, it reads, ‘May your Holy Spirit come upon us and purify us’,25 which leads
into the long passage of detailed Trinitarian theology, already mentioned, which
closes the homily.
20 De Oratione Dominica 1, in GNO 7.2, 17.12–15.

21 De Oratione Dominica 2, in GNO 7.2, 20.21–21.4; ET (modified), Graef, ed. The Lord’s
Prayer, 35–6.
22 De Oratione Dominica 2, in GNO 7.2, 28.2–6; ET, Graef, ed. The Lord’s Prayer, 42. Cf. Plato,
Theaetetus 176B.
23 De Oratione Dominica 3, in GNO 7.2, 36.12–15; ET, Graef, ed. The Lord’s Prayer, 50.
24 See Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.7.40.1–3.
25 De Oratione Dominica 3, in GNO 7.2, 39.18–19.
The fourth homily leads from consideration of the accomplishment of God’s

will, on earth as in heaven, in which Gregory develops his understanding of the
human as standing on the frontier between the corporeal and the incorporeal, the
material and the spiritual. This leads on to the petition, ‘Give us today our daily
bread’. In contrast to Origen, Gregory passes over the suggestive word, ἐπιούσιος,
and concentrates on the simplicity of the petition for bread:
So we say to God: Give us bread. Not delicacies or riches, nor magnificent pur-
ple robes, golden ornaments, precious stones, or silver dishes. Nor do we ask
him for landed estates, or military commands, or political leadership. We pray
neither for herds of horses and oxen or other cattle in great numbers, not for a
host of slaves. We do not say, give us a prominent position in assemblies or
monuments and statues raised to us, nor silken robes and musicians at meals,
nor any other thing by which the soul is estranged from the thought of God and
higher things; no—but only bread.26
Gregory goes on to consider the consequences of this desire for having more
(ἡ ἐπιθυμία τῆς πλεονεξίας): ‘And so someone must weep, his neighbour must
sorrow, many who are deprived of their property must be miserable, in order that
their tears may contribute to enhance the ostentatious display of his table’.27 So we
must pray simply for bread, as in the prayer. If we pray thus, we are committing
ourselves to the promotion of a just society:
You are master of your prayer, if abundance does not come from another’s prop-
erty and is not the result of another’s tears; if no one in hungry or distressed
because you are fully satisfied. For the bread of God is above all the fruit of just
ice, the ear of the corn of peace, pure and without any admixture of the seed of
tares. But if you cultivate what is another’s property, if you practise injustice and
confirm your unjust gains by written documents, then you may indeed say to
God, Give bread; but another will hear your plea, not God. For the fruit of
injustice is the product of the contrary nature. He who pursues righteousness
receives his bread from God, whereas the man who cultivates iniquity is fed by
the father of iniquity.28
Gregory’s catechesis is not just concerned with personal morality, the struggle
against the passions and wanting more; it is also concerned with the conditions
that go to make a just society—he is concerned with what we call nowadays social
justice. This seems to me to reflect the dangers of the assimilation of Church and
society, which was the result of the opening of the doors of the Church to all who
26 De Oratione Dominica 4, in GNO 7.2, 51.13–22; ET, Graef, ed. The Lord’s Prayer, 63–4.
27 De Oratione Dominica 4, in GNO 7.2, 54.21–4; ET, Graef, ed. The Lord’s Prayer, 66.
28 De Oratione Dominica 4, in GNO 7.2, 55.23–56.9; ET, Graef, ed. The Lord’s Prayer, 67–8.
wanted to embrace Christianity, often from very mixed motives. For Gregory it is
important that society be assimilated to the Church, not the other way about.
And this comes over in the concerns of his catechesis, and particularly his expos
ition of the Our Father.
Maximos the Confessor
Maximos’ treatise on the Our Father belongs to a later time, to the seventh cen-
tury, probably to the beginning of the period when he settled in North Africa
after fleeing his monastery on the Erdek peninsula before the advance of the
Persian army in 626. It is the period to which most of his theological works
belong, apart from his writings in defence of Chalcedon. It is addressed to what
appears to be a high-ranking layman, possibly one of Maximos’ spiritual children,
for there seems to have been a group of devout laymen in the Byzantine court
who looked to him for spiritual guidance. I think that we can confidently con-
sider it as an example of the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in the context of mys-
tagogy, not least because in his work entitled Mystagogia there are passages of
theology, in the strict sense of the word, that is, the doctrine of the Trinity, that
are picked up and developed in the treatise on the Our Father. The mystagogical
context is however different. We are no longer concerned with the catechume-
nate, which, for reasons already mentioned, would have become the exception
rather than the rule by the seventh century, rather mystagogia seems now to sug-
gest the Eucharistic liturgy itself and what is a lifelong initiation into the deeper
mysteries of Christianity, not the once-and-for-all initiation through Baptism,
Chrismation, and the Eucharist. The treatise on the Lord’s Prayer is addressed to a
devout Christian, and the Lord’s Prayer itself presented as an epitome of the
whole of theology, understood not just as teaching but as assimilation to God by
restoration of God’s likeness.
For hidden within a limited compass this prayer contains the whole purpose and
aim of which we have just spoken; or, rather, it openly proclaims this purpose
and aim to those whose intellects are strong enough to perceive them. The
prayer includes petitions for everything that the divine Logos effected through
his self-emptying in the incarnation, and it teaches us to strive for those bless-
ings of which the true provider is God the Father alone through the natural
mediation of the Son in the Holy Spirit.29
29 Maximos the Confessor, Expositio Orationis Dominicae, ed. Peter van Deun, CCSG 23, ll. 62–9;
ET: The Philokalia: the Complete Text, compiled by St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and
St Makarios of Corinth, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. 2 (Faber and
Faber, 1981), 286.
Maximos sees the Lord’s Prayer as containing, in a hidden, or mystic, form, seven
mysteries: ‘theology, adoption as sons by grace, equality with the angels, partici-
pation in eternal life, the restoration of human nature when it is reconciled dis-
passionately with itself, the abolition of the law of sin, and the destruction of the
tyranny that holds us in its power through the deceit of the evil one’.30 These seven
mysteries correspond to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To quote
Maximos again:
The Lord’s Prayer, as I have said, contains a petition for each of these things.
Fort, it speaks of the Father, his name, and his kingdom. Second, it shows us that
the person who prays is by grace the son of this Father. It asks that those in
heaven and those on earth may be united in one will. It tells us to ask for our
daily bread. It lays down that man should be reconciled with one another and
unites our nature with itself when we forgive and are forgiven for then it is not
split asunder by differences of will and purpose. It teaches us to pray against
entering into temptation, since this is the law of sin. And it exhorts us to ask for
deliverance from the evil one.31
It is significant, Maximos adds, that this teaching is presented in the form of a

prayer, for the teaching is not just something to contemplate, or consider, but
something we want to receive, to make our own, and this is only possible by God’s
grace. It is presented to us, therefore, in the form of a prayer.
The rest of the treatise then takes us through the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer,
one by one. Or at least, that is what he sets out to do: in reality, in a way which is
typical of the way Maximos’ thought moves, he seems to move in cycles, coming
back repeatedly to the same point, though at a higher level.
The beginning of the Lord’s Prayer addresses God as Father, asks for the hal-
lowing of his name and prays for the coming of his kingdom. This, for Maximos,
is a revelation of the Trinity: for the name of the Father is the Son, and for the
petition ‘Your kingdom come’, he recalls the variant reading, also known to
Gregory of Nyssa: ‘May your Holy Spirit come and purify us’.32 The kingdom is
then the Holy Spirit. We acknowledge the Trinity though sanctification and puri-
fication: sanctification (or hallowing) of the name, and purification through the
Holy Spirit. Or put another way, the kingdom belongs to the gentle and humble,
in support of which Maximos cites several scriptural passages. He then reaches
ahead through the later petitions, seeing in ‘Your will be done’ the reconciliation
of heaven and earth, and the assimilation of the human to the angelic state. The
theme of reconciliation as restoring the human to its natural state is also developed,
30 Exp. Orationis Dominicae, in CCSG 23, ll. 81–5; ET: Palmer et al., trans., The Philokalia, 287.
32 Exp. Orationis Dominicae, in CCSG 23, ll. 244–5.
reaching forward to the petition for forgiveness. Maximos’ exposition is dense

and allusive. The theme of reconciliation leads him to recall Galatians 3:28, about
there being neither Jew or Greek in Christ, which leads him to draw in the
Cappadocian theme, found in both the Gregories, that Christian confession of
the Trinity is a middle way between Greek polytheism and Jewish monotheism.
This then leads him into a fairly technical statement of Trinitarian theology, in
which he develops the passage from his Mystagogia.33 This is, however, presented
as ‘mystical theology’ (πάγιος μυστικῆς θεολογίας θεσμός: ‘inexorable law of mys-
tical theology’),34 the term used by Dionysios, and used elsewhere by Maximos,
for the highest contemplation of God and assimilation to him.
We are moving here into the deepest realms of the Christian life. As
Maximos put it:
When we pray let our aim be this mystery of deification, which shows us what
we were once like and what the self-emptying of the only-begotten Son through
the flesh has now made us; which shows us, that is, the depths to which we were
dragged down by the weight of sin, and the heights to which we have been raised
by his compassionate hand.35
Concluding Remarks
What I have tried to do in this paper is set the practice of mystagogy against the
developments in the early Church from being a persecuted minority to becoming
the Church of a Christian Roman Empire. Apart from the contextual development
I have emphasized, we have noted many Platonic allusions, which serve to remind
us of the tradition of philosophical mystagogia found in the Platonic tradition—in
Plato himself, especially in the Symposium and the Phaedrus—and developed by
Philo in a way that likely provided a direct resource for our authors. This is a
theme to be drawn out another time. Nevertheless, from our discussion it is
evident how the Christian practice of mystagogia developed in response to the
changing social and political situation of the early Church.
33 The parallel passages are: Exp. Orationis Dominicae, in CCSG 23, ll. 440–65; Mystagogia 23, in
Maximi Confessoris Mystagogia, ed., Christian Boudignon (CCSG 69; Turnhout, 2011), ll. 840–63.
34 Orationis Dominicae, in CCSG 23, l. 431.
28
St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγος
and τρόπος and the Ontology of the
Person
St Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi of creation, together with the related topic of
the distinction between logos and tropos has been the subject of many discussions
over the last half-century or so. In this paper, I shall draw on these reflections and
add some of my own; it is a well-worn topic and I doubt if I have anything dra-
matic to add to the accumulated wisdom of scholarship, but it is perhaps worth
reminding ourselves of the historical development of such reflection, and
Maximos’ own contribution.
Logos, in this context, means something like ‘principle’, or ‘meaning’. According
to Maximos everything that exists has its logos which determines its nature; he
speaks of λόγος τῆς οὐσίας or λόγος τῆς φύσεως. It means something like ‘defini-
tion’, a meaning logos had for Plato. It is a central notion in many aspects of his
thought. In relation to the Johannine notion of creation through the Logos, he
develops an understanding of the logoi of creation, according to which all the
logoi participate in the Logos of God—‘the One Logos is many logoi, and the many
logoi are One’, as he asserts several times in Ambiguum 7—so that all the logoi
pre-exist in God: the being and purpose of everything that exists exists as para-
digm, pre-determination, or will in God, in this context citing several times
Dionysios’ Divine Names 5.8. One can also speak of λόγος τῆς οὐσίας in relation to
God, though here it cannot mean definition, as God is beyond definition, indeed
beyond any kind of determination.
The origin of the word tropos in relation to logos goes back to Trinitarian the
ology and to the terminology made popular, if not invented, by the Cappadocian
Fathers who, in conjunction between their distinction with ousia and hypostasis,
spoke of λόγος τῆς οὐσίας and τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως—principle of being and mode
of existence: the three Persons had a single λόγος τῆς οὐσίας, but each had his own
τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως. Mode of existence is, then, the equivalent of ἰδιότης, par-
ticularity, distinguishing feature; the term, mode of existence, seems to refer pri-
marily to source or origination; it might be rendered mode of coming-to-be, used
in relation to the Godhead analogically. This seems to be a settled result of
modern scholarship, found in Prestige’s now rather old God in Patristic Thought,1
as well as in more recent discussions, such as those of Brian Daley.2 When the
language of nature and hypostasis was extended to Christology—a move given
synodical authority by Chalcedon—the distinction between logos and tropos fol-
lowed, and was used in later Patristic discussion of their understanding of the
union of divine and human in Christ.
Maximos’ developed doctrine of the logoi of creation opens the door to the use
of tropos in this context, too, and it is a door through which Maximos treads. This
is true, even though it seems to be the case that Maximos makes no particular use
of the distinction between ousia and hypostasis outside Trinitarian theology and
Christology; his use of hypostasis is that of most late antique Christian thinkers:
hypostasis simply refers to the particular case of a being defined by an essence—a
particular man, or a particular horse, the use we find in the Dialectica of John
Damascene, a theologian greatly influenced by the Confessor. The case is, I think,
different with the distinction between logos and tropos, where Maximos exploits
this distinction to bring out his understanding of what is involved in the creation
and re-creation of the human, and therefore his understanding of what we might
well call his ‘ontology of the Person’.
It is best, I think, to approach Maximos’ understanding of the ontology of the
Personal, by following in this own thought the movement of the pair logos/tropos
from Trinitarian theology, through Christology, to his understanding of
the human.
In his Mystagogia, Maximos speaks of:
One God, one being, three hypostaseis, tri-hypostatic monad of being, consub-
stantial triad of hypostaseis, monad in triad and triad in monad, not one and
another, nor one beside another, nor one through another, nor one in another,
nor one from another, but the same in itself and according to itself, the same on
its own and by itself both monad and triad, possessing union uncomposed and
unconfused, and distinction undivided and inseparable, monad according to the
logos of its essence and being but not by composition or combination or any
kind of confusion, triad according to the logos of how it exists and subsists, but
not by division or change or any kind of separation—for the monad is not
divided into hypostaseis nor does it exist by relationship nor is it beheld in them,
nor are the hypostaseis combined to form the monad nor do they bring it to ful-
filment by contraction—but it is the same by itself, thought of in one way or
another—for the triad of hypostaseis is the monad unconfused in being and the
1 G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (SPCK, 1936), 245–9.

2 Brian E. Daley SJ, ‘Nature and “Mode of Union”: Late Patristic Models for the Personal Unity of
Christ’. In The Incarnation, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall SJ, and Gerald O’Collins SJ (Oxford
University Press, 2002), 164–96. See also Polycarp Sherwood OSB, The Earlier Ambigua of St Maximus
the Confessor, Studia Anselmiana 36 (1955), 155–66.
St Maximos ’ Distinction between λόγος and τρόπος 307
same by a single logos, while the holy monad is a triad in its hypostaseis and by
the mode of existence—we are to think in both ways according to one and the
other account, as we have said, the Godhead understood wholly as one and
single, undivided and unconfused, simple, undiminished, and undeviating,
existing wholly as monad in accordance with its being and wholly as triad
shining identically in the hypostaseis as one ray of threefold light in a
single form.3
The characteristic language of Chalcedon has been transposed into a Trinitarian

vein, and the distinction between the divine substance manifest in its λόγος τῆς
οὐσίας, and the persons, or hypostaseis, distinguished by their τρόπος τῆς
ὑπάρξεως, expressed by Maximos with care (and occasional paradox, thus under-
lining the limitations of human reason). Another shorter example of Maximos’
sense of the divine unity manifest in being, while the trinity of persons is
expressed in existence, can be found in Ambiguum 1, where he affirms that ‘[t]he
Triad is truly a Monad, for such it is [ἐστίν]; and the Monad is truly a Triad, for as
such it subsists [ὑφέστηκεν], since there is one Godhead, being monadically and
subsisting triadically’. What this makes clear is the consistent and deliberate use
of different verbs to describe being and existence.
With Christology, the use of these terms serves rather a different purpose.
A good example of his concern can be found in Ambiguum 42, where he says:
And what greater paradox could there be than that, whereas He is God by nature
and deemed it fitting to become man by nature, He did not alter the natural def
initions of either one of the natures by the other, but being wholly God He
became and remained wholly man? For being God did not hinder Him from
becoming man, nor did becoming man diminish His being God, and thus He
remained wholly one and the same in both, truly existing naturally in both,
being neither divided by the unadulterated integrity of the essential differences
of the two natures, nor confused by the fact that the two natures came to exist in
an absolutely single and unique hypostasis, and so He neither changed nature
nor underwent a transformation into something he was not.
(Amb. 42:1320BC; trans. Constans, II.131–3)
Here the key point is the integrity of the natures, defined by their logoi. This is for
Maximos an absolute principle. The logoi of creation are inviolable. God’s endeav-
our in Christ to ‘renew the natures’, as St Gregory the Theologian had put it in one
of his homilies, cannot mean the alteration of the natures defined by the logoi,
even their improvement. Indeed, Maximos believes that because the logoi of cre
ation exist in God, they are inviolable; even in the fallen world, the destructive
3 Mystagogia, 840–63 (ed. Boudignon, CCSG 69, 2011).

effects of the fall do not reach to the logoi of creation—the fall is a matter of the
distortion, hideous though it is, of the modes of existence, the τρόποι τῆς
ὑπάρξεως. This seems to mean that the fall only affects rational creatures, as it is
only the possession of a rational will that makes it possible for logos and tropos to
get out of alignment. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.
There is another Christological passage worth recalling here: the interpretation
of the Transfiguration found in Question 191 of the Quaestiones et dubia. There
we read:
By the face [prosopon] of the Word, which shone like the sun, we are to understand
the characteristic hiddenness of his being . . .
and he goes on to expound the meaning of the Lord’s body and garments which
were radiantly white:
By the body of the Word we are to understand the substance of the virtues, such
as goodness, meekness, and the like; by the garments, we are to understand the
words of Scripture and the work of creation that comes forth from and takes its
being from God, which are seen as white by those who have put aside the thick-
ness that attaches to the word of Scripture and behold by the contemplation of
the spirit the radiant beauty of its concepts, and by removing the deceitful of the
senses behold radiantly the sensible creation, understanding by analogy its cre
ator from its vast beauty.
We find much the same interpretation of the Transfiguration in Ambiguum 10,

with this significant addition: the overwhelming radiance of the face of Christ is
called apophatic theology, while the radiance found in Scripture and creation is
called kataphatic theology. This suggests a personal encounter with the Word—
for prosopon means both face and person—which is beyond concepts, which are
not rejected, but found at a lower level in the body and raiment of the transfig-
ured Christ. I think we should note this.
Let us now pass on to consider the use of logos and tropos in Maximos’ reflec-
tion on the nature of man: his creation, fall, and restoration or renewal. What we
have seen so far—the consistent distinction of logos and tropos, whereby logos
defines being, and tropos existence, and the notion of the inviolability of the logoi
of creation—suggests an understanding of the human (and indeed of all rational
creation) whereby the logos of being is given and determined by God, and this can
be shaped by the mode of existence, the way of existing, the how of existing,
which, in free rational creatures, is not determined. Who we are, as persons, is a
matter both of our logos of essence and of our tropos of existing. I suggested
something like this in my book on Maximos (and others have suggested a more
determinedly existentialist version of this, to the point of suggesting that Maximos
opposes essence and existence, locating the image of God at the level of exist-
ence). There I said:
Maximus sometimes, as we have seen, expresses this distinction of levels by dis-

tinguishing between existence (hyparxis) or subsisting (hyphistanai, from which
the noun, hypostasis) and being (ousia, or einai): persons exist, natures are.
Whatever we share with others, we are: it belongs to our nature. But what it is to
be a person is not some thing, some quality, that we do not share with others—as
if there were an irreducible somewhat within each one of us that makes us the
unique persons we are. What is unique about each one of us is what we have
made of the nature that we have [or are]: our own unique mode of existence,
which is a matter of our experience in the past, our hopes for the future, the way
we live out the nature that we have.4
I don’t suggest that this is altogether untrue—I am not making a retraction—but

my reading of Maximos over the last nearly twenty years since I wrote that has
made me realize that Maximos never quite puts it like that.
There seem to me two principal contexts in which Maximos uses the distinc-
tion logos/tropos in relation to the human condition. An example of the first can
be found in a passage a little before the one already quoted from Ambiguum 42, in
which Maximos affirms the inviolability of the logoi of creation. There he says, in
relation to the notion of the ‘three births’ of mankind:
you must seek to understand what is the causal principle [ὁ κατ’ αἰτίαν . . . λογος]
that preceded the creation of man, which alas remains inseparably within its
own proper state of permanence, and what is the mode of His Birth [ὁ . . . τῆς
γεννήσεως . . . τρόπος] as a corrective dispensation directed to human sin, a mode
which aims to reform the one corrected and restore him completely to the prin-
ciple of his creation [πρὸς τὸν λόγον τῆς αὐτοῦ γενέσεως]. By understanding
these things, you will see clearly how God, in becoming man, became perfect in
both, wisely restoring the mode of dispensation to the true principle of creation.
(Amb. 42:1317D–1320A; trans. Constans, II.129–31)
Here logos is associated with creation, and tropos with the oikonomia: logos cor
responds to God’s plan for the created order, tropos with the divine economy, in
particular the Incarnation. We find the same idea expressed in Ambiguum 5,
where Maximos talks of ‘recognizing that the principle of being is one thing,
and the mode of its existence is another [ἕτερος μὲν ὁ τοῦ εἶναι λόγος ἐστίν,
ἕτερος δὲ ὁ τοῦ πῶς εἶναι τρόπος], the one confirming nature, the other the
4 Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 59.

oikonomia’. Tropos, then, in contrast to logos is less concerned with what we

make of our logos of being, and more to do with how God, in the Incarnation,
renews the natures.
We get a step closer to the idea of mine outlined above in several places where
Maximos brings together his triad of being–well-being–eternal-being with the
distinction logos/tropos. For instance in Ambiguum 10, he states:
From their exact understanding of beings, the saints learned that there exist
three general modes [καθολικοὺς τρόπους] accessible to human beings, modes
by which God created all things, for He endowed us with substance and exist-
ence so that we might have being, well-being, and eternal-being. The two
extremes (i.e., being and eternal-being) belong solely to God, who is their
author, but the intermediate mode depends on our inclination and motion, and
through it the extremes are properly said to be what they are, for if the middle
term were absent, their designation would be meaningless, for the good (i.e.,
well-being) would not be present in their midst, and thus the saints realized that
apart from their eternal movement toward God, there was no other way for
them to possess and preserve the truth of the extremes, which is assured only
when well-being is mixed in the middle of them.
(Amb. 10:1116AB; trans. Constans, I. 167–9)
Being and eternal-being are determined by God; they are inscribed in the logoi of
creation. Well-being (or ill-being) are up to us; they are not determined by the
logos of creation but depend on our ‘inclination and motion’ (τῆς ἡμετέρας . . . γνώμης
τε καὶ κινήσεως). It is, however, only well-being that will link up being and
eternal-being; ill-being leads to the destruction of our natural powers. This pre-
sumably allows for different kinds of well-being: rational beings are free, not
determined, but that freedom is only truly exercised in the fulfilment of eternal
well-being.
A little later on in Ambiguum 42, Maximos returns to the distinction between
logos and tropos in connexion with the renewal of natures, καινοτομία, the subject
of the previous ambiguum, no. 41. He says,
Every innovation, generally speaking, takes place in relation to the mode of

whatever is being innovated, not in relation to its principle of nature, because
when a principle is innovated it effectively results in the destruction of nature,
since the nature in question no longer possesses inviolate the principle according
to which it exists. When, however, the mode is innovated—so that the principle
of nature is preserved inviolate—it manifests a wondrous power, for it displays
nature being acted on and acting outside the limits of its own laws.
(Amb. 42:1341D; trans. Constans, II.173)
Maximos goes on to give various examples such as the translation of Enoch and
Elijah, the birth of Isaac to the aged Abraham and Sarah, the burning bush, and
so on, leading up to the Incarnation:
Together with and after all these mysteries, He brought about the utterly and
truly new mystery of His Incarnation for our sake (on account of which and
through which all the other mysteries occur), and thus He innovated nature
with respect to its mode, not to its principle, assuming flesh through the medium
of a rational soul, being ineffably conceived without seed, and being truly born
perfect man without corruption, possessing a rational soul together with His
body from the very moment of his ineffable conception.
(Amb. 42: 1344D–1345A; trans. Constans, II. 177–9)
It seems to me that when Maximos is thinking of tropos, he is less concerned with

the way the distinction of logos and tropos enables him to think what is meant by
being a person, and much more concerned with reconciling God’s act of re-creation
in the Incarnation with his act of creation: re-creation, though radical, does not
mean abolition of corrupted nature and literal re-creation; rather it is a funda-
mental renewal of natures at the level of their mode of existence. We need to
cooperate with God’s act of renewal, and this involves ascetic struggle, acquisition
of the virtues (or, more precisely, making manifest virtue that is natural5), con-
templation of the logoi of creation, and the rediscovery of the image of God in
which we were created, but Maximos is most deeply concerned with understand-
ing how God’s act of renewal preserves the logoi of creation inviolable.
So, what is my conclusion? I think it is possible to find an inchoate understanding
of what it is to be personal in the use Maximos makes of the logos/tropos distinction,
and it is a notion of the person that includes both an element of the given—the
image of God in which we were created which belongs to the logos of creation—
and also an element that we make for ourselves, so that it is not just a matter of
being a person, but of becoming a person, though one cannot become a person
without being one. We have to realize, however, that, so far as Maximos is con-
cerned, this is not what he is primarily interested in, and to the extent that we see
persons created in freedom, we are probably finding in Maximos ideas that he
would have found surprising, for even the exercise of the mode of existence that
leads to well-being is much more assimilation of something achieved in the
Incarnation, than something of our own.
5 Cf. Dispute with Pyrrhus: 309B.

29
Pronoia in the Life and Thought of
St Maximos the Confessor
After St Maximos the Confessor’s arrest for defying the emperor over the imperial
Christological compromises—first the promulgation of Monotheletism endorsed
by the Ekthesis of 638 and then the forbidding of any discussion of Christ’s wills
demanded by the Typos of 648—Maximos endured two trials—in Constantinople
in 655 and 662—and an interrogation (the Dispute, disputatio), conducted princi
pally by Bishop Theodosios of Caesarea in Bithynia in 656 at Bizya in Thrace,
where Maximos had been exiled after his first trial.1
The interrogation begins by Theodosios’ greeting Maximos: Πῶς ἔχεις, κῦρι
ἀββᾶ—‘How are you, Lord Father?’ To which Maximos replies, ‘As God preor
dained before all ages a way of life for me in his providence (τὴν ἐμὲ προνοητικὴν
διεξαγωγήν), that’s how I am.’ Theodosios replied with astonishment: ‘How can
that be? Did God preordain for each of us our destiny before all the ages?’
Maximos replies that if God has foreknowledge then certainly he preordained as
well. Theodosios asks for clarification of foreknowledge and preordination, which
Maximos provides by saying that foreknowledge (πρόγνωσις) concerns thoughts,
words, and deeds that are up to us (ἐφ’ ἡμῖν), while preordination (προορισμός)
concerns thoughts, words, and deeds that are not up to us: introducing the notion
of ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, what is up to us, which goes back to Aristotle and is used by, among
others, Nemesios. Theodosios asks for further clarification, which Maximos hesi
tates to give, maintaining that Theodosios knows these matters perfectly well
himself. After further protest, Maximos clarifies by saying that what is up to us
are acts of volition, that is, virtues and vices, whereas what is not up to us are
punishments and the opposite, giving the examples of illness and good health,
neither of which are entirely up to us. Theodosios seizes on this to suggest that
Maximos’ exile is punishment for deeds he has committed that deserve punish
ment; Maximos’ response is that he prays that ‘by this suffering, God may limit
the retribution due to him for the sins he has committed’. Theodosios suggests
that such suffering may be a way of testing, by which I think he must mean the
kind of suffering inflicted on witnesses to make them confess the truth, with obvi
ous reference to Maximos’ suffering. To this Maximos replies that suffering is,
1 Greek text with English translation in P. Allen and B. Neil, eds., Maximus the Confessor and His
Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford University Press, 2002), 75–119.
Pronoia in the Life and Thought of St Maximos 313
indeed, for the testing, δοκιμή, of the saints—to reveal their virtues. Theodosios
has had enough of this, and commends Maximos for his eloquence, before mov
ing on to the matter in hand: trying to persuade Maximos to accept the Typos.2
This discussion is characteristic of the debates that form part of both the trial
of 655 and the dispute of 656: in all these debates, Maximos remains quite calm
and takes control of the discussion, leading it away from any attempt to trap him
into some admission of guilt to a calm philosophical discussion, as here. This dis
cussion at the beginning of the dispute in Bizya is initiated by Maximos’ philo
sophical response to what was intended as no more than a polite greeting.
Maximos neither says politely that he is well nor complains of his treatment,
which can hardly have been other than ill: a little later on in the dispute Maximos’
refusal to compromise his conscience and accept the Typos provokes physical vio
lence and his being drenched ‘from head to toe by their spitting’ (Dispute 11).3
Maximos’ serenity seems to be founded on his confidence in God’s providential
care for him; whatever happens to him, all is held in the providence of God—his
care of him, his πρόνοια.
St Maximos’ calm and trust in God’s providence is striking, but the account of
providence recorded in the Disputatio is tantalizing in its brevity. We want to
know more about what Maximos meant by providence, not least because it was
for him a firm support in the determined attempt by the court officials, acting at
the command of the emperor, to break Maximos’ will and undermine his convic
tion. It is not difficult to find out more about Maximos’ doctrine of providence, as
he visits the question several times in his writings, though perhaps before we look
directly at Maximos’ own doctrine of providence, it would be well to remind our
selves what an important place providence, πρόνοια, played in Byzantine philo
sophical and theological thought in general.
In his commentary on Proclus’ Elements of Theology, the great classical scholar
of the last century, E. R. Dodds, famously remarked that ‘the topic of πρόνοια
bulks almost as large in Neoplatonism as does that of predestination and grace in
the Christian theology of the period’.4 However, it seems to me that Dodds’ judge
ment would have been more accurate, had the contrast been between Greek and
Latin theological or philosophical reflection, rather than between pagan
Neoplatonism and Christianity, for in the Greek Christian world there was, and
continued to be, a great deal of reflection on the notion of πρόνοια or providence.
Already with Clement and Origen, providence plays a major role in their thought.
A good deal of Dionysios of Alexandria’s Περὶ φύσεως is concerned to defend the
notion of providence. In the next century, perhaps the most important work on
providence is Nemesios of Emesa’s somewhat neglected work, De natura hominis,
2 Cf. Allen and Neil, eds., Maximus the Confessor, 76–80.

3 Allen and Neil, eds., Maximus the Confessor, 110.
4 E. R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theology, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1963), 263.
in which providence, which is discussed expressly towards the end, plays a major
structural role; St Basil the Great’s sermon, ‘that God is not the author of evils’,
which deals with providence, was almost equally influential. In the fifth century,
there are treatises expressly on providence by the Antiochene theologians, St John
Chrysostom and Theodoret of Cyrrhos, though they take very different forms. In
the Byzantine period, apart from reflection on providence in general, there
emerged what came to amount to a literary genre, which concerned the question
of ‘predestined terms of life’, that is, whether the date of death is determined for
each individual. This question was discussed, drawing on philosophical consid
erations as well as some of the discussions of the Fathers, especially Basil in the
sermon just mentioned, by Theophylact Simocatta, the historian of the reign of
the Emperor Maurice, who may be said to have inaugurated the genre at the
beginning of the seventh century, which is continued at the end of that century by
St Anastasios of Sinai in some of his Questions and Answers. We can find treatises
on ‘the predestined terms of life’ by Patriarch Germanos in the eighth century,
Photios in the ninth century in two of his Amphilochia (one of which, no. 149,
more or less reproduces Germanos’ treatise); in the twelfth century there are two
major discussions of providence, and in particular of the question of predestined
terms of life, by Michael Glycas and Nikolaos of Methone; later discussions sur
vive from the hands of Mark Eugenikos and George Scholarios, notable defenders
of the Orthodox tradition against the compromises demanded by the Council of
Florence.5
St Maximos, too, stands in this tradition, more especially in the tradition of
reflection on providence stemming from Origen, including the great philosopher
of the desert, Evagrios, as well as Nemesios of Emesa; indeed Maximos’ appeal to
Nemesios in discussing providence, as well as other issues, seems to have
reclaimed the bishop of Emesa from oblivion. To understand Maximos’ doctrine
of providence fully, one would need to preface our exposition of the Confessor
with a thorough discussion of his sources, for he thinks by engaging with the
thoughts of others. This is partly because Maximos is often dealing with difficul
ties others have expressed to him, so he needs to engage with the problems that
have caused these difficulties, but beyond that, he does not just take up ideas from
other thinkers—the Fathers whom he respects—rather he prefers to express him
self through the words and images of the Fathers, rather than relying simply on
his own power of thought.
Nevertheless, it will be useful to say a little more about the background to
Maximos’ doctrine of providence before exploring his own development of these
ideas. The Christian doctrine of providence reflects a profound sense of affinity
5 Most recently, see Ken Parry, ‘Fate, Free Choice, and Divine Providence from the Neoplatonists to
John of Damascus’. In The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. Anthony Kaldellis and
Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 341–60.
between Platonism and Christian theology. For Plato, refusal to accept divine
providence was a reason for exclusion from the kallipolis, for which he legislates
in the Laws (899Dff.). Platonists in late antiquity saw themselves as treading a
middle road between the Stoics, on the one hand, whose doctrine of Fate,
εἱμαρμένη, was alleged to turn human beings into puppets without free will and,
on the other hand, the Epicureans, who denied divine providence, together with
the Aristotelians who maintained that divine providence reached no further than
the realm of the moon—in the sublunary realms there was no overruling provi
dence (this doctrine is found in De mundo, falsely ascribed to Aristotle, but most
recent scholarship is inclined to think that the philosophers of late antiquity,
and the Fathers, found this doctrine in then extant works by the younger
Aristotle, too).
This middle way was a route Christian philosophers were also happy to follow,
preserving as it does the conviction that God rules the world with an assertion of
human freedom. Early Christian philosophers therefore drew readily on the
arsenal of Platonic arguments in defence of providence, something manifest par
excellence in Origen’s Contra Celsum. These arguments were of considerable
sophistication, but I do not want to go into them now, I shall simply draw atten
tion to the main lines by which Platonists defended providence. There seem to me
to be two. The first is expressed in the words from the Myth of Er in book X of
Plato’s Republic: ‘αἰτία ἑλομένου· θεὸς ἀναίτιος, blame belongs to the one who
chooses, god is blameless’. We are responsible for our actions, because we freely
initiate them, we are their αἰτία; our actions then lead to a train of consequences
ruled by divine providence, so that even our best endeavours may be frustrated
and our worst errors turn out for the best. The second is drawn from the ‘likely
story’ about the structure of the world told in the Timaeus, where the universe is
depicted as the result of reason, νοῦς, working with necessity, ἀνάγκη, and ‘ruling
it by persuasion so that most of what came to be was for the best’ (Tim. 48A). This
world, belonging to the realm of becoming, is not perfect, but reason prevails, so
that it is as good as something necessarily imperfect can be. These arguments
played an important role in Christian reflexion on and defence of providence,
though the latter argument—on the limitations of the imperfect—came to take a
peculiarly Christian form that created, and therefore finite, reality inevitably par
took of change and corruption. At one point, however, the Christians parted
company with the Platonists: for the Platonists providence effected the good of
the universe as a whole; human beings, though rational, were by no means the
highest part of the cosmos, and were not privileged by providence,6 whereas, for
Christians, since humans were created in God’s image, providence worked ultim
ately for the benefit of human beings, a belief they shared with the Stoics. So, for
6 See Plotinus, Enneads III. 2. 9.

instance, we find Origen in Contra Celsum IV. 74ff. using Stoic arguments to
defend the belief that ‘God made all things for man’ against the arguments of the
(Middle-)Platonist, Celsus.
Let us now turn to Maximos. I want to begin by looking at two passages from
one of the longest of his Ambigua: Ambiguum 10. It comes from the earlier set of
Ambigua, the Ambigua ad Ioannem, a series of responses to questions put by
John, bishop of Kyzikos, on the Erdek peninsula in the Sea of Marmara, where
Maximos had been a monk in the early part of the 620s. A few years later,
Maximos had settled in North Africa after fleeing before the advance of the
Persians in 625; from there he wrote to his former bishop a lengthy treatise deal
ing with the matters they had discussed. The Ambigua ad Ioannem are much exer
cised with Origenist errors which still seem to have been endemic amongst
Byzantine monks in the seventh, as in the sixth, century; this is certainly the case
with the Ambiguum we are concerned with, Ambiguum 10. Maximos’ engage
ment with Origenism, as Polycarp Sherwood7 has shown, is not a simple refuta
tion, it is rather an attempt to restate in orthodox form the essential truths the
Origenists had grasped, but expressed in an inadequate form. This we need to
bear in mind in seeking to interpret these passages on providence. The first comes
towards the end of the Ambiguum: section 42 (PG 91:1188C–1193C). This section
is very closely based on Nemesios of Emesa, De natura hominis 42–3, the final
two chapters of the treatise.8 Maximos begins by linking the doctrine of creation
to that of providence: God’s providential ordering of the cosmos is part of his
creative activity, and both make it clear that God exists. He explains the nature of
providence in essentially cosmological terms: it is providence that holds every
thing together in the harmony of the cosmos, and also keeps things from becom
ing confused; the harmonious structure of the cosmos, in which everything finds
its part, is the result of providence. Maximos expresses this in not untypically
dense language, which includes the comment that providence preserves the logoi
of each nature within the created order. The doctrine of the logoi of creation is a
characteristically Maximian doctrine—what Fr Maximos of Simonopetra has
called his ‘signature doctrine’9—which expresses the notion that everything in the
cosmos owes its existence to the meaning or logos that exists in God’s mind and
expresses his intention for each creature, and for the created order as a whole. The
fact that the created order possesses meaning, both as a whole and in each
7 Polycarp Sherwood, An Annotated Date-Lit of the works of Maximus the Confessor, Anselmiana
30 (Centro Studio Sant’Anselmo, 1952), 3: ‘[A] refutation of Origenism . . . with a full understanding
and will to retain what is good in the Alexandrian’s doctrine—a refutation perhaps unique in Greek
patristic literature.’
8 Nemesius of Emesa, De natura hominis, ed. M. Morani (Teubner, 1987), 120–36.
9 Maximos Simonopetritis (Nicholas Constas), ‘St Maximus the Confessor: The Reception of his
Thought in East and West’. In Knowing the Purpose of Creation through the Resurrection: Proceeding of
the Symposium on St. Maximus the Confessor, Belgrade, October 18–21, 2012, ed. M. Vasiljević
(Sebastian Press, 2013), 25–54.
individual creature, is expressed by Maximos both in his doctrine of providence,

and in his doctrine of the logoi of being. There is, incidentally, a striking parallel
to this in Plotinus’ treatise on providence which forms Enneads III. 2–3; there
Plotinus introduces the idea that providence, the pre-understanding, pro-noia,
that stems from the One itself finds expression in the All, the universe, through
what is variously called logos in the singular, and logoi in the plural. The parallel
with Maximos can hardly be a matter of chance, though what is the nature of the
influence is quite unclear to me. The linking of the doctrine of providence with
the doctrine of the logoi is something Maximos might have learnt from Dionysios,
not least from the famous remark of the Areopagite, quoted more than once by
Maximos, which equates the logoi of beings with paradigms, preordinations, and
divine and good wills (παραδείγματα, προορισμοί, θεῖα καὶ ἀγαθὰ θελήματα:
Divine Names 5. 8: PG 3, 824C).10 Maximos then introduces two definitions of
providence, both taken from Nemesios: ‘providence is, then, according to the
God-bearing Fathers, the care (ἐπιμέλεια) that comes from God to the things that
are’ and ‘providence is the will of God through which everything that is receives
suitable direction’ (PG 91, 1189AB). What follows is concerned to make, at some
length, two essential points. First of all, providence is either a way of talking about
God’s own concern for the cosmos or the power that God exercises through the
cosmos: either way, it is a matter of God’s own activity—providence is not dele
gated to other lesser beings. Second, providence reaches down to individuals
themselves, and does not simply concern universals, by which I take Maximos to
mean that providence is not concerned simply with general conditions that affect
all human beings equally (for instance) but is concerned with the destiny of each
individual. Maximos makes this explicit by continuing with another quotation
from Nemesios (ascribed to ‘my teachers’): if providence ‘is God’s purpose—to
use the very words of my teachers—then it necessarily follows that what happens
happens in accordance with right reason, and could not have been better
arranged’. (In all these cases Nemesios, Maximos’ source, makes clear the philo
sophical positions he has in mind in emphasizing these aspects of providence:
this is omitted by Maximos.) He emphasizes how the power of God, in a way
beyond anything we can understand, is concerned with multitudinous variety
and each tiny detail, and the fact that this is beyond our understanding consti
tutes no objection. He also emphasizes the naturalness of providence, concerned
as it is with preserving the logoi of being, and although he is not so specific seems
to make clear that in the case of human beings, who can act, as other beings
10 This aspect of Maximos’ doctrine of providence and a comparison between Maximos and
Dionysios is treated in Vladimir Cvetković, ‘Predeterminations and Providence in Dionysius and
Maximus the Confessor’. In Dionysius the Areopagite between Orthodoxy and Heresy, ed. Filip Ivanović
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 135–56.
cannot, in a way that runs against the grain of their logos of being, providence has
the tendency to draw them back to their logos of being.
The other passage comes earlier in Ambiguum 10,11 and is one of a series of
reflections following his meditation on the Transfiguration of Christ. For
Maximos, the Lord’s radiant garments represent the written and the natural law,
rendered diaphanous by the uncreated light of the Incarnate Word. There follows
a more detailed meditation on the natural and written law (PG 91, 1128D–1133A),
which is followed in turn by the passage we shall be concerned with, a meditation
on the five modes of natural contemplation (PG 91, 1133A–1137C). The title—
five modes of natural contemplation—is reminiscent of Evagrios, who talks of five
‘principal contemplations’.12 However, Maximos’ ‘five modes of natural contem
plation’ are based on ‘being, movement, difference, mixture and position’ (which
recall Plato’s ‘five greatest kinds’—being, rest, motion, sameness, and difference—in
the Sophist 254D–255C, though only partially overlapping with them). Maximos’
five contemplations are all called natural, whereas of Evagrios’ five contempla
tions, it is the second and third—of incorporeal and corporeal beings—that
he calls natural. The similarities between Evagrios and Maximos do not end
here: Maximos, like Evagrios, speaks of providence and judgement, which are
involved in these contemplations, and like Evagrios he associates providence with
motion (cf., Evagrios, S2 IV. 24,13 which also asserts that the logoi of judgement
are secondary to those concerning providence, which corresponds to what
Maximos says here). These similarities gain further credence when one notices
that Maximos seems to be arguing against Evagrios. So, for instance, he asserts
that providence is not concerned with conversion, nor is judgement educative or
punitive—it is not paideutic; rather the function of providence and judgement is
ontological: providence ‘preserves the universe in accordance with the logoi by
which it consists’ (the purpose of providence as we have already encountered it in
Maximos), while judgement preserves the differences and distinctions among the
beings of the universe, preventing confusion between them. In the case of the
lowest kinds of contemplation—those concerned with mixture and position—
‘mixture’ is that by means of which the creature discerns what is natural, in
accordance with the logoi, and cleaves to it, while ‘position’ seems to be based on
this, and constitutes a steady inclination towards the Good, that opposes what is
contrary to the Good and accepts change only if it is in accordance with the logoi,
that is, the intentions of the Creator.
Maximos goes on to speak of combining the contemplation corresponding to
position with movement— that is, contemplation of providence— and that
11 See English translation in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 96–154.
12 Cf. Evagrius Ponticus, S2I.27: A. Guillaumont, ed., Les six centuries des ‘Kephalaia Gnostica’
d’Évagre le Pontique, PO 28, 1 (Brepols, 1985), 29.
13 Guillaumont, ed., Les six centuries, 187.
corresponding to mixture with difference—that is, contemplation of judgement:

in this way we begin to discern the way in which the Logos is manifested in the
logoi of creation as ‘being, being wise, and being alive’, in the fundamental activ
ities, that is, of being, wisdom, and life, a triad of divine attributes the Confessor
has adopted from Dionysios the Areopagite. Through these the creature may
ascend to contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity, of the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit. The way Maximos expresses all this is not exactly pellucid—
indeed much of it is very obscure, and my interpretation is only tentative—but
what I am suggesting is that we can find here a reshaping of Evagrios’ understand
ing of providence and judgement. For Evagrios, providence and judgement are
manifest in the way in which they shape the human lot in accordance with the
free, pre-natal choice of the rational creature, by which it separated itself from the
primordial henad: the cosmos is therefore, for Evagrios, a vale of soul-making, a
simple backdrop to the drama of redemption. For Maximos, on the contrary, the
cosmos is an expression of the manifold wisdom of God, of value in its own right,
but which, as such, can, when rightly perceived, help to guide fallen creatures
back to God. For Evagrios, the cosmos is fallen, it only exists as a result of the fall
of the rational creatures and the consequent dissolution of the primordial henad;
the end will see the dissolution of the cosmos and the restoration of the henad.
For Maximos, the cosmos is only fallen in so far as human kind, created in God’s
image to be a microcosm and ‘bond of the cosmos’, has failed to fulfil this role, as
a result of the fall of the human. The logoi of the cosmos are preserved inviolate
by providence; they are preserved unconfused by judgement. But human kind, by
turning away from its own logos of being—by setting its tropos of existence at
odds with its logos of being by exercise of its opinion or gnômê—has obscured for
itself the wonderful coinherence of the cosmos, and lost the capacity for natural
contemplation. This is a subject Maximos treats in Ambiguum 41 and also in the
Mystagogia, where the whole restoration of humanity is set in the context of the
Divine Liturgy. But despite the differences from Evagrios, which are profound,
Maximos preserves his insight into the way in which the providential ordering of
the cosmos can provide steps of contemplation for the fallen creature, as it seeks,
drawn by the grace of the Incarnate Word, to come to contemplation of God and
the world in God.
What I find interesting about St Maximos’ doctrine of providence is the way he
combines the different ways in which Evagrios and Nemesios developed an
understanding of providence as concerned with human kind and its quest for
God. Nemesios develops in a striking way his conviction that human kind is a
double being, both spiritual and material, both soul and body, in some ways even
a being on the frontier between the material and the spiritual, and there finds
what is distinctive about humanity. This was a theme developed by St John
Damascene, and even later by St Gregory Palamas. It places humanity at the
centre of the cosmos, in a way that is indebted to Plato’s portrayal of human kind
in the Timaeus, but which goes beyond that. Human kind is a supreme example of
God’s providential ordering, and the drama of redemption centres on humanity’s
failure to fulfil this mediating role. Incidentally—though it is not at all incidental—
this understanding of humanity and the fall means that Maximos’ doctrine of
providence is Christological, in a way that Origen’s—and Evagrios’—is not. For
Origen’s doctrine of providence seems to usurp the role of Christ, the providen
tial ordering of things seeming quite adequate to bring about restoration of the
cosmos, indeed, a complete apocatastasis, whereas Maximos’ doctrine of provi
dence enables us to enter into what Christ has achieved when, in his Incarnation,
Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, he recapitulated the human cosmic role that
the fall of human kind had thwarted. Evagrios supplements, and deepens Origen’s
doctrine of providence when he sees providence as serving humanity in a
different way, as constituting a paideutic environment. Maximos combines the
approaches to providence of both Nemesios and Evagrios, so that the cosmo
logical and the ascetic fit together, and beyond that, in the Mystagogia, especially,
he finds their fulfilment in the liturgical celebration of the cosmic Christ.
This fills out Maximos’ doctrine of providence in a significant way—significant,
especially, for our understanding of his reliance on providence as he faced ‘the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. The brevity of the discussion of provi
dence between Maximos and his interrogator, Bishop Theodosios, might leave
one with the impression that Maximos’ reliance on providence is nothing more
than what we call ‘stoical’ (an odd usage, as to the ancients there was nothing sto
ical about πρόνοια), but our exposition of Maximos’ deeper understanding of
providence demonstrates that Maximos’ trust in providence is not to be separated
from his confidence in Christ, the ‘alpha and omega, the beginning and the end’
(Rev 22:13)—of the cosmos as a whole, and of the life of each individual in
particular.
30
Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos
the Confessor
I doubt if it would have occurred to anyone to convene a conference on Sophia,

the Wisdom of God, in the Church Fathers, were it not for the role that Sophia
played in certain strands of (mostly) Russian Orthodox theology in the last cen-
tury. It is striking, too, that interest in Sophia has grown over the last decades,
perhaps not so much in Orthodox theology itself, though there was a conference
on the sophiology of Fr Bulgakov with mostly Orthodox participants in Paris
only last year (May 2014), but further afield, not least among the adherents of that
curiously influential group of modern theologians who espouse what they call
‘Radical Orthodoxy’; this is partly, at least, due to the recent accessibility in
English of the works of Bulgakov, and also of his (younger) mentor, Fr Pavel
Florensky.1 Sophiology has always been controversial, with those who embrace it
tracing it back to the Fathers, while those who oppose it regard it as a modern
heresy, with roots in esoteric, pseudo-mystical traditions that flourished from the
seventeenth century onwards. Catholic scholars have also been fascinated by
sophiology, two obvious examples being Fr Louis Bouyer, who wrote what seem
to me several sophianic trilogies,2 and Fr Tomas Špidlík (later Cardinal), who in
1961 published a volume called La Sophiologie de S. Basile.3 That this book was
inspired by the Russian sophiologists is evident from the introduction which
begins with a quotation from Fr Sergii Bulgakov’s The Wisdom of God:
Anyone who has visited the church of St Sophia in Constantinople and fallen
under the spell of that which it reveals, will find himself permanently enriched
by a new apprehension of the world in God, that is, of the Divine Sophia.4
Bulgakov was talking about himself, for in January 1923, after his expulsion from
Soviet Russia on the ‘Steamship of the Philosophers’, he had himself that
1 For another glimpse of wide-ranging interest in Sophia the Wisdom of God, see Françoise Mies,
ed., Toute la sagesse du monde. Hommage à Maurice Gilbert, s.j. (Lessius, 1999).
2 The last being: Mystérion. De mystère à la mystique, Gnôsis. La connaissance de Dieu dans
l’Écriture, Sophia ou le Monde en Dieu (Cerf, 1986, 1988, 1994).
3 Tomas Špidlík, La Sophiologie de S. Basile, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 162 (Pont. Institutum
Orientalium Studiorum, 1961).
4 Sergius Bulgakov, The Wisdom of God (Williams and Norgate, 1937), 13.
experience of standing in the church of Hagia Sophia, then a mosque, and it

evidently remained with him.
I suppose in suggesting this title for my paper at the colloquy I thought that if
one could write a book on the sophiology of St Basil the Great, it must be possible
to give a paper on the sophiology of St Maximos the Confessor, but I am not so
sure now, having tried to write it! The ‘apprehension of the world in God’, which
Bulgakov identifies with Divine Sophia: surely that is at the heart of the Confessor’s
theology? Indeed yes, but I am now convinced that it never even occurs to
St Maximos to think of his cosmic, metaphysical, sacramental vision in terms of
Sophia, the wisdom of God.
Given that I soon learnt that there was nothing very obvious in St Maximos on
Wisdom, in order not to disappoint you, or change my subject altogether, I began
by thinking what are the themes in those to whom Maximos is indebted that
might lead into the theme of wisdom, and why do they not do that in the
Confessor’s thought? Two themes struck me at once: one in Origen, and the other
in Evagrios—both thinkers with whom Maximos engaged in the development of
his theological vision. The theme in Origen is the distinction he makes between
knowing ‘the Word of God according to “it became flesh”, [and] according to the
“Wisdom hidden in a mystery”‘: the quotation is from one of his homilies on
Exodus (12:4),5 but it occurs frequently in one form or another. The theme in
Evagrios is rather different, and it struck me when, some time ago, I was working
on his Scholia on Psalms, where he makes a good deal of the Apostle Paul’s notion
of the πολυποίκιλος σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ, the ‘multi-manifold wisdom of God’ (Eph. 3:10).
For Evagrios, the psalms are concerned with wisdom because the psalms belong
to the level of the manifold, while prayer is a more unified activity of the νοῦς. In
On Prayer, he often contrasts prayer and psalmody, and once explicitly associates
psalmody with manifold wisdom: ‘Psalmody belongs to ποίκιλης σοφίας, but
prayer is the prelude to immaterial and undiversified knowledge (τῆς ἀύλου καὶ
ἀποικίλου6 γνώσεως)’ (Or. 85). Maximos does not follow up either of these leads,
and I think the reason is manifest: the way in which Wisdom can be used both, as
in Origen, to take one to the hidden source from which emerges the Word made
flesh, and, in Evagrios, to speak of the manifold nature of God’s presence in the
world—both of these Maximos speaks of in terms of his distinction between the
one Logos of God and the many λόγοι. Instead of calling on the doctrine of
Sophia, Maximos seems to deal with the relationship between the One and the
many by means of what has been called his ‘signature doctrine of the logoi’.7 This
5 Origen, Hom. in Exod. 12: W. A. Baehrens, GCS 29 (Leipzig, 1920), 145–279.

6 The reading ποικίλος of PG 79.1185 is clearly wrong; ἀποικίλου is following the reading of Paris
Coislin 109 and Bodleian, Holkham gr. 53; Hausherr requires a similar reading: I. Hausherr SJ, Les
leçons d’un contemplative (Paris, 1960), 119.
7 By Fr Maximos Simonopetrites (Nicholas Constas): see his paper, ‘St Maximus the Confessor:
The Reception of his Thought in East and West’. In Knowing the Purpose of the Creation through the
Resurrection, ed. Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević) (Sebastian Press, 2013), 25–53, at 45.
Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos the Confessor 323
conclusion would not in the least have surprised Bulgakov, for instance, who
several times appeals to Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi in support of his doctrine
of Sophia.
Is that it? Well, it could be, but I would like to pursue it a little further. There
are a couple of lines I would like to pursue: the first is to look at how Maximos
actually talks about wisdom; it is not that he never mentions sophia, but he never
develops what you might call a doctrine of sophia. Then there are two places, at
least, where Maximos develops his understanding of the world in God, which for
Bulgakov is where the doctrine of Sophia belongs, and see if there is a kind of
sophia-shaped hole in Maximos’ exposition. And finally I have another idea!
Wisdom, sophia, is, of course, one of the virtues, and Maximos frequently lists
wisdom along with other virtues. There is, for instance, a triad that frequently
occurs in the Centuries on Love: goodness, wisdom, and power (Carit. I. 96, 100;
II. 27, etc.).8 More generally, wisdom is one of the divine attributes: in Carit.
II. 52, we are told that νοῦς, ‘when it touches God and spends time with him
through prayer and love’ becomes ‘wise and good and powerful and loving
towards mankind and merciful and long-suffering’—all attributes of God, he
comments. In Carit. III. 22, we learn that God knows creatures ‘from his wisdom,
through which and in which he made all things’. In Carit. III. 24, we learn that
‘well being’, the central term of Maximos’ triad, being–well being–eternal being, is
characterized by goodness and wisdom. In the next chapter, Maximos relates the
divine qualities of being, eternal being, goodness, and wisdom to the creation of
man: man is created κατ’ εἰκὸνα τοῦ θεοῦ, which means according to God’s being
and eternal being—this is a matter of being (οὐσία) and is κατὰ φύσιν, natural;
man is also created καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν, which means according to God’s goodness and
wisdom—this is a matter of God’s will (γνωμή) and is κατὰ χάριν. Elsewhere we
learn of the unknowability of God’s wisdom and knowledge apart from grace: the
Greeks, that is, pagans, cannot know the ‘wisdom and knowledge’ of the Good,
which are ὑπὲρ νοῦν (Carit. IV. 2). He also speaks of the ‘unsearchable wisdom of
infinite being’ (IV. 3). In another chapter (IV. 70), Maximos quotes Eph. 3:17 and
Col. 2:3—‘Christ dwells in your hearts through faith’, ‘All the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge and hidden in him’—and comments, ‘All the treasures of wisdom
and knowledge are hidden in our hearts; they are manifest in the heart according
to the analogy of the purification of each through the commandments’. Further
on this line, we find grace identified with wisdom and knowledge (IV. 77).
What does all this add up to? The notion of wisdom—not alone, but in com
bination with other virtues, which are understood as divine qualities or attri
butes—is central for Maximos’ understanding of deification. It is not a human
8 I am using the edition: Aldo Ceresa-Gastaldo, Centuries on Love, VSen 3 (Editrice Studium, 1963).
wisdom, and is not accessible to reason apart from grace. Becoming wise, σόφος,
is an aspect of becoming God, deification; it is participation in Christ.
This leads us naturally to a text of the Confessor’s which would seem a natural
place to look for his ideas about wisdom. It is the sixtieth of his Quaestiones ad
Thalassium, which is concerned with what is meant by Christ’s being foreknown
before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:20); it is called in the English transla-
tion, ‘On the Cosmic Mystery of Christ’ and is mostly concerned with the way in
which in Christ the whole mystery of God is summed up.9 Maximos says that the
Scriptures know two kinds of knowledge (γνῶσις) of divine things. On the one
hand there is relative (σχετική) knowledge, ‘rooted only in reason and ideas, and
lacking the kind of experiential perception (διὰ πείρας . . . αἴσθησις) of what one
knows through active engagement’: the knowledge we use to conduct our daily
lives. On the other, there is
that truly authentic knowledge (τὴν δὲ κυρίως ἀληθινὴν), gained only by actual
experience (ἐν μόνῃ τῇ πείρᾳ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν), apart from reason and ideas, which
provides a total perception (ὅλην. . . τὴν αἴσθησιν) of the known object through a
participation by grace (κατὰ χάριν μεθέξει). By this latter knowledge, we attain,
in the future state, the supernatural deification (τὴν ὑπὲρ φύσιν. . . θέωσιν) that
remains unceasingly in effect.10
This distinction, says Maximos, citing the authority of the ‘wise’ (σοφοί), is such
that ‘it is impossible for rational knowledge of God to coexist with the direct
experience (πεῖρα) of God, or for conceptual knowledge (νόησις) to coexist with
immediate perception (αἴσθησις) of God.’ He clarifies what he means by
affirming that
by ‘rational knowledge of God’ (λόγος περὶ θεοῦ) I mean the use of the analogy
of created beings in the intellectual contemplation (γνωστικὴ θεωρία) of God; by
‘perception’ I mean the experience, through participation, of the goods beyond
nature; by ‘conceptual knowledge’ (νόησις) I mean the simple and unitary
knowledge of God drawn from created beings.11
This passage is of great interest, for Maximos could hardly be regarded as one shy
of theological argument. To read this passage (and others like it) in an anti-
intellectualist way seems implausible. In fact, it recalls a passage in Dionysios the
Areopagite’s ep. 9, in which he argues that the ‘tradition of the theologians’ (that
is, the scriptural tradition) is double: on the one hand ‘ineffable and mystical’ and
9 Quaestiones ad Thalassium, vol. 2, ed. Carl Laga and Carlos Steel, CCSG 22 (1990), 72–83;
English translation by Robert Wilken and Paul Blowers in St Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic
Mystery of Christ (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 123–9.
10 Maximos, Quaest. ad Thal. 60 (CCSG 22. 63–71).
11 Maximos, Quaest. ad Thal. 60 (CCSG 22. 79–83).
on the other ‘manifest and more knowable’; the former ‘symbolic and presupposing
initiation’, the latter ‘philosophical and capable of proof.’12 For Dionysios ‘the
ineffable is interwoven with what can be uttered’. Furthermore, elsewhere we find
the ‘ineffable and mystical’ exemplified in his mentor, Hierotheos, who ‘not only
learnt, but suffered, or experienced, the divine things (οὐ μόνον μαθὼν ἀλλὰ παθὼν
τὰ θεῖα).’13 There is much here that seems to anticipate Maximos, though, on the
face of it, Maximos wants to keep separate what Dionysios regards as inseparable.
For both of them, experience, ‘suffering divine things’, is paramount, though
Dionysios seems to allow a greater place to the ‘philosophical and apodictic’. This
‘suffering divine things’ seems to correspond to what we have seen Maximos call
wisdom, σοφία.
Another place we might look is the last of the first set of Ambigua, or
‘Difficulties’, the Ambigua ad Ioannem.14 It is concerned with a passage from
St Gregory the Theologian, in this case exceptionally one of his poems rather than a
passage from his homilies. In the poem, Gregory says, ‘The high Word of God
plays in every kind of form, mixing, as he wills, with this world here and there’
(another reading would give: dividing the world). Maximos immediately relates
this to the psalm verse where it says that ‘abyss calls to abyss in the noise of your
cataracts’ (Ps. 41:8); this, he comments,
perhaps [τυχὸν, Maximos is often quite tentative in his resolution of the difficul-
ties] shows that every contemplative mind, because of its invisible nature and
the depth and multitude of its thoughts, is to be compared to an abyss, since it
passes beyond the ordered array of the phenomena and comes to the place of
intelligible reality.15
As the phrase, ‘the noise of the cataracts’, shows, this takes place in this world, ‘in
which was accomplished the great and dreadful mystery in the flesh of the divine
descent to the human level of God the Word’.16 It is this mystery, the Confessor
continues, that the divine apostle called the ‘foolishness of God and weakness,
because I think of its transcendent wisdom and power’.17 What the apostle called
‘foolishness’, the Theologian, Gregory, calls ‘play’. So, concludes Maximos,
the mystery of the divine Incarnation is called the foolishness and weakness of
God according to the holy Apostle Paul, and God’s play according to the
12 Dionysius, ep. 9.1 (PG 3.1105D); A. M. Ritter, 2PTS 67 (Berlin, 1990), 193–207.
13 Dionysius, DN 2.9 (PG 3.648B); B. Suchla, PTS 33 (Berlin, 1990), 134, ll. 1–2.
14 Nicholas Constas (Fr Maximos), On the Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. II,
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 29 (Harvard University Press, 2014), 313–29.
15 Maximos, Amb. 71 (PG 91:1408D; A. Louth, trans., Maximus the Confessor (Routledge,
1996), 164).
16 Amb.71 (PG 91:1409A). 17 Amb.71 (PG 91:1409B).
wonderful and great teacher Gregory, since it oversteps in a way that transcends
being every order and harmony of all nature and power and energy.18
Maximos has introduced yet another point: words like foolishness, weakness, and
play are appropriate, not just because the Incarnation escapes the human mind’s
conceptual capacity, but for a more fundamental ontological reason, for the
Incarnation breaches the structures of the universe—the ‘play’ of the Word of
God cannot be confined to the ontological structures of the created order, for the
Word created that order and transcends it. Nonetheless, the Incarnation, or rather
the love of God for human kind in the Incarnation, needs to be grasped in some
way by the human intellect, for such knowledge, such assimilation of like to like,
is the purpose of the Incarnation in which ‘the Word of God became man, so that
man might become God’, to quote the famous passage from St Athanasios.19 The
deeper meaning of ‘abyss calling to abyss’ is to be found in ‘the mind that reaches
after knowledge and calls upon wisdom, and thus discerns a tiny reflection of the
mysteries of the divine and ineffable descent among us’.20
Maximos goes on to probe the passage from Gregory by offering further reflec-
tions. He considers more closely what might be meant by the Word ‘playing’. He
finds other passages from Scripture, as well as Gregory the Theologian and
Dionysios the Areopagite, that suggest that the play of the Word is, as we might
say, transgressive, passing across fixed boundaries, and so relating things that are
customarily kept apart. The passage from the Areopagite speaks of the cause of
all, ‘in his wonderful and good love for all things, through the excess of his loving
goodness, is carried outside himself . . . so enchanted is he in goodness and love
and longing’,21 and mentions ‘an ecstatic and transcendent power which is yet
inseparable from Himself ’.22 This is usually interpreted by the Fathers, as by
Maximos here, of the leaping of the Word of God into the world at the Incarnation
(cf. Wisd. 18:14–15), though Dionysios may have meant creation itself. Maximos
then goes on to illustrate the notion of play from the way in which parents and
teachers adapt themselves to the level of their children or students, often by a
kind of play, and suggests that God, both by leading us through created things
and historical events, is playing with us, and getting us to grasp what is beyond
our present capacity. So, ‘foolishness’, ‘play’, and ‘enchanting . . . being carried out-
side himself ’ are different ways of thinking of God’s movement towards us in
love. A final contemplation suggests that life itself is a kind of play, as we dance, as
it were, towards the stillness of eternity. He quotes from Gregory of Nazianzus’
funeral sermon for his brother, Caesarius:
18 Amb.71 (PG 91:1409CD).

19 Athanasios, De Incarnatione 54, ed. John Behr (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 166.
20 Amb.71 (PG 91:1412A).
21 Dionysios, DN 4. 12, ed. Suchla, 159. 9–11, 12; quoted by Maximos, Amb.71 (PG 91.1413AB).
22 Dionysios, DN 4. 12.
Such is our life, brothers, the passing life of living beings: a sort of play upon the
earth. As those that have not been, we come into being, and having come into
being we are dissolved. We are a dream that does not last, a passing phantom,
the flight of a bird that is gone, a ship passing through the sea and leaving no
trace, dust, vapour, the morning dew, a flower that blooms for a time and is
gone, ‘man, his days are like grass, like the grass of the field, he flourishes’, as the
divine David says as he reflects on our weakness.23
The theme of the Word of God playing among human beings, coming down to
their/our level, expressing the deepest mysteries in riddling ways that we can
make something of: that is a recurrent theme in the writings of St Maximos. A
good example can be found in the second of his Centuries on Theology and the
Incarnate Dispensation, a treatise summarizing in groups of a hundred chapters
his various theological insights. There we read:
The Word of God is said to be flesh not only when he is incarnate, but in another
sense as well. When God the Word is contemplated with single vision as he is in
the beginning with the God and Father, he possesses the clear and naked types
of the truth concerning all things, but does not contain parables and puzzles, or
stories needing allegories. When he dwells among human beings who are unable
to make contact with the naked intellect through naked concepts, he selects
from things that are familiar to them, combining together a variety of stories,
puzzles, parables, and dark sayings, and in this way becomes flesh. In its first
encounter, our intellect does not engage with the naked Word, but with the
Word made flesh, that is, through a variety of sayings. Although he is the Word
by nature, in appearance he is flesh, so that the many appear to behold the flesh
and not the Word, even though he is, in truth, the Word. The meaning of the
Scriptures is not what appears to the many, but is other. For the Word becomes
flesh in each of the recorded sayings.24
I have a final thought that I can only touch on for reason of time. Maybe I should
have taken a hint from the quotation with which Cardinal Špidlík prefaced his
book on St Basil: Bulgakov’s reference to his experience of standing in the church
of Hagia Sophia just after his departure from Russia. For it suggests that one of
the contexts in which we experience the Divine Wisdom is in the Liturgy. This
experience was of paramount importance for St Maximos, as we can see from his
treatise called On the Church’s Mystagogia.25 It is partly a commentary on the
liturgical action, partly a treatise on theology, closely parallel to his treatise on the
23 Gregory of Nazianzus, Hom. 7. 19 (PG 35: 777).

24 Maximos, Capitum theologicorum et œconomicorum Centuria II. 60 (PG 90:1153B–1156A).
25 Critical edn by Christian Boudignon, CCSG 69.
Lord’s Prayer, but it is prefaced by a series of parallels drawn by Maximos: first

between God and the Church (Myst. 1), and then a sequence of parallels between
the church building and the invisible and visible cosmos, the nave corresponding
to the visible cosmos, the sanctuary to the invisible (Myst. 2), then just with the
visible cosmos where the nave corresponds to the earth and the sanctuary to
the heavens (Myst. 3). In Mystagogia 4, Maximos suggests a parallel between the
human and the Church building, with the nave corresponding to the body, the
sanctuary to the soul, and the altar to the intellect, or νοῦς. In Myst. 5, Maximos
takes further the parallel between the nave and the sanctuary, so that they corres
pond with the active and contemplative aspects of the soul. The active faculty of
the soul is concerned with the pursuit of the Good, and moves towards it through
the exercise of reason (λόγος), leading to moral wisdom, (φρόνησις), practice
(πρᾶξις), leading to virtue (ἀρετή), and then faith (πίστις), and finally the Good
(ἀγαθόν). The contemplative faculty moves in parallel, with the intellect (νοῦς),
seeking out wisdom (σοφία), leading to contemplation (θεωρία), knowledge
(γνῶσις), abiding knowledge (ἄληκτος γνῶσις),26 and finally to the Truth
(ἀλήθεια). What Maximos is doing here, having shown how the Church mirrors
the activity of God in drawing all into union, is to draw a series of parallels that
make clear the cosmic dimension of the church and what takes place in it, and
also the psychological or spiritual dimension. All of them interact, and the liturgy
takes on a significance that is cosmic and yet reaches deeply into the heart of
every Christian. It is this way of relating everything that is at the heart of
Bulgakov’s notion of Sophia. In his diary, he spoke at greater length of his experi-
ence in Hagia Sophia:
It creates a sense of inner transparency; the weightiness and limitations of the

small and suffering self disappear . . . It becomes the world: I am in the world and
the world is in me. And this sense of the weight on one’s heart melting away, of
liberation from the pull of gravity, of being like a bird in the blue of the sky, gives
one not happiness nor even joy, but bliss . . . This is indeed Sophia, the real unity
of the world in the Logos, the co-inherence of all with all, the world of divine
ideas . . . Truly, the temple of St Sophia is the artistic, tangible proof and mani
festation of St Sophia—of the Sophianic nature of the world and the cosmic
nature of Sophia.27
It is worth reflecting that St Maximos himself almost certainly stood within the
walls of Hagia Sophia: certainly in his Mystagogia he gives expression to something
very like the experience Bulgakov had as he stood in that church some thirteen
centuries later.
26 Cf. Dionysios, DN 4.35.

27 Translated in: James Pain and Nicolas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov
1871–1944 (SPCK, 1976), 13–14.
31
The Doctrine of the Image of God
in St Maximos the Confessor
Introduction: The Puzzle of Maximos’ Doctrine of

the Image, a Survey of Recent Scholarship
In a renowned article on ‘La théologie de l’image de Dieu’, père Th. Camelot

remarked:
Or ce thème de l’image est, dans la théologie des Pères, surtout des Pères grecs,
vraiment central: on y voit se rencontrer à la fois la christologie et la théologie
trinitaire, l’anthropologie et la psychologie, la théologie de la creation et celle de
la grâce, le problème de la nature and de la surnature, le mystère de la divinisa-
tion, la théologie de la vie spirituelle, les lois de son développement et de son
progrès.1
This is no overblown claim: the theme of the image is indeed central to patristic
theology in all these ways. This is borne out by the host of books and articles on
the patristic doctrine of the image published in the last century; to mention just a
few books there is A. Mayer on Clement (Rome, 1942), H. Crouzel on Origen
(Paris, 1956), R. Bernard on Athanasios (Paris, 1952), H. Merki and R. Leys on
Gregory of Nyssa (Fribourg, 1952 and Bruxelles-Paris, 1951), W. J. Burghardt on
Cyril of Alexandria (Baltimore, 1957), as well as the extensive discussion of
patristic notions of the image that forms the central section of Gerhart Ladner’s
The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA, 1959). Given that, one would expect to find
that the same is the case with St Maximos the Confessor, for Maximos’ theological
vision draws deeply on the patristic tradition that he has inherited, especially the
tradition of the Alexandrian Fathers and of the Cappadocian Fathers, as well as
the already well-developed ascetic tradition of the Greek East. M.-Th. Disdier,
who had written a pioneering article on the dogmatic basis of Maximos’
1 Th. Camelot, ‘La théologie de l’image de Dieu’, RSPhTh 40 (1956), 433–71, at 443–4.
spirituality,2 soon after remarked that the doctrine of the image ‘est à la base de
toute de théologie, comme de toute la spiritualité du Confesseur’.3
However, as scholars were to point out, if this is true (and they were, on the
whole, inclined to support it), then there is a puzzle, for references to the doctrine
of the human being in the image of God are really few and far between in the
works of the Confessor; and there is no more than a handful of explicit discus-
sions of the meaning of Gen. 1:26–7. Lars Thunberg notes this, remarking that
‘Maximus has, in fact, given no personal contribution to the doctrine of the image
of God in man, as such’.4 He goes on to make a few points about Maximos’ doc-
trine of the image, drawing attention to his deep indebtedness to the Alexandrian
tradition. Furthermore, he notes that it is not the human as a whole that is in the
image of God, an idea adumbrated in several early Christian theologians, but only
his spiritual aspect, his intellect or νοῦς; in taking this line Maximos simply
reflected what had, long before his time, become the dominant interpretation of
the image in the Fathers. Thunberg traces this notion back through the
Alexandrian tradition to Philo, noting that for him the body is simply the sanctu-
ary of the intellect that is itself the image.5 What is important for Thunberg is the
way in which Maximos develops the distinction between the image and the like-
ness, εἰκών and ὁμοίωσις, a distinction emphasized by Origen, for instance, but
made little of by others, such as Athanasius or Gregory of Nyssa.6
Walther Völker, whose book on Maximos was published in the same year as
Thunberg’s, begins by making much the same point as Thunberg, namely that one
cannot maintain ‘daß Maximus bei der Ausformung des Gottesbild sonderlich
originelle Gedanken entwickelt hätte’.7 This comes at the beginning of a section
devoted to ‘Das Gottesbild’,8 which discusses the principles behind the Confessor’s
notion of the human as the image of God. He emphasizes, straightaway, the fun-
damentally Platonic texture of Maximus’ notions here, beginning by emphasizing
the fundamental distinction between the uncreated God and the created beings
that constitute the universe, in illustration of which he quotes this phrase from the
first Century on Theology and the Economy: πάντων τῶν ὄντων καὶ μετεχόντων
καὶ μεθεκτῶν ἀπειράκις ἀπείρως ὁ Θεὸς ὑπερεξῄρηται—‘God transcends infinitely
2 M.-Th. Disdier, ‘Les fondements dogmatiques de la spiritualité de saint Maxime le Confesseur’,

EOr 29 (1930), 296–313.
3 M.-Th. Disdier, ‘Élie l’Ecdicos et les ἕτερα κεφάλαια attribués à saint Maxime le Confesseur et à
Jean de Carpathos’, EOr 31 (1932): 36. I owe these references to Jean-Claude Larchet, La divinisation
de l’homme selon saint Maxime de Confesseur (Éditions du Cerf, 1996), 152, nn. 152 and 153.
4 Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 2nd edn (Open Court, 1995; 1st edn, Lund, 1965), 113.
5 Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 115. Thunberg gives no reference to Philo, however, simply
referring to H. Crouzel, Théologie de l’image de Dieu chez Origène (Aubier, 1956), 55 f., who himself
refers to further secondary literature.
6 I shall have a little more to say about this question of the distinction between image and likeness
further on.
7 Walther Völker, Maximus Confessor als Meister des geistlichen Lebens (Steiner, 1965), 47.
8 Völker, Maximus Confessor, 47–69.
Doctrine of the Image of God in St Maximos the Confessor 331
times infinitely all beings, whether they participate or are participated in’.9 Völker
makes a reference to Plato’s assertion that the Form of the Good is ἐπέκεινα τῆς
οὐσίας,10 of which there are several echoes in Maximos (noted by Völker), though
not necessarily (or even likely) direct citations from Plato. This emphasis on God’s
transcending ‘infinitely times infinitely’ all beings overshadows Völker’s whole
presentation of Maximos’ theme of God’s image. God’s transcendence of all
beings is so great that it is impossible even to think of this transcendence in terms
of distance; διάστημα, διάστασις are inapplicable in relation to God, whose tran-
scendence swallows up any notion of distance, for distance is characteristic of
creatureliness as such, and foreign to God, inapplicable even in the context of
God’s relation to the created order. This texture of Maximos’ thought (which
Völker regards as ultimately Platonic, though it seems to me that the basic notion
of creatureliness is specifically Christian) lends to his understanding of our
knowledge of God a fundamentally apophatic dimension, expressing itself in
terms of paradox. Völker goes on to discuss creation and providence, but the
overall character of his presentation of Maximos’ thought on the image is condi-
tioned by a sense of God’s transcendence.
Perhaps the fullest account of what Maximos means by the divine image in the
human is provided by Jean-Claude Larchet, who devotes a lengthy section in his
La divinisation de l’homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur to the theme of image
and likeness.11 He mentions, as we have done, Disdier’s remark and Thunberg’s
response, and then goes on to indicate certain features of Maximos’ understand-
ing of this theme. First, he draws attention to a parallelism in Maximos between
the pair nature-person (hypostasis) and the pair, characteristic of Maximos, logos-
tropos—logos, principle (of being) contrasted with tropos, way (of existence)—and
cites a scholion to the first of the Opuscula theologica et polemica, which begins:
Πρόσωπον, ἤτοι ὑπόστασις· φύσις, ἤτοι οὐσία. Οὐσία γὰρ, τὸ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα, ὁ λόγος·
τὸ καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν δὲ, ὁ βίος, ὑπόστασίς ἐστιν, ἐξ ὧν ἀμφοτέρων ἡ ἀρετὴ
συμπεπλήρωται.
Person, otherwise called hypostasis; nature, otherwise called essence. For essence,
[is] that which is according to the image, the logos; and that which is according
to the likeness, the life, is hypostasis, out of both of which virtue is fulfilled.12
These three polarities—nature and person, logos and tropos (not mentioned as
such, but see below), κατ᾽ εἰκόνα and καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσις—are parallel, if not identical.
9 Maximus, Cap. theol. et œcon. I. 49, ed. K. Hadju, Fontes Christiani 66 (Freiburg, 2016), 122;
quoted by Völker, Maximus Confessor, 48. All English translations are my own, unless otherwise
indicated.
10 Rep. VI: 509B. 11 Larchet, Divinisation, 151–65.
12 Maximus, Opusc. Theol. et pol. (PG 91: 37BC).
Larchet goes on to make a series of further points about Maximos’ treatment of

the image. It is clear, for instance, that Maximos holds to the notion found as far
back as Clement that the human is not strictly the image of God, but fashioned
‘according to’ (κατά) the image of God, which is properly speaking the Logos.13
It is also the case, as we have noted from Thunberg (the same point is made by
Völker) that it is in virtue of the human intellectual and rational soul that the
human is in the image of God: it is the intellect, the νοῦς, that is in the image.14
The qualities of the intellect that pertain to being in the image include being self-
determining, αὐτεξούσιος, sovereign (over itself), αὐτοδέσποτος,15 invisible,
incorruptible, and immortal: for all of these Larchet cites Maximos’ Quaestiones
et Dubia III. 1.16 This ‘question-and-answer’ is a rare occasion on which Maximos
directly addresses Gen. 1:26–7, sharply distinguishing between image and like-
ness, attaching the qualities that belong to the image to the substance or being of
the soul, and the qualities that belong to the likeness to its ἐνέργεια. The qualities
that characterize the image we have already listed; Maximos calls them
εἰκονίσματα of God. Those that characterize the likeness—ἡ ἀπάθεια, τὸ πρᾶον, τὸ
μακρόθυμον καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ, ‘dispassion, meekness, long-suffering and the rest’—he
calls ‘signs that make known God’s goodness’ (τῆς ἀγαθότητος τοῦ Θεοῦ
γνωρίσματα). So, to the polarities already remarked—nature/person, logos/tropos,
image/likeness—there seems to be added a fourth, οὐσία/ἐνέργεια, not, I think, to
be taken in some proto-Palamite sense, but rather in its Aristotelean sense, often
presented as a triad: οὐσία/δύναμις/ἐνέργεια (which Maximos employs in
Centuries on Theology and the Economy I. 1–10).17
Larchet also refers to Centuries on Love III. 25,18 where Maximos discusses the
four divine attributes that God shares with rational and intellectual beings,
namely, being, eternal being, goodness, and wisdom (τὸ ὄν, τὸ ἀεὶ ὄν, ἡ ἀγαθότης,
ἡ σοφία). Two of these belong to the essence or οὐσία, namely being and eternal
being; while two belong to the ‘intentional aptitude’ (γνωμικὴ ἐπιτηδειότης),
namely goodness and wisdom. Maximos relates this to the image/likeness dis-
tinction, image corresponding to the ontological categories of being and eternal
being, the likeness to the moral categories of goodness and wisdom. Maximos
concludes: ‘Every rational nature is in the image of God, while only the good and
the wise are in accordance with the likeness’. This raises a problem that Larchet
discusses at some length, for in the Dispute with Pyrrhos Maximos asserts, in
13 Larchet, Divinisation, 154, cites Maximus, Dispute with Pyrrhus: PG 91.324D and QuThal. 53
(CCSG 7, 431, l. 24).
14 Larchet, Divinisation, cites Myst. 6; QuThal. 65 (CCSG 22. ll.128–9); Amb. 10: PG 91. 1204A;
42: 1325A.
15 Cf. Plato’s assertion that ἀρετὴ δὲ ἀδέσποτον: Rep. X. 617E.
16 QD III. 1 (CCSG 10, 1982, 170).
17 Maximus, Cap. theol. et oecon. I, 1–10: A. Wollbold and K. Hadjú, eds., FC 66 (Freiburg,
2016), 90–6.
18 Maximus, Cap. carit.; A. Ceresa-Gastaldo, ed., VSen, NS 3 (Rome, 1963), 154.
contradiction of Aristotle,19 and to the amazement of Pyrrhos that virtues are

natural, and yet, in this chapter from the Centuries on Love, it seems that virtues
belong to the ‘likeness’, not to the ‘image’, and it is what is κατ᾽ εἰκόνα that is
natural. For the moment, I want simply to note this contradiction, or paradox;
we shall return to it later.
Having briefly looked at recent scholarship on the treatment of Maximos’ doc-
trine of the human image of God, I want now to bring some considerations of my
own to what seems to be recognized in scholarship generally as something of a
paradox in Maximos’ thought. Let us pursue this in three sections: first, Maximos’
understanding of image in general; second, the relationship between image and
likeness; and third, with the broader context in Maximos’ thought in which the
doctrine of the human as the image of God is to be considered.
The Notion of the Image
Although the early Fathers are indebted to a generally Platonist view of the world,
in which the notion of the image plays a major role—along with other important
themes such as participation—the theme of the human in the image of God is
mostly related in their thought to their interpretation of Genesis 1:26–7; it is not
really considered as a subset of a broader notion of image characteristic of
Platonic thought in general. God creates the human in his image (and likeness),
and it is that special creation of the human that is the focus of early Christian
thought on what it means to be human. In Platonism, in contrast, the notion or
theme of image, though not necessarily the term εἰκών, is of broad application,
for it plays a fundamental role in Plato’s doctrine of the Forms or Ideas. According
to this, both things we perceive in the everyday world and how we think about
them, only have what reality they have as a result of reflecting, imitating, being an
image of, or participating in the realm of eternal forms or ideas. This entails the
notion of two worlds, as it were, the world perceived by sense perception, on the
basis of which we form opinions, and the world perceived by the intellect, of
which we can know the truth: the κόσμος αἰσθητός and the κόσμος νοητός. The
term εἰκών, not that frequently used by Plato, becomes a central term for desig-
nating the relationship between the invisible world and the visible world; it is fre-
quently used in this sense by Plotinus.20 This central notion of the image in
relating the visible and the invisible, so that the visible contains images of the
realities of the invisible world, and the invisible is expressed through images in
the visible world, is central to Dionysios the Areopagite’s vision of reality. As he
says to John the Theologian in his tenth letter: Ἀληθῶς ἐμφανεῖς εἰκόνες εἰσὶ τὰ
19 Cf. Eth. Nic. II: 1103a.

20 See Lexicon Plotinianum, ed. J. H. Sleeman and G. Pollet (Brill, 1980), 301–3, s.v. εἰκών.
ὁρατὰ τῶν ἀοράτων—‘truly visible things are manifest images of things invisible’.21
This imaging of the invisible world in the visible world enables one to gain a
glimpse of the eternal invisible world, and is also the basis of the return to the
invisible world by a process of likening, ὁμοίωσις. Nevertheless, there is no clear
case in the Dionysian corpus of his basing this process of human deification on
his understanding of human creation by God in his image and likeness, as
asserted in Gen. 1:26–7.22 The whole weight of Dionysios’ understanding of the
place of εἰκών and ὁμοίωσις—image and likening or assimilation—rests not on
Gen. 1:26–7, but on a Neoplatonic understanding of image expressing procession,
and assimilation expressing return; Dionysios’ use of ὁμοίωσις seems less an echo
of Gen. 1:26, than an allusion to the famous passage in Plato’s Theaetetus: φυγὴ δὲ
ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν (‘flight is assimilation to God as far as is possible’).23
Maximos, it seems to me, inherits this general doctrine of the image from
Dionysios. He certainly is by no means unaware of Gen. 1:26–7, but, as we have
seen, his discussions of this passage are few and far between, and there are plenty
of places where he discusses the relation of the human to the divine in terms of
image in ways that seem not at all derived from his understanding of the Genesis
passage. Let me give two examples of this, both of them from quite central pas-
sages in the Confessor’s œuvre. First, a much-cited passage in Amb. 10:
For they say that God and man are paradigms of each other [ἀλλήλων εἶναι
παραδείγματα τὸν Θεὸν καὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον], so that as much as man, enabled by
love, has divinized [ἀπεθέωσε] himself for God, to that same extent God is
humanized for man by His love for mankind; and as much as man has mani-
fested God who is visible by nature through the virtues, to that same extent man
is rapt by God in mind [νοῦν] to the unknowable [τὸ ἄγνωστον].24
This passage, echoed in other places in the Maximian corpus, is clearly a strong
assertion of the human being in the image of God, on the basis of which the
human can be deified, to the extent that God has become human: the divine-
human exchange between God and the human, virtually universally affirmed by
the Fathers. The language Maximos uses, however, gestures elsewhere than the
Genesis creation account: instead of the by-now regular use of θέωσις for the
human’s becoming God as a counterpart of the Word’s ἐνανθρώπησις, Maximos
uses the verbal form of apotheosis, more redolent of pagan notions. Moreover,
21 Ep. 10: PG 3: 1117AB; A. M. Ritter, ed., 2nd edn, PTS 67 (Berlin, 2012), 208, 9–10.
22 In the index of biblical citations in the Suchla-Heil-Ritter ed. (PTS 67), ten references to Gen.
1:26(‒7) are given, but none of them is a quotation, and in most cases the allusion is very vague (PTS
67, 231).
23 Theaet. 176AB.
24 Amb. 10: 1113BC: N. Constans, ed. and trans., On the Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The
Ambigua (= Hieromonk Maximos Simonopetrites), DOML 28 (Harvard University Press, 2014), 164–5.
instead of using the language of image and archetype, here at least he uses the
term παράδειγμα, paradigm, a term the biblical associations of which (it is not
found in the NT) have to do with the way in which the temple and its accoutre-
ments reflect the invisible worship of the angels; the more likely source of such
language is, however, the Areopagite, for whom paradigms are, ‘we say, the logoi
of beings that bring them into existence and pre-exist in a united way in God,
which theology calls predeterminations [προορισμοὺς], and divine and good wills,
determinative and creative of beings, in accordance with which the One beyond
being predetermined and produced all beings.’25 Paradigms, logoi, predetermin
ations, ‘divine and good wills’: it is through these that the One beyond being cre-
ates and cares for (exercises providence over) all that exists. The human being
belongs to this in-between realm: he is a paradigm of God, as God is a paradigm
of the human by his love for mankind, manifest in the Incarnation. All of this
could be put in terms of the human being created by God in his image, but that is
not the way Maximos puts it here: he reaches for the terminology of mediation
between God beyond being and the beings he has brought into existence, a ter
minology largely Platonic or Neoplatonic in inspiration.
Another place where the notion of image is central to what Maximos wants to
say is in the early chapters of his Mystagogia, where in each of the first seven chap-
ters he discusses the way in which one thing is image of another: in chapter 1 the
way in which the Church is an image and type of God;26 in chapter 2 the way in
which the Church is an image of the cosmos, constituted, as it is, of visible and
invisible beings;27 in chapter 3 the way in which the Church is an image of the
visible cosmos alone;28 in chapter 4 the way in which the Church of God symbol
ically images the human and is itself imaged by the human (which is justified in
the first lines by reference to the human being created in God’s image and
likeness);29 in chapter 5 the way in which the Church is an image and type of the
soul on its own;30 in chapter 6 the way in which the Scriptures are said to be a
human being, at the end of which chapter Gen. 1:26 is quoted, as justifying the
singling out of the human from other living beings;31 in chapter 7 the way in
which the cosmos is said to be a human being and the human being a cosmos, in
which the notion of being images of each other is introduced in the first line.32
I shall have more to say about the Mystagogia—not exactly a neglected work of the
Confessor’s, but one that yields more and more insight as one returns to it—but
here all I want to do is point out the way in which the notion of the image, εἰκών,
25 Maximos, Divine Names 5. 8 (PTS 33. 188). 26 Maximus, Myst. 1: CCSG 69. l 130.
27 Maximus, Myst. 2: CCSG 69. ll 207–9.
31 Maximus, Myst. 6: CCSG 69. ll 507–8 (Gen 1:26 quoted in ll 536–7).
sometimes linked to the term τύπος, type or figure, is a key term for Maximos in
his attempt to understand the interrelatedness of God, the Church, the human,
the Scriptures, the cosmos. Gen. 1:26 is not at all ignored, though only cited twice,
but it fits into a much broader conception of the image as the key to understand-
ing the intricate way in which everything is bound together and to God—both in
creation and in God’s saving economy.
Image and Likeness
The first thing to note about these terms image and likeness is that, whatever may
be the case with the Hebrew, the term the Septuagint translation uses for the sec-
ond term, ὁμοίωσις, is only very imperfectly rendered by ‘likeness’. For likeness
suggests some similar feature, a similitude, between one thing and another: but
there are other words for rendering that in Greek, for example, ὁμοίωμα or
ὁμοίοτης, both of which express more closely what is meant by the English like-
ness. The -ις suffix indicates a process rather than a feature, which suggests that a
translation such as ‘likening’ or ‘assimilation’ is much closer to what is meant by
ὁμοίωσις. Furthermore, in the context of Greek ways of understanding the human
quest for God, the word ὁμοίωσις recalls the phrase from Plato’s Theaetetus,
already cited: φυγὴ δὲ ὁμοίωσις θεῷ κατὰ τὸ δυνατόν (‘flight [from the world] is
assimilation to God as far as is possible’).33 This suggestion is made almost
unavoidable by the curious discrepancy, made much of by Origen, between verses
26 and 27 of Genesis 1: the first verse has God saying, ‘Let us make God accord-
ing to our image and according to [our] likeness’, but the next verse asserts only
that ‘God made the human, according to his image he made him, male and female
he made them’. For Origen, and those who followed him, God’s intention was to
make the human in his image and likeness, but in fact he made the human only in
his image, with no mention of the likeness: the likeness was, then, the eschato-
logical destiny of the human, or better, the likening or assimilation to God, was a
process that the human needed to undergo, a process that, had there not been the
Fall, would have involved a seamless unfolding of the human likeness to God,
implicit in being created in the image, but in the event demanded a long process
of ascetic struggle in response to God’s assuming human nature in the Incarnation
and overcoming death on the Cross, for the damage done to the human by the
Fall had to be overcome, if the human were to accomplish the demanding process
of gradually being assimilated to God. We have already noticed several places in
which Maximos discusses the difference between image and likeness, a difference
that sheds light on the nature of the process of attaining and restoring the divine
33 Theaet. 176AB.

likeness in the human. One further point: scholars often make a good deal of a
distinction between those Fathers who, following Origen, make a clear distinc-
tion between image and likeness and those, such as Athanasios and Gregory of
Nyssa, who seem to make little of this distinction. I am not sure how important
this is, as image and likeness are not really two similar terms, for, as I have sug-
gested, while being κατ᾽ εἰκόνα refers to the creation of the human in a relation-
ship to God who is in some way ‘imaged’ in the human, the καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν is really
about a process. Whether the two terms are distinguished clearly or not, the
human created in God’s image can be, or become, a recognizable, even resplen
dent, image of God, or remain an unformed, even damaged, image of God.
Ὁμοίωσις reveals more and more clearly that the image is truly an image of God;
it is not something added to the image. So, though Maximos clearly falls in the
Origenian camp which tends to distinguish between what is κατ᾽ εἰκόνα and what
is καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν, they are at the very least complementary, for the process of
likening reveals the image in all its purity and distinctness. I wonder if this sense
of ὁμοώσις as the achievement of a lifetime’s struggle is not alluded to by an odd
feature of the scholion to Opusc. theol. et pol. 1,34 namely that in the account of
what belongs to nature and what to person, we have as belonging to nature, image
and logos, and as belonging to person, likeness and—not tropos, as one expect
would expect—but ὁ βίος, life. The image and the logos of being are aspects of
human nature, while likeness is a matter of our living, our life (βίος not ζωή),
which is formed by our way, tropos, of existing over the course of a lifetime.35
There are three places in Maximos’ work that I want to examine more closely:
Capita de caritate III. 25;36 the erotapokrisis known as Quaestiones et Dubia
III. 1;37 and the discussion in Mystagogia 5.38
The chapters from the Centuries on Love (CC) and from Quaestiones et Dubia
(QD) make similar, though complementary, points about the distinction between
κατ᾽ εἰκόνα and καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν. In CC, Maximos distinguishes four divine attri
butes that God shares with beings in bringing into being the rational and intel-
lectual substance (ἡ λογικὴ καὶ νοερὰ οὐσία): being, eternal being, goodness, and
wisdom. Two of these are endowed on the substance—being and eternal being;
the other two are endowed on the ‘intentional aptitude’ (γνωμικὴ ἐπιτηδειότης)—
goodness and wisdom. God has done this ‘so that what he is essentially (κατ᾽
οὐσίαν), the creature might be by participation (κατὰ μετουσίαν)’. Maximos con-
tinues by saying that
34 Maximus, Opusc. Theol. et pol. 1: PG 91: 37BC.

35 Vide A. Louth, Maximus the Confessor (Routledge, 1996), 59.
36 Maximus, Cap. carit. III, 25; A. Ceresa-Gastaldo, ed., VSen, NS 3 (Rome, 1963), 154.
37 Maximus, Quest. et Dub. III, 1: CCSG 10. 170. 38 Maximus, Myst. 5: CCSG 69. ll. 285–306.
for this reason it [the rational creature] is said to have come into being in accord-
ance with God’s image and likeness: as being, in the image of God’s being, and as
eternal being in the image of God’s eternal being (it is not, however, without
beginning, though it is without end); as good, in the likeness of God’s goodness
and as wise in an image of God’s wisdom—having by grace (κατὰ χάριν) what
God has by nature (κατὰ φύσιν).
And he concludes by commenting that ‘every rational nature is in the image of

God, but only those who are good and wise are in his likeness’. QD III. 1 makes a
similar, though somewhat expanded, distinction between κατ᾽ εἰκόνα and καθ᾽
ὁμοίωσιν, in the course of commenting on the discrepancy between the two
verses, Gen. 1:26 and 27. As image, the soul was given incorruptibility, immortal-
ity, and invisibility, ‘which image the divine’, and together with these sovereignty
over itself (τὸ αὐτοδέσποτον) and self-determination ((τὸ) αὐτεξούσιον), which
are εἰκονίσματα of God’s οὐσία. Καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν involves dispassion (ἀπάθεια),
meekness (πρᾶον), long-suffering (μακρόθυμον) and the other marks (γνωρίσματα)
of God’s goodness, which are indicative of God’s activity (ἐνέργεια). Maximos
adds this comment:
what therefore belongs to his οὐσία and makes manifest the κατ᾽ εἰκόνα he gives
to the soul naturally; what belongs to God’s activity, that characterizes the καθ᾽
ὁμοίωσιν, these he left to our self-determining intention, waiting for the human
being to realize his end, if somehow he might attain likeness to God through
imitation of characteristics of virtue that befit the divine.
This passage, though short, is densely packed, but we find the same pattern we
have noticed elsewhere: characteristics that define what the rational nature is—
incorruptibility, immortality, invisibility, as well as being sovereign over itself and
self-determining—all these creaturely reflections of God’s nature manifest the
κατ᾽ εἰκόνα; whereas what characterizes the καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν are the moral attain-
ments of dispassion, meekness, long-suffering, which are creaturely reflections of
the way God acts, of his ἐνέργεια. It is worth noting that, contrary to what is
asserted by some of our contemporary Greek theologians, freedom of the will, or
self-determination, belongs to the image, and therefore (as we have seen) to the
logos of being, not to the tropos of existence, which for Maximos belongs to the
καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν. Maximos draws here, as elsewhere (as we have seen), a distinction
between the ontological, which is the level of being κατ᾽ εἰκόνα, and the realm of
moral activity/achievement, which is the level of being καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν.
However, this seems to fit ill with Maximos’ conviction, as expressed in the
Dispute with Pyrrhos, that virtue is natural, for what is natural seems to belong to
the image, whereas struggle for and attainment of the virtues seems quite clearly
to belong to the process of likening. Maximos’ explanation to Pyrrhos of what he
means by virtue being natural seems to suggest that praktiki, ascetic struggle,
should not be seen as building up virtuous habits that, as it were, clothe the soul,
but as clearing away bad habits and misperceptions that disguise the image that is
truly the essence of what it is to be human. Recall the point made earlier that the
distinction between image and likeness is not a distinction between two similar
kinds of thing, two qualities of the soul, as it were, but a distinction between what
the rational soul essentially is—in the image of God—and what it is for, what its
purpose is, which is to make manifest the image which is, in life as we know it,
grimy and deformed to the extent that it is often unrecognizable, and even in
Paradise was unstable and needed the discipline of testing, which the primal
human beings failed. Nevertheless, Maximos seems to express this insight in a
paradoxical way.
Mystagogia 5 is the chapter in which Maximos discusses ‘how and in what way
the holy Church of God is an image and type of the soul, understood by itself ’.39
First, let us remind ourselves of the general approach of these introductory chap-
ters of the Mystagogia: Maximos is exploring the way in which there are relation-
ships, captured by the terms image and type, between God, the church (both
theologically, and as the church building), the invisible and visible cosmos, the
visible cosmos itself (that is, heaven and earth), the human, the soul on its own,
scripture in relation to the human, and the cosmos in relation to the human, and
vice versa: all this as introductory to Maximos’ commentary on the liturgical
action of the Divine Liturgy. In chapter 5, Maximos sets out an understanding of
how soul in itself reflects the twofold division of the church into sanctuary and
nave in the distinction in the intellectual soul between the contemplative and the
practical, or as he soon clarifies, between the intellect or νοῦς and the active aspect
of the soul, which he calls reason, λόγος. This distinction, found in the soul (but
reflected in the church building, in which the Divine Liturgy is celebrated, and in
the cosmos, whether thought of as κόσμος νοητός/αἰσθητός, or as the visible cos-
mos, on its own: heaven and earth), leads Maximos to discuss the way in which
the contemplative and active activities of the soul work together in leading it to
apprehension of God, considered both ontologically, that is, to truth, perceived by
the νοῦς, and to goodness, pursued by the λόγος. He traces a way in which there
are five pairs—therefore ten in all—involved in bringing the soul to truth and
goodness. Νοῦς passes from wisdom, to contemplation, to knowledge (γνῶσις), to
enduring knowledge (ἄληστον γνῶσις), to truth; while λόγος passes from moral
wisdom (φρόνησις), to practice, to virtue, to faith, and finally comes to goodness.
He speaks of this by comparing the spiritual life to playing a lyre, which has ten
strings, matching these ten virtues, intellectual and moral, so that the intellect
plays on the soul, as on a lyre, a harmonious melody in praise of God. These
39 Maximus, Myst. 5 (CCSG 69. ll. 285–506).

virtues—intellectual and moral—exist in pairs; one needs to pursue not just

vision, but practical goodness. Ultimately, there is no truth without goodness, no
goodness without truth. This seems to turn on its head what we have discovered
so far, where the perfecting of the soul concerns the καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν, while what we
find here seems to subordinate the level of moral achievement to—or at least
place it in parallel with—the ontological, or maybe the epistemological, though as
the νοῦς passes from σοφία to θεωρία to γνῶσις to ἄληστος γνῶσις and finally to
ἀλήθεια,40 the goal is certainly to know that ‘the truth is something simple and
alone and one and the same and without parts and unchangeable and beyond
passion, as well as all-seeing and completely’ (ἁπλοῦν γὰρ καὶ μόνον καὶ ἕν καὶ
ταυτὸν καὶ ἀμερὲς καὶ ἄτρεπτον καὶ ἀπαθὲς πρᾶγμα ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἀλάθητον καὶ
παντελῶς ἀδιάστατον):41 that is, God.42 Perhaps there is no paradox here.
Maximos is clear that the search for truth by the νοῦς takes place together with,
even depends on, the acquisition of goodness, which is the role of the λόγος, so
that the fulfilment of what is entailed in the human being κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ θεοῦ
depends on the process of ὁμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ which is achieved by the λόγος of the
soul. Nevertheless, as Lars Thunberg once remarked of Maximos, ‘he often con-
structs his sentences like Chinese boxes, which have to be opened slowly and with
undisturbed attention, to reach the final truth he wanted to communicate to his
readers’.43 Nowhere is this more evident than in these introductory chapters of the
Mystagogia, where the consideration of the way in which one thing is mirrored in
another achieves something very like a Chinese box, where each layer adds
another layer of interpretation to the rest.
The Broader Context of the Image
I have suggested that the paradoxical place of the human in the image of God,
clearly carrying with it echoes of centuries of reflection on this mystery by the
Church Fathers, but at the same time so rarely related to the fundamental biblical
text in Genesis, has something to do with the way in which the notion of the
image has broader implications for Maximos, derived from his acquaintance with
the architectonic role of the image in much Neoplatonic thought, as reflected, not
least, in the theological vision of Dionysios the Areopagite. To pursue fully the
way in which Maximos’ notion of the image resonates in a metaphysical

42 Cf. Maximus’ account of the Trinity later, in Mystagogia 23 (CCSG 69. ll. 840–63), noting not
only its deliberately paradoxical form, but also its liturgical resonances; and the strongly apophatic
character both of the passage quoted above and the one referred to, which only bears out the prevail-
ing character of Völker’s comments, discussed above.
43 Lars Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos (SVS Press, 1985), 29.
framework built up, not only from Neoplatonic sources, but also from Maximos’
own creative reading to his predecessors in the Greek patristic tradition, is not
something that can be developed in the concluding pages of a brief paper. It is,
however, incumbent upon me to indicate something of what I mean, and the
route we have just pursued has taken us to a convenient starting point for these
final reflections.
The last two of the introductory chapters of the Mystagogia discuss the way in
which the Holy Scripture may be said to be a human being (ἄνθρωπος),44 and how
the cosmos may be said to be a human being and in what way the human being
may be said to be a cosmos.45 The comparison between the human being and
Scripture goes back to Origen who, in book IV of his De Principiis, finds the
threefold constitution of the human being as body, soul, and spirit reflected in the
Holy Scriptures,46 though Maximos’ account is in many respects different. The
comparison between the cosmos and the human being goes back to Plato’s
Timaeus, where the cosmos is described as ζῶον ἔμψυχον ἔννουν, ‘a creature
endowed with soul and intellect.’47 In both cases—Scripture and the cosmos—
there is a dual reality, both invisible and visible, which is true of the human, too.
And these two levels—the invisible and the visible, or the realm of intellect and
the realm of sense—mutually inform each other: the visible providing images by
which we may grasp something of the realm of the intellect, and the invisible
making itself known in the realm of the senses. It is through this relationship,
essentially one of image, that the meaning of Scripture or of the cosmos can be
perceived. As dual beings ourselves, existing on the frontier between the intellec-
tual and sensible worlds, we know something of what it means to pass from the
realm of the senses to the realm of the intellect and vice versa. Furthermore, in
our true essence, we belong to the κόσμος νοητός, we might even say, with
Plotinus, that ‘we are, each one of us, the intellectual cosmos’ (ἐσμὲν ἕκαστος
κόσμος νοητός),48 and so we understand from within, as it were, what is involved
in the relationship between the intellectual world and the world of the senses, and
in particular know the kind of ascesis required if we are to pass beyond distrac-
tion by the world of the senses, and trace the images we discern in it back to the
intellectual world that gives the world of the senses both meaning and reality.
The most famous place where Maximos explores all this is in Amb. 41, one of
the Ambigua most deeply indebted to Gregory of Nyssa’s De Opificio hominis.
There Maximos elaborates on the divisions of being that he sketches in the open-
ing chapters of the Mystagogia. The human embraces the last of these divisions,
44 Maximus, Myst. 5 (CCSG 69. 19–31, ll. 285–506).

45 Maximus, Myst. 6 (CCSG 69. 31–3, ll. 507–39).
46 De Principiis 4. 2. 4, in Origen, On First Principles, ed. and trans. John Behr (Oxford University
Press, 2017), II. 496 (Latin text), 498 (Greek text).
47 Plato, Tim. 30b. 48 Plotinus, Enneads 3. 4. 3. 22.
that between male and female, coming last, because he is at the centre of the
cosmos. Human being is
like a most capacious workshop containing all things, naturally mediating

through himself all the divided extremes, and who by design has been benefi-
cially placed amid beings, . . . manifestly possessing by nature the full potential to
draw all the extremes into unity through their means, by virtue of his character-
istic attribute of being related to the divided extremes through his own parts.
Through this potential, consistent with the purpose behind the origination of
divided beings, the human 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.49
Although Maximos does not refer to Gen. 1:26–7, it seems evident to me that the
role allotted the human in the fashioning of the cosmos is exercised by the human
in virtue of its being created in the image of God, and it is that function that the
Incarnation of the Word of God is intended to restore.
Maximos’ doctrine of the human as in the image of God is, one can, I think,
say, central to his understanding of the role of the human in the cosmos. If he
only rarely refers to the passage in Genesis, this is to be understood, not as his
discounting in any way the importance of God’s creation of the human in his
image; rather, he both takes for granted the tradition he has inherited from the
Greek patristic tradition and sets the doctrine of the human image of God in
the wider context of the image as defining, perhaps one can say, the texture of the
created order, the cosmos, which is to be understood as a forest of images,
through which meaning can be discerned, a meaning that derives from God as
creator and the source of the divine providence that governs the cosmos.50
49 Amb. 41 (PG 91. 1305AB). Translation, slightly modified, in Constans, On Difficulties, II. 105.
50 When I wrote this, I had not read Elie Ayroulet, De l’image à l’image. Réflexions sur un concept
clef de la doctrine de la divinisation de Saint Maxime le Confesseur (Institutum Patristicum
Augustinianum, 2013), which is now the standard work on the subject of the image in Maximos.
32
The Holy Spirit in the Theology of
St John Damascene
The lack of attention to the Holy Spirit—sometimes to the point of apparent

absence—in the later theologies of both East and West is one of the accusations
we—Orthodox and Catholic—have been accustomed to make against each other.
Perhaps it is more a characteristic of Orthodox complaints against the West—Fr
Gabriel Bunge, although a Catholic monk, echoes a common Orthodox theme,
when he remarks in his Irdene Gefäβe that ‘die Person des Heiligen Geistes ist in
der “Spiritualität” des Abendlandes der große Abwesende’1—but it seems to be
implicit in remarks by Western scholars against the developed Byzantine theology
found in such as St John Damascene about the ‘abstractness’ of such theology,2 for
such abstractness is held to reduce theology to a matter of correct formulæ, from
which the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit inevitably seems excluded.
What I want to do in this brief paper is look at the way the Damascene treats the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, for on the face of it there is a problem here in that
mention of the Holy Spirit seems to be comparatively infrequent; even in his
liturgical poetry, where one might expect more awareness of the role of the Spirit,3
mention of the Spirit is again quite occasional. Perhaps, however, the question of
the Holy Spirit in St John can be put more sharply, in terms of a contrast: on
the one hand, there is a developed theology of the place of the Spirit within the
Godhead—something relatively undeveloped in the conciliar confessions of the
Church, notably in Niceno-Constantinopolitan symbol—but otherwise mention
of the Holy Spirit is rare, or perhaps we should say: the Damascene is reticent in
his mention of the Spirit. What is the meaning of this reticence, given the clarity
with which St John confesses the place of the Spirit within the Trinity?
John’s developed understanding of the place of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity is
expressed concisely in the eighth chapter of On the Orthodox Faith, where he
expands on the conciliar formula in these terms: ‘Likewise we believe in One Holy
1 Gabriel Bunge, Irdene Gefäβe. Die Praxis des persönlichen Gebetes nach der Überlieferung der heili-
gen Väter, 2nd edn (Der Christliche Osten, 1997), 27f.
2 See, e.g., G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought, 2nd edn (SPCK, 1952), pp. 273–81 (though
the theologian Prestige calls ‘Pseudo-Cyril’, who is in reality John Damascene himself, is held to
save the doctrine of the Trinity from such abstractness by his doctrine of perichoresis); A. Van Roey,
‘La lettre apologétique d’Élie à Léon, syncelle de l’évêque chalcédonien de Harran. Une apologie
monophysite du VIII–IXe siècle’, Le Muséon 57 (1944), 1–52.
3 Space has not permitted any consideration of John’s liturgical poetry.
Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the
Son, who together with the Father and the Son is together worshipped and glori-
fied, as consubstantial and co-eternal’ (expos. 8. 172–5).4 John’s expansion consists
of three additions (italicized above): an emphasis on the oneness of the Spirit, in
parallel with the conciliar symbol’s similar insistence on the oneness of the Father
and the Son; his expansion of the clause about the Spirit’s procession, in which he
adds to his procession from the Father his resting in the Son (ἐν υἱῷ ἀναπαυόμενον);
and finally his making explicit that the Spirit is consubstantial with the Father and
the Son, something left implicit in the creed, though made explicit in the letter to
Pope Damasus from the Fathers of the continuation of the Second Œcumenical
Council, sent the following year.5
It is the addition, ‘and rests in the Son’, that is most interesting. It needs to be
taken with what John says a little later on (expos. 8. 289‒93) about the procession
of the Spirit, where he denies that the Spirit can be said to be ‘from the Son’
(ἐκ τοῦ υἱοῦ), even though he is called the ‘Spirit of the Son’, deriving this latter
title from the fact that he is ‘made manifest and bestowed on us through the Son’: in
support of this John quotes Jesus’ words to the disciples as he gave them the Holy
Spirit on the Sunday after the Resurrection (John 20:22). Some scholars have seen
in this the beginnings of an Eastern response to the Western doctrine of the
Filioque. I am not convinced: John seems quite unaware of the Filioque, and seems
to be addressing a rather different problem: viz., given that in the Trinity the
Father is the sole principle (ἀρχή), what is the relationship of the Spirit to the Son,
from whom he does not derive? (essentially a problem for Greek theology).6
John’s explanation here, with the reference to John 20:22, suggests that he is mak-
ing a distinction between what is true in theologia and what is true in the oikono-
mia: the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and not from the Son, but in the
oikonomia he is bestowed by the Son, and hence called the Spirit of the Son. It has
to be said, however, that the analogy he immediately gives of the sun, its ray, and
its brightness rather tells against this interpretation (expos. 8. 293‒6).
In his ‘modification’ of the credal statement, he speaks of the Spirit proceeding
from the Father and resting in the Son; in the expansion of the passage from
Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration in his earlier chapter on the Spirit he had
spoken of the Spirit as ‘proceeding from the Father and resting in the Word and
being his manifestation, being separated neither from God, in whom he is, nor
the Word, whom he accompanies’ (expos. 7. 19‒22).7 John here brings together
4 All references to John’s works are to Dom Bonifatius Kotter’s edition: Die Schriften des Johannes
von Damaskos, Patristische Texte und Studien 7, 12, 17, 22, 29 (Walter de Gruyter, 1969–88).
5 See the letter of the bishops, in, e.g., N. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1
(Sheed and Ward, 1990), p. 28.
6 José Grégoire makes a similar point: ‘La relation éternelle de l’Esprit au Fils d’après les écrits de
Jean de Damas’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique 64 (1969): 715.
7 This phrase is inserted by John in the passage taken from the Oratio Catechetica at p. 13, line 6, in
Mühlenberg’s edition (Gregorii Nysseni Opera III, 4 (E. J. Brill, 1996).
The Holy Spirit in the Theology of St John Damascene 345
refinements in the understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit that have
been determinative for later Orthodox theology.8 The idea that the Spirit is in the
Son, as the Son is in the Father, can be found in Athanasius and Didymos the
Blind.9 Athanasius has no verb, however, and Didymus (or whoever wrote On the
Trinity, attributed to him) uses the Johannine verb ‘abide’10 to say that the Spirit
‘abides’ (μένει) in the Son. But Didymos also uses the verb to rest (ἀναπαύειν), in a
passage commenting on Isaiah 11:2. José Grégoire has suggested,11 that the idea
of the Spirit resting in the Son derives from Alexandrian exegesis of Isaiah 11:1‒2,
which (according to the LXX text) speaks of a rod or shoot (ράβδος) growing
from the root of Jesse, as well as a flower, upon which the Spirit of God rests. The
shoot or flower is the Incarnate Word coming from the womb of the Virgin
Mother of God. Didymos, in his comment on the passage from Isaiah, says that
we see in the Gospel passage (undoubtedly John 1:32: the Baptist’s account of his
baptism of Jesus) the Spirit resting on the Incarnate Word.12 Cyril takes up this
suggestion, but is concerned to demonstrate that the events of the baptism reveal
the permanent resting on the Spirit of the Son, not something that took place for
the first time on that occasion (it is significant that all this grows out of reflection
on the account of the Lord’s baptism, seen by the Fathers13 as a revelation of the
Trinity).14 In both these Alexandrians, it is a matter of the Spirit resting on the
Son in his incarnate state. John takes this reflection on John 1:32 in the light of
Isa. 11:2 a step further and speaks of an eternal resting of the Spirit in the Son,
manifest in the oikonomia, where the Spirit rests or abides on the Son. Similarly
with the Spirit as the manifestation of the Son: this takes place in the oikonomia,
but it rests on the eternal self-manifestation of the Son in the Spirit.
8 See, especially, Dumitru Stăniloae, ‘The Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and His
Relation to the Son, as the Basis of our Deification and Adoption’, in Lukas Vischer, ed., Spirit of God,
Spirit of Christ: Ecumenical Reflections on the Filioque Controversy, Faith and Order Paper 103 (SPCK /
World Council of Churches, 1981), 174–86.
9 B. Fraigneau-Julien, ‘Un traité anonyme de la sainte Trinité attribué à Cyrille d’Alexandrie’,
Recherches de Science Religieuse 49 (1961): 198 and n., referring to Th. de Régnon, Études de théologie
positive sur la Sainte Trinité, ‘4. 145’ (properly, 3. 2. 145–6), who cites Athanasius, ep. Serap. 1. 14 (PG
26. 565B2, cf. B10‒11) and Didymos (or perhaps, Pseudo-Didymos), Trin. I. 31 (PG 39. 425A5). One
could also add, from Didymos, Trin. II. 5 (540B7‒14), II. 27 (753A9‒B2); the former develops the idea
from the Johannine idea of the mutual abiding of the Father in the Son, while the latter cites a verse
from the Sibylline oracle. (In fact this ‘anonymous treatise ascribed to Cyril’ is a fourteenth-century
treatise, dependent on the Damascene, not his source, by Joseph the Philosopher: see
Vassa L. Conticello, ‘Pseudo-Cyril’s “De SS. Trinitate”: A Compilation of Joseph the Philosopher’,
Orientalia Christiana Periodica 61 (1995): 117–29.)
10 See John 14:10, 17; 15:1–10, and elsewhere in the Johannine writings.
11 Grégoire, ‘La relation éternelle’, 728–9, n. 2. 12 Didymos, Trin. II. 7. 9 (PG 39. 596A8).
13 And the Byzantine liturgy: see the apolytikion for the Feast of the Theophany, celebrating the
Baptism of the Lord, which begins, ‘As you were baptized in the Jordan, Lord, the worship of the
Trinity was made manifest . . .’.
14 Cyril, Is. II. 1 (PG 70. 313D3‒4) (where the verb used is ἀναπαύειν); Joel 2 (Pusey, I. 338, 14–19);
Jo. 2. 1 (Pusey, III. 175. 1) (in both these latter cases the verb is μένειν, and Cyril is commenting on
John 1:32).
John then has reflected deeply—and with some originality—on the place of the
Spirit in the Holy Trinity. How far is this developed theology of the Spirit reflected
in the rest of his theology? Before we look at the way in which John makes men-
tion of the Spirit, we should notice something not sufficiently observed in John’s
extensive discussion of Christology in On the Orthodox Faith, and that is that,
although the bulk of what he has to say in his long section on Christology (expos.
45‒81) concerns the detailed issues at dispute between the Orthodox conciliar
faith and those who rejected Chalcedon, and also Ephesus, and the succeeding
councils, all this quite technical discussion is prefaced by two chapters on what
John calls the divine oikonomia, but which we nowadays would more naturally
call the history of salvation, Heilsgeschichte. In other words, John is concerned to
root his Christology in what happened in history; it is only to safeguard our
understanding of this that John embarks—as he does, in detail—on explaining
the technical language of the councils. If we forget this, then John’s Christology
can only appear highly abstract; but if we draw that conclusion, it is because we
have failed to give John’s careful presentation the attention it deserves. It is in the
context of his recital of the history of salvation that John first mentions the
Holy Spirit:
By the good pleasure of God the Father, the only-begotten Son and Word of God
and God, who is in the bosom of the Father, consubstantial with the Father and
the Holy Spirit, before eternity, without beginning, who is in the beginning, and
is with God the Father and is God, he who is in the form of God inclined the
heavens and came down . . . and being perfect God he became perfectly human
and accomplished the newest of new things, the only new thing under the sun.
(expos. 45. 36‒40, 43‒5)
That affirms that the One who became incarnate is consubstantial with Father
and Spirit, that the Incarnation is a concern of the entire Trinity. In the next
chapter, he continues his account of the history of salvation to the Incarnation itself,
and says:
Therefore, after the consent of the holy Virgin, the Holy Spirit came upon her in
accordance with the word of the Lord, spoken by the angel, purified her, and
gave her at once the power to receive the Godhead of the Word and to beget.
Then the subsistent Wisdom and Word of God Most High, the Son of God, con-
substantial with the Father, overshadowed her and, in the manner of a divine
seed, from her chaste and most pure blood compacted for himself flesh ani-
mated with a rational and intellectual soul, the first-fruits of our compound
nature, not by seed, but by creation through the Holy Spirit . . . . (expos. 46. 16‒24)
The role of the Holy Spirit is here described as being to purify the holy Virgin, to
render her receptive (δεκτικήν) to the divine Word, and to do this in a way that
John describes as ‘by way of creation’ (δημιουργικῶς). This is picked up in the first
of John’s homilies on the Dormition, in which he says:
The Father predestined her, and the prophets spoke of her through the Holy
Spirit. The sanctifying power of the Spirit reposed on her, cleansed her and made
her holy; in a certain sense, he fertilized her in advance. Then you, the Definition
and Word of the Father, dwelt in her without being limited, summoning the far-
thest reaches of our nature up to the endless heights of your incomprehensible
Godhead. (dorm. I. 3)15
In the context of the homilies on the Dormition, this activity of the Holy Spirit
has more than an immediate significance, for in rendering the Virgin holy it pre-
pares her, not just to receive the Word of God as a child in her womb, but also
renders her body ζωαρχικός, and makes fitting her body’s transcendence of death,
manifest in her assumption into heaven. Her tomb becomes a bridal chamber
(παστάς)—a theme echoed in the hymns for Good Friday and Holy Saturday in
the Byzantine rite:
A tomb a bridal chamber? Yes, and one much more splendid than every other
bridal chamber, for it is radiant not with flickering gold or shining silver or bril-
liant gems, not with silken threads or cloth of gold and spun purple, but with the
divine glory of the Holy Spirit. If offers not bodily contact for earthly lovers, but
to those linked by bonds of the Spirit it offers the life of holy souls—a state better
and sweeter than God’s sight than any other. (dorm. III.2)16
It is clear from this passage that what the Holy Spirit works in the Mother of
God—purifying her and making her receptive to the coming of the Word—is in
some way offered to us, if we allow ourselves, and are able, to be ‘linked by bonds
of the Spirit’.
It is not surprising then, that another place where we find John’s reticence
about the Holy Spirit yielding is when he comes to talk about the sacraments, for
it is here that these ‘bonds of the Spirit’ become tangible to us. First, in relation to
baptism: when he speaks about the element of water in On the Orthodox Faith, it
is ‘through water and the Holy Spirit, borne on the waters in the beginning’ that
man is renewed (expos. 23. 53‒4); in the chapter on baptism, he makes this
important assertion:
Since man is double, of both soul and body, there is given to us a double
purification—through water and the Spirit; the Spirit renewing in us that which
15 Translation (modified) by Brian E. Daley SJ in On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies
(St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 185.
16 Translation: Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, 233.
is ‘according to the image and likeness’, while water, through the grace of the
Holy Spirit, cleansing the body of sin and releasing it from corruption; the water
fulfilling the image of death, while the Spirit bestows the first-fruits of life.
(expos. 82. 36‒42)
The Spirit is purifying, because it is the Spirit of creation, so that purification leads
to a new creation. John’s emphasis on the double nature of man, in both of which
the Holy Spirit works, is fundamental for John’s understanding of the sacraments,
indeed of Christianity altogether. Twofoldness runs throughout his account of the
Holy Eucharist: there is a twofoldness of the Eucharistic elements—bread and
wine, but also the pure body and the precious blood—a twofoldness of man that
receives it, and also a twofoldness of Word and Spirit that effects it: a twofoldness
that I think reflects his developed Trinitarian theology in which the Spirit rests in
the Son, and the Son is manifest in the Spirit. The twofoldness of the action of the
Word and Spirit in the Eucharist is made plain in this passage:
If then the ‘Word of God is living and active’ (Heb. 4:12) and ‘everything that the
Lord will, he does’ (Ps. 134:6); if he says, ‘Let there be light, and it was so; let
there be the firmament, and it was so’ (Gen. 1:3,6); if ‘by the word of the Lord
the heavens were established, and by the spirit of his mouth all their power’
(Ps. 32:6); if heaven and earth, water and fire and air and the whole cosmos—
and this celebrated living being that is man—was accomplished by the word of
the Lord; if the very Word of God willed to become man and constituted flesh
without seed from the pure and immaculate blood of the holy Virgin—can he
not make bread his own body and wine and water his blood? He said in the
beginning, ‘Let the earth bring forth green pasture’, and to the present time
when the rain comes it brings forth its own plants urged on and empowered by
the divine command. God says, ‘This is my body’, and ‘Do this’, and by his
almighty command, it comes to pass, until he comes; for he said, ‘Until he
comes’. And by invocation the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit becomes
rain to this new tillage; for just as everything that he does, he does through the
activity of the Holy Spirit, so now too the activity of the Spirit works things
beyond nature, which cannot be accepted, save by faith. ‘How will this happen to
me,’ said the holy Virgin, ‘since I have not knowledge of a man?’ And the archangel
Gabriel replied, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most
High will overshadow you.’ And now you ask, How does this bread become the
body of Christ, and this wine and water the blood of Christ? And I say to you,
The Holy Spirit is present and works these things that are beyond reason and
understanding. (expos. 86. 60‒83)
A little later on John says that ‘it is through the invocation and presence of the
Holy Spirit that the bread set forth and the wine and water are changed, in a way
beyond nature, into the body of Christ and his blood, and they are not two, but
one and the same’ (expos. 86. 105‒7).
It is then the Holy Spirit, the Creator Spirit, who is active in the sacraments,
through which we receive Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, and are purified
and renewed—and indeed deified. In the chapter on the Eucharist, John says that
this sacrament is called participation, μετάληψις, ‘because through it we partici-
pate in the divinity of Jesus’; it is called communion, κοινωνία, ‘and is truly so,
because through it we have communion with Christ and share in his flesh and his
divinity, and have communion with, and also are united with, one another
through it’ (expos. 86. 167‒70). In his third treatise against the iconoclasts, John
even goes so far as to say that through our participation in Christ’s body and
blood in the Eucharist, and consequent deification, our human nature ‘has
become greater than the angels’ (imag. III. 26. 67). It is a truly awesome sacra-
ment, the Eucharist. Therefore, says John, echoing the words with which the
priest in the Byzantine rite now invites the faithful to communion, ‘let us
approach with great fear and a pure conscience and unhesitating faith’ (expos.
86. 121‒2).
This leads me to a final reflection. Is it perhaps for this reason that we should
speak, not of John’s comparative neglect of the Holy Spirit in his theology, but of
his reticence or reserve? It is clearly not because the Holy Spirit is unimportant to
him that his mention of Him is relatively infrequent: is it not perhaps because the
Holy Spirit’s presence and activity is so awesome that he is sparing in his words,
when it comes to the Holy Spirit? Perhaps we should be cautious before we accuse
theologians of other traditions of neglect of the Spirit, when the reality might
rather be an awesome reserve.
33
John of Damascus on the Mother of God as
a Link between Humanity and God
Fifty years or so ago, in the wake of the proclamation of the doctrine of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin by Pope Pius XII, my topic would have been at
least tinged with controversy. Henry Chadwick ended his justly famed article,
‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy’, a paper given within a
month or so of the promulgation of the dogma in 1950 and published later in
1951, by observing:
The whole tendency of Monophysite piety was to minimize the significance of

Christ’s soul . . . [T]he result is that Christ loses solidarity with us . . . No doubt
there were many diverse factors which contributed to the rise in the position of
the Virgin during the fifth and sixth centuries. But perhaps a fundamental factor
is this need felt by popular Monophysite piety (and for the most part popular
piety remains Monophysite to this day) for a figure in complete solidarity with
us. The holy archimandrite Eutyches confesses to Flavian that for him Mary is
ὁμοούσιος ἡμῖν (‘consubstantial with us’), ‘but until today I have not said that the
body of our Lord and God is of one substance with us’; for the body of God can-
not be a merely human body. Accordingly, there seems little need for surprise
that such a story as the Assumption of the Virgin became current in Monophysite
circles during this period.1
The thrust of Chadwick’s remarks is that the Virgin Mary becomes the link
between God and humankind because the Christ of popular piety has become too
divine to effect such a link. St John Damascene, despite his fierce rejection of
Monophysitism in many treatises, would be regarded from this perspective as
embracing ‘Monophysite piety’ in virtue of his enthusiastic endorsement of the
doctrine of the Assumption. There is an interesting question to be discussed
about the relationship between learned theology and popular piety especially in
the case of devotion to the Mother of God, but Chadwick’s remarks (made a long
time ago, and certainly not to be held against his memory now) seem to short-
circuit that discussion.
1 H. Chadwick, ‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy’, JTS n.s., 2 (1951), 163–4.
(This paper was delivered before Henry Chadwick’s death in 2008.)
John of Damascus on the Mother of God 351
The case of Marian devotion is interesting because it raises in quite a stark way
the question of the very different theological resources on which such devotion
draws. It is evident that such piety has been nourished by two very different
sources: on the one hand, reflection in apocryphal literature, especially the apoc-
ryphal gospels, on the infancy of Christ and, in the background, on the life of his
mother, the blessed Virgin; and, on the other hand, reflection on the implications
of conciliar definitions in matters Christological—the implications of these defin
itions, let it be noted, not usually the definitions themselves.
On the doctrinal side, Byzantine understanding of the Mother of God can be
summed up in three epithets: Θεοτόκος, ἀειπαρθένος, and παναγία (‘the one who
gave birth to God’ or ‘Mother of God’, ‘Ever-Virgin’, ‘All-Holy’). The authority for
these epithets is to be found in the records of the early Ecumenical Councils.2 The
first of these, Θεοτόκος, was affirmed at the council of Ephesos (431), as a way of
safeguarding Christological orthodoxy; the other two are affirmed, more or less
in passing, by later councils: ἀειπαρθένος at Constantinople II (553), and παναγία
by the use of the virtual equivalent ἄχραντος (‘immaculate’) at Nicaea II (787).
What is striking about this is that the dogmatic assertions about the blessed
Virgin implied by these terms were intended to safeguard orthodox Christological
dogma; there was clearly no intention of developing a Mariology to compensate
for a Christology that had allowed the divinity of Christ to overshadow his
humanity.
The apocryphal literature provides very different material: imagined, and
indeed imaginative, reflection on the hidden years of Christ’s infancy and of the
Virgin’s childhood—years that must have exercised Christian curiosity from the
very beginning, as the profusion of infancy gospels illustrates.3 Very quickly quite
an elaborate tradition developed, the best, and most influential, witness being the
so-called Protevangelium of James, a late-second-century work.4 This provides an
account of the life of the conception and birth of the Virgin, her upbringing in the
Temple, her engagement to Joseph, more details about the birth of Christ and his
infancy. The most obvious evidence of its influence in Byzantium is liturgical: the
2 The so-called Ecumenical Councils were church councils that legislated for the whole oikoumene,
i.e. the world governed by the Roman or Byzantine emperor. There were seven of them, the first and
last held at Nicaea, modern Iznik in Turkey, in 325 and 787, the rest mostly at or near Constantinople
(in 381; in 451 at Chalcedon, a suburb of Constantinople on the other side of the Bosphoros, and in
553 and 680–1), save for one held at Ephesos in 431.
3 ‘Infancy Gospels’ is the name given to accounts of the life of Christ as a baby and infant, in con-
trast to other Gospels, including the canonical Gospels found in the New Testament, that pay more
attention to the ministry of the adult Christ, and/or his trial, death on the Cross and Resurrection
from the dead. There are translations of these infancy gospels in J. K. Elliott, ed., The Apocryphal New
Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation Based on
M.R. James (Oxford, 1993; rev. edn 2004), 46–122.
4 ‘Protevangelium’ is a modern term, meaning ‘Gospel of the first [years]’; it is attributed to James,
the Lord’s ‘brother’ (claimed by the text to be his step-brother). For a translation, see Elliott, The
Apocryphal New Testament, 48–67.
feasts of the Mother of God, celebrating her Conception, Nativity, and

Presentation in the Temple, are all inspired by the Protevangelium. This text also
had a powerful influence on the iconographic tradition, perhaps the fullest
example of this being the cycle of mosaics illustrating the life of the Virgin in the
narthex of the Church of the Chora in Constantinople.5 The Protevangelium is
also a source for the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God,
justifying it on empirical, rather than doctrinal, grounds.
I want to suggest that we see these two sources of reflection on the Virgin Mary
as parallel to the two modes of Jewish exegesis, known as aggadah and halakah,
the former providing narrative accounts that embroider the biblical text, initially
the account of the Exodus, as well as providing stories about later figures in the
Jewish tradition, such as rabbis, while the latter provides detailed elaboration and
commentary on the moral teaching of the Torah.6 The sort of narrative elabor
ation found in the aggadah is paralleled in the apocryphal material, and indeed
can already be found in some of the Gospel material, notably the infancy narra-
tives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Christian equivalent of the ethical
halakah I suggest we find, not in the collection of ecclesiastical canons—the most
obvious parallel—but in the doctrinal definitions, ratified by the councils. I am
deliberately suggesting a morphological difference between Rabbinic Judaism
and Christianity, or at least, Patristic (or maybe Eastern and Oriental Orthodox)
Christianity, both finding significance in a narrative elaboration of their tradi-
tions, but finding defining significance in elaborated moral precept, on the Jewish
side, and precise doctrinal definition, on the Christian side. The way in which, on
this model, Christian doctrinal definition parallels Jewish moral precept indicates
a fundamental divergence between the two developments of Second Temple
Judaism,7 something I cannot pursue now, though I would observe that it is borne
out in the way in which Rabbinic Judaism has developed differences over the
interpretation of the Torah, that is in the realm of halakah, while Christian differ-
ences are, notoriously, over matters of dogma. Furthermore, as both aggadah and
halakah are understood as developments, or unfoldings, of the fundamental reve
lation of the Torah, so the narratives of the Protevangelium and the related scrip-
tural material, both canonical and apocryphal, as well as the doctrinal
definitions—the Christian aggadah and Christian halakah, so to speak—draw out
5 The Kariye Djami, a mosque from the fall of Constantinople until it became a museum in mod-
ern Turkey, has a fine set of mosaics in the narthex that depict the infancy of the Virgin Mary: see
P. A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, 4 vols (London, 1966–75).
6 The Torah is the law revealed to Moses. In its written form, it corresponds to the Pentateuch of
the Christian Bible, but it embraces, too, the oral tradition of the law, also revealed to Moses and
handed down by word of mouth.
7 ‘Second Temple Judaism’ is the term used by scholars to denote the Hebrew religion during the
period of the second temple, rebuilt c.520 after the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians,
itself destroyed by the Romans in ad 70. ‘Second Temple Judaism’ can be seen as the common ances-
tor of both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.
the Christian significance of the Scriptures: they are both ultimately exegetical
methods. In the Christian case aggadah is often developed in a very particular
way, peculiar to Christianity, and that is by means of what we have come to call
typology—indeed I would go so far as to say that Christian aggadah is almost
invariably developed by this means; typology provides the interpretative struc-
ture, as it were, of Christian narrative aggadah. Take, for example, the story of
Mary as one of virgins weaving the scarlet and purple cloth for the veil of the
temple at the time of the Annunciation: as the body of Jesus is woven in her
womb—the flesh of Christ, which is according to the Epistle to the Hebrews the
veil (Heb. 10:20)—Mary weaves the scarlet and purple of the veil of the temple
that will be rent when the King (purple) to whom she gives birth surrenders his
life on the cross (scarlet).8 Or again, many aspects of Christian belief about the
Virgin Mary, from the earliest times, relate the Virgin Mary to the Virgin Eve:
Mary’s obedience redeems Eve’s sin; Mary gives birth to God, while Eve exclaims
that she has begotten a man—Cain (Gen. 4:1); and so on.9 This way of thinking
about the imaginative narratives, so important for the development of reflection
on the Virgin Mary, as well as devotion to her (note how important the
Protevangelium has been for the development of liturgical celebration of the
Mother of God, as noted earlier), is clearly capable of considerable elaboration. If
we are to think of it as aggadah, as I have suggested, then we are drawing atten-
tion to its hermeneutical dimension: there is something being interpreted in these
stories, they are not just satisfying a desire for imaginative detail. Typology is one
of the ways of providing this hermeneutical dimension. We can, furthermore, ask
what is the overall meaning of, say, the Protevangelium. A provisional answer is
not difficult to find: the Protevangelium is about purity: the purity of the Virgin,
the liturgical significance of purity.10 Here, however, is not the place to pursue
this, fascinating though it has become. We must turn to the subject of this paper:
St John Damascene.
By the time of St John Damascene, all this reflection on the Virgin Mary—both
dogmatic deduction and imaginative development—has been fully elaborated: he
stands within a highly articulated Christological tradition, the tradition of the
councils which he fiercely defended; he also stands within a well-developed litur-
gical tradition—most of the feasts of the Mother of God found in the Byzantine
8 I know that Mary is said to be spinning thread, not weaving, but it is clear that the end result is
the veil (see Protevangelium 10.1), and it is striking that from the time of Proklos of Constantinople
(d. 446 or 447) onwards, when the imagery already there in the Protevangelium is suddenly developed,
the metaphor seems to glide almost unconsciously from spinning to weaving, and Mary’s womb is
thought of as a loom rather than a spindle.
9 This inverse parallelism between the Blessed Virgin and Eve is often called in the Latin tradition
the ‘Eva-Ave’ theory (Ave—Hail—being the first word addressed by the Archangel Gabriel to the
Virgin Mary in the Latin version of the Gospel of Luke: Luke 1:28).
10 I am here picking up on some of the discussion provoked by the original paper, and in particular
the observations of Dr Mary Cunningham.
tradition had emerged by his day, the latest of these feasts, that of the Dormition
(Koimesis, ‘falling asleep’ or death), based on much later apocryphal traditions
than the Protevangelium, having already by then established for a couple of cen
turies.11 How does John of Damascus understand the Virgin as the link between
God and humanity? It is not that Mary fulfils a mediatorial role Christ can no
longer fulfil because devotion has raised him too high. Christ is the mediator, the
link between God and humanity, but this is understood in terms of the elaborated
Christology of the councils—not just those of the fourth century, but of the next
two centuries too. It is not just that God and man meet in Christ; rather that in
Christ God assumes and embraces a human nature and a human life: the
Damascene’s Christology, like that of the post-Chalcedonian interpretation of
Chalcedon, is what Father Georges Florovsky called an ‘asymmetrical Christology’.12
The one who Christ is, is God, and it is God who assumes humanity. From where?
From the Virgin. Without the Virgin and her free acceptance of God’s request
conveyed by the archangel Gabriel, God would not be able to embrace humanity:
Mary therefore provides a necessary link. John expresses this in three ways: first
in a narrative, retelling the evangelical events of Annunciation and Nativity in
precise, technical language; second, in technical theological language expressed
in formulae and defended; and third, in imagery, drawn from the scriptures and
interpreted by way of typology. An example of the first is a passage from his
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith:
The Holy Spirit came upon her . . . purified her, and gave her at once the power to
receive the Godhead of the Word and to beget. Then the subsistent Wisdom and
Word of God Most High, the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father, over-
shadowed her and, in the manner of a divine seed, from her chaste and most
pure blood compacted for himself flesh animated with a rational and intellectual
soul, the first-fruits of our compound nature, not by seed, but by creation
through the Holy Spirit, the form not being put together bit by bit, but perfected
all at once. . . . (Expos. 46. 16 ff.)13
11 For which, see, most recently, S. J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition
and Assumption (Oxford, 2002).
12 Georges Florovsky coined the term ‘asymmetrical Christology’ (cf. Vizantiiskie Otsy V–VIII vv.,
(Paris, 1933), 26) to express his insight that despite the Chalcedonian Definition seeking to express
balance between the humanity and divinity of Christ, this balance finds its fulcrum in the Divine
Person of Christ. The divinity therefore takes precedence and Chalcedonian theology is thus
‘asymmetrical’.
13 All following references to John’s writings are to B. Kotter’s critical text, in Die Schriften des
Johannes von Damaskos, Patristische Texte und Studien 7, 12, 17, 22, 29, 5 vols (Berlin and New York,
1969–88). Expos. = Expositio Fidei (in vol. 2); Fid. = De Fide contra Nestorianos (in vol. 4); Nativ.M. =
Oratio in Nativitatem Sanctae Dei Genetricis Mariae; Dorm. = In Dormitionem Sanctae Dei Genitricis
Mariae Orationes (all in vol. 5).
Here the focus of the elaborations of the account—even those that directly
concern the Virgin: for example, the detailed exposition of her perpetual v irginity—is
not on the Virgin herself, but on the necessary entailments of a Chalcedonian
Christology.
The same is true of the technical language expressed in formulae: it is all pri-
marily Christological; the implications for the status of the Virgin are just that—
implications. Most of these formulae—both those that involve the Mother of God
and those that are purely Christological—have one striking characteristic, and
that is that they are antithetical, either based on the fundamental antithesis that
Christ is God and man, or involving other antitheses such as fall–redemption. An
example of this is the way John expresses the doctrine of what he calls the two
births (of Christ):
For we know two births of the only-Begotten Son and Word of God, one from
before the ages, immaterially and divinely, from the Father alone, according to
which birth he was not born of a woman and is motherless, and the other, in the
last days from a mother alone in the flesh in accordance with the divine economy
and for our salvation, according to which birth he is fatherless.
(Fid. 49.1‒11)
Or more laconically in his sermon on the Nativity of the Mother of God: ‘for he
[Christ] alone is only-Begotten from the Father alone, and alone <born> from a
mother alone’ (Nativ.M. 10.19‒20).
Most revealing, however, is the use of typological imagery. This typological
imagery has a long history, going back to Justin and Irenaeus in the second century,
exploding round about the time of the council of Ephesos, as we can see from the
sermons of Proklos of Constantinople, and later in the Akathistos Hymn. A good
example can be found in John’s first sermon on the Dormition:
You are the royal throne, around which the angels stand to see their Lord and
creator seated upon it. You are called the spiritual Eden, holier and more divine
than that of old; for in the former Eden the earthly Adam dwelt, but in you the
Lord from heaven. The ark prefigured you, in that it guarded the seeds of a sec-
ond world; for you gave birth to Christ, the world’s salvation, who overwhelmed
<the flood of> sin and calmed its waves. The burning bush was a portrait of you
in advance; the tablets written by God described you; the ark of the law told
your story; the golden urn and the candelabrum and table, the rod of Aaron that
had blossomed – all clearly were foreshadowings [of you]. (Dorm. I.8)14
14 The translations from the homilies on the Dormition are those by Brian Daley, occasionally with
slight modifications, in his On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies (Crestwood NY, 1998),
183–239.
John goes on to mention the ‘flame of divinity’ (cf. Exod. 13:21), the manna
(Exod. 16:31), the ‘nameless “name that is above every name” ’ (Phil. 2:90), the
fiery furnace of Daniel (Dan. 3:49 f.), Abraham’s tent in which Sarah baked ‘bread
hidden in the ashes’ for the three angelic visitors (Gen. 18:6), and then recalls, as
if he had almost forgotten it, Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12).
What is striking about the examples John chooses (or rather the tradition
which John is following has chosen) is that they are all places where God is to be
found, and most of these examples are cultic: the Virgin is the place where God is
encountered and worshipped. So the Virgin is the throne of Isaiah’s vision (Isa. 6:1);
the burning bush, before which Moses was ordered to remove his shoes, ‘for
the place on which you are standing is holy ground’ (Exod. 3:5); the ark of witness
and everything it contained—the tablets of the Law (Exod. 32:15 f.), the golden
urn (Exod. 16:33), the candelabrum and table (Exod. 25:30, 22), the rod of Aaron
which blossomed (Num. 17:8). The Virgin is the place of God, the shrine at which
we worship—not her, but the one born of her, the God made flesh she presents to
us. Mary is, if you like, theotopos—‘place of God’! But in truth she is more than
that, she is Θεοτόκος, the ‘one who gave birth to God’. She is not just an edifice, an
impersonal temple, in which God is found and worshipped; nor is she simply the
ground that was fertilized, the fleece on which rain or dew fell (see Ps. 71 [72]:6;
Judg. 6:36–8)—she is not a passive instrument in God’s hands; she is God’s part-
ner in the conception and birth of his Son. The Damascene, following tradition,
brings this out, not only in his treatment of the Annunciation, but also in his
treatment of the Conception of the Virgin and her Assumption. In his sermon on
the Nativity of the Mother of God, John proclaims:
But why has the Virgin Mother been born from a sterile woman? For that which
alone is new under the sun, the culmination of miracles, there had to be pre-
pared a way by means of miracles and what was greater had to advance slowly
from what was more humble. And I have another more exalted and divine rea-
son. Nature has been defeated by grace and stands trembling, no longer ready to
take the lead. Therefore when the God-bearing Virgin was about to be born
from Anna, nature did not dare to anticipate the off-shoot of grace; instead it
remained without fruit until grace sprouted its fruit. For it was necessary to her
to be the first-born, she who would bear the ‘Firstborn of all creation’ in whom
‘all things subsist’ . . . . (Nativ.M. 2. 1–10)15
and a little later:
15 I have used, and slightly modified, Mary Cunningham’s translation of his sermon. This appears
in M. B. Cunningham, ‘Wider Than Heaven’: Eighth-Century Byzantine Homilies on the Mother of God
(Crestwood NY, 2008), 53–70.
Today the sterile gates are opened and a virginal, divine gate comes forth, from
which and through which God, who is beyond all existing things, will enter ‘into
the world’ ‘bodily’, according to Paul who heard ineffable things. Today a rod
was begotten from the root of Jesse, out of which a divine flower will arise for
the world. Today he, who once in ancient times established the firmament out of
water and raised it up to the heights, has prepared heaven on earth out of earthly
nature. For, truly, this <heaven> is much more divine and miraculous than that
<firmament>. For the One, who at that time prepared the sun, arose from this
<earthly nature> as a Sun of righteousness. (Nativ.M. 3. 1–9)
The point of this concern for the conception, birth (and upbringing) of the one
who is to be Mother of God is that her involvement in the divine economy is not
passive, she must freely, personally, accept the divine invitation, which entails a
simplicity and limpidity of will that cannot simply be presumed.
Similarly with the Assumption of the Mother of God. This is, as John makes
clear in his homilies on the Dormition, especially the second, an entailment of the
fact that the body formed in the womb of the Virgin is itself a source of life,
ζωαρχικός, a term he doubtless owes to Dionysios the Areopagite, the first theolo-
gian to reflect on the Dormition of the Mother of God.16 But if the body of the
one the Virgin bore is ζωαρχικός, what must the Virgin’s body itself be? What
John asserts at length is expressed succinctly in the kontakion for the Feast: ‘for as
Mother of Life she has been taken over into life by him who dwelt in her ever-
virgin womb’.17 But this is not a merely physical entailment, it is expressed in the
whole longing and desire of the Mother of God on her deathbed. As the
Damascene put it:
And it seems likely that she would have spoken thus: ‘ “Into your hands, my Son,
I commend my spirit!” Receive the soul that is so dear to you, which you have
preserved blameless. Yours is my body, too; I do not give it to the earth! Keep it
safe, since you were pleased to dwell in it, and to preserve its virginity as you
were being born. Bring me close to you, so that where you are, the fruit of my
womb, I too may be, and may share your home. I am hastening towards you,
who came to dwell so immediately in me. And you must console my dear chil-
dren, whom you have been pleased to call your brothers and sisters, when I go
away from them; add a blessing to the blessing I shall now give them by laying
on my hands.’ (Dorm. II. 10. 4–13)
16 Dionysios the Areopagite, the judge of the Areopagos converted by Paul’s speech in Athens (cf.
Acts 17:34), was the pseudonym taken by the author of a set of four treatises and ten letters, composed
c.530, that had a vast influence on Byzantine theology.
17 Translation taken from The Divine Liturgy of our Father among the Saints John Chrysostom
(Oxford University Press, 1995), 80. A kontakion, in modern use, is a short verse (troparion), used in
the services of the Orthodox Church.
And John represents the Lord replying to his mother in words drawn from the
Song of Songs:
Come, my blessed Mother, ‘into the place of my rest’.18 ‘Arise, come, my dear
one,’ beautiful among all women; ‘for the winter has past, and the time of pruning
has come’ (Cant. 2:10–12). ‘My dear one is beautiful, and there is no blemish in
you’ (Cant. 4:7). ‘The odour of your ointments surpasses all fragrance’
(Cant. 1:3, cf. 4:10).
St John Damascene is traditional in the way that he uses what I have called
Christian aggadah and halakah as the source of his meditation on the Mother of
God. What is also traditional is the reserve with which he uses the Christian
‘aggadic’ tradition: it is only the bare bones of the story that concern him, any-
thing significant is justified by Christian doctrinal halakah. On the one occasion
when he relates one of the stories in more detail—the account of the Jew who
tried to seize the bier of the Mother of God—he almost apologises for mentioning
it, calling it ‘a bit of spice in a cooked dish’: mere garnish, not the substance of the
meal (Dorm. II. 13). Indeed John seems to me to prefer, if not create, a new form
of Christian aggadah, in which the narrative is filled out, not by detail to satisfy
the curious, but by a doctrinal elaboration, presented in narrative form.
I want to close with the words about the Mother of God which he puts on the
lips of Adam and Eve:
It was then, indeed, that Adam and Eve, the ancestors of our race, cried out
piercingly, with joyful lips: ‘Blessed are you, our daughter, for cancelling the
punishment of our transgression! For you inherited from us a corruptible body,
but you bore in your womb, for our sake, the garment of incorruptibility. You
took your being from our loins, but you restored to us our well-being. You put
an end to our travail, and broke through the swaddling-bands of death. You
made available to us again our ancient home: we were the ones who locked
Paradise, you the one who opened the way to the tree of life. Through our
actions, sad times overtook good; but through yours, yet better times have come
again out of sadness. How, then, shall you, the immaculate one, taste death? For
you death will be the bridge to life, the stairway to heaven, the ford to the banks
of immortality. Truly you are blessed, O most blessed one! For who has been
offered in sacrifice but the Word himself, suffering all that we have learned he
did?’ (Dorm. II. 8. 1–13)
18 Ps. 131 (132):8; cf. Ps. 94 (95):11. Note that both these psalm verses refer to the ark of the coven
ant as the place where God rests.
34
The Doctrine of the Eucharist in
the Iconoclast Controversy
Over the last few decades, much research has been done into the nature of the
Iconoclast controversy; there has been a great deal of discussion over what
Iconoclasm actually was, what its antecedents were, as well as what indeed hap-
pened, the sequence of events that constituted Iconoclasm. The publication in
2011 of a major work from Cambridge University Press, Byzantium in the
Iconoclast Era, c.680–850, by the distinguished Byzantinists, Leslie Brubaker and
John Haldon, has done little to establish any resolution of the issues, for the line
taken by these authors has been much contested.1 Indeed, given the comparative
paucity of evidence, it is not likely that controversy over the Iconoclast contro-
versy will ever be dispelled.2
The origins of Iconoclasm are quite obscure; was it a popular movement, of
which the Byzantine emperors decided to take advantage? Was it simply imperial
policy imposed from above? Either way, it seems certainly to have been a matter
of imperial intervention. There is no direct evidence for this: later sources give the
impression that imperial edicts were issued ordering the destruction, or at least
removal, of icons, but no imperial edict survives either from 726, when according
to some sources Iconoclasm was introduced, nor from 730, when iconoclasm was
confirmed and the patriarch, Germanos, resigned. It is not quite true to say that
there is no contemporary evidence for this two-stage introduction of iconoclasm;
both the Liber Pontificalis and, on the most natural interpretation, the first two
treatises against the iconoclasts by St John Damascene support such a sequence of
events, but their evidence is indirect, and based on their understanding of the
1 Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.680–850 (Cambridge
University Press, 2011), with its companion volume, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (ca 680–850): An
Annotated Survey, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 7 (Ashgate, 2001). For a critical
review, see my review in Journal of Theological Studies 64 (2013), 289–93.
2 For a very brief bibliography on Iconoclasm, I would mention: Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin,
eds., Iconoclasm (Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1977), representing the state of play of older scholar-
ship, still valuable; Hans-Georg Thümmel, Die Frühgeschichte der ostkirchlichen Bilderlehre. Texte und
Untersuchungen zue Zeit vor dem Bilderstreit, Texte und Untersuchungen 139 (Akademie Verlag,
1992) for a collection of texts relating to icons from before the Iconoclast controversy, and for texts
from the Iconoclast period itself: Herman Hennephof, ed., Textos Byzantinos ad Iconomachiam
Pertinentes (Brill, 1969). For a recent account of the iconoclast controversy, see my Greek East and
Latin West: The Church ad 681–1071 (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 41–66, 82–99, 119–38.
impact of imperial policy. If the sequence of events that accompanied the origins
of iconoclasm as imperial policy are unclear, the reasons for this policy can only
be a matter of conjecture, but the responses to iconoclasm by St Germanos of
Constantinople and St John of Damaskos suggest that, at least to begin with, the
charge against the veneration of icons was that of idolatry. This is supported by
the later repudiation by the Orthodox of ‘those who say that another, apart from
Christ our God, delivered us from the error of idols’, as one of the anathemas
pronounced at the Seventh Œcumenical Synod put it3—presumably directed
against claims of Leo III and Constantine V that by their policy of iconoclasm
they had rid the empire of idolatry.
Politics and theology were, then, involved in the introduction of iconoclasm.
As an imperial act, it was clearly political, but that does not mean that theo
logical reasons were irrelevant: it will not do to assert, with Brubaker and
Haldon, that ‘[t]heology is not why iconoclasm happened’.4 The Christian Roman
Empire, what we nowadays call the Byzantine Empire, was a society which
thought of itself in terms and concepts that were soaked in theology. There is
nothing odd about this; indeed, as Mark Whittow once pointed out, it is we,
products of Western society, who are odd in expecting a rationalist explanation
of events.5
Constantine V acceded to the imperial throne in 741 and during his reign,
though not immediately, the theological justification of iconoclasm became more
sophisticated. Spurred on, perhaps, by the defence of the icons mounted by
Patriarch Germanos and, maybe, John Damascene (though it is not clear that
John’s arguments—as opposed to his reputation—were known in Constantinople
as early as Constantine’s reign), instead of arguing that the veneration of icons
amounted to idolatry a more elaborate attack on icons was mounted. This was
contained in the Inquiries—Peuseis—written by Constantine V himself, as papers
in preparation of the Synod he eventually called in 754 to be the Seventh
Œcumenical Synod, now known as the Synod of Hiereia, after the palace where it
took place. The argument of the Peuseis was incorporated in the definition, or
Horos, of the Synod of Hiereia. Both the Peuseis and the Horos survive in
Orthodox sources: the latter in the acts of the sixth session of the Second Synod
of Nicaea (778), which affirmed the legitimacy of making and venerating icons,
where it was read out paragraph by paragraph and refuted; the former in the
extracts quoted from it by Patriarch Nikephoros in his refutation in the three
Antirrhetici adversus Constantinum Copronynum.
3 J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 31 vols (Florence, 1759–98), 13.
397E. The anathema was included in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy (843).
4 Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium, 783.
5 See Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600–1025 (Macmillan, 1996), 134–5.
The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast 361
The Iconoclast Argument against Icons
It is, therefore, difficult to be certain about the theological justification of icono-

clasm offered by the iconoclasts themselves, as what we have of their reasoning is
preserved by their Orthodox opponents. Nevertheless, from these sources, tainted
though they are, we can, I think, venture to construct a carefully formed argu-
ment against icons, both their fashioning and their veneration. First of all, an icon
could only function if it were a true icon—an undeceiving icon, ἀψευδὴς εἰκών.
There followed two lines of attack arguing that a visual icon was a false, deceptive
icon—ψευδὴς εἰκών. First, a true icon would need to be consubstantial (ὁμοούσιος)
with the original, as the eternal Son was consubstantial with the Father; this was
obviously not the case with a visual icon. Furthermore, an icon of Christ would
have to depict one who was both God and man: if it simply depicted a man, it
would have separated the humanity of Christ from his divinity, and thus fallen
into the Nestorian heresy; if it was claimed that the depiction of the humanity of
Christ also depicted his divinity, then his divinity would be circumscribed and
made to form one nature with his humanity—the heresy of Monophysitism.
Recalling, however, that icons were claimed by the iconodules to recall the mem-
ory of some holy person or event, the iconoclasts offered an alternative to the icon
by claiming that the real way of remembering Christ was to do what he had asked
his followers to do in his memory—that is, to celebrate the holy mystery of the
Eucharist. Instead of an icon made by an artist, the true way of remembering
Christ, the iconoclasts now claimed, was in the Eucharist, which was a true type
or figure—τύπος—of Christ, in some sense homoousios with Him. The series of
extracts from the Peuseis concerning the Eucharist read thus:
According to his godhead he foresaw his death and resurrection and the ascent
into the heavens, and that we who believe in him would preserve a continual
memory of his Incarnation day and night . . . And he commanded his holy dis
ciples and apostles to pass on a type of his incarnation6 in a way that pleased
him; so that through the priestly service [τῆς ἱερατικῆς ἀναγωγῆς], if we take
part according to the ordinance, we receive it as truly and properly his
body . . . And if we wish to understand the image of his body as something
derived from that [sc. the body], we take this as the true form of his body . . . For
why? The body that we receive is an image of his body, having the form
[μορφάζων] of his flesh, since it has become a type of his body . . . Nor is any
bread his body, just as neither is any wine his blood, but only that which has
been taken up through the priestly rite from that which is made with hands to
6 Τύπον εἰς σῶμα αὐτοῦ: literally, I suppose, a type of (his coming) into a body.
that which is not made with hands [διὰ τῆς ἱερατικῆς τελετῆς ἀναφερόμενος ἐκ
τοῦ χειροποιήτου πρὸς τὸ ἀχειροποίητον].7
The argument here is:
• We should remember Christ in the way he commanded us;

• This is through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, which are a τύπος and
εἰκών of his body and blood;
• Here we find the true ἀχειροποίητος icon, the true icon ‘made with-
out hands’;
• This type and image of Christ is only made through the proper priestly rite
(the importance of this underlined by its being affirmed twice).
Traditional Nature of the Iconoclast Argument
There are a couple of points worth emphasizing. First, we should recognize that
this is intended to be an uncontroversial affirmation of the real presence of Christ
in the Eucharist. The language of τύπος, in particular, is taken from the Eucharistic
texts; as is well known, the Anaphora of St Basil, the one still the most commonly
used at this time in the liturgy at the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, refers to τὰ
ἀντίτυπα τοῦ ἁγίου σώματος καὶ αἵματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ σου. The use of the language
of type and antitype is not at all meant to deny that the consecrated bread and
wine is truly the body and blood of Christ. What the iconoclasts are saying is that
the bread and wine are symbols of the body and blood of Christ made present in
the Eucharist, and to express this they are simply using traditional, hallowed lan-
guage. Second, note the claim that the Eucharist is not just an icon, but an icon
‘made without hands’, ἀχειροποίητος. One argument in favour of icons was surely
(though this argument is not regarded as important in the justification of icons by
such as St John Damascene) that there are icons ‘made without hands’, miraculous
icons like the face of Christ impressed on the Mandylion, whose very existence
demonstrates divine approval and authentication. Finally, and closely related to
this iconoclast attempt to undermine claims about icons ‘made without hands’,
there is the stress on the ‘priestly rite’ that effects the presence. In this context, it is
relevant to recall that one of the iconoclast objections to icons was, as the Horos of
Hiereia put it,
the ill name of the falsely called icon neither has its existence in the tradition of
Christ, or the Apostles, or the Fathers, nor is there any prayer of consecration for
7 Hennephof, Textus Byzantinos, §§165–8 (Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova, 13:333B–337C).

it to transpose it from the state of being common to the state of being sacred.
Instead it remains common and worthless, as the painter made it.8
We should note that, in the response to this at the sixth session of Nicaea II, the
fact that icons are not blessed is simply accepted: like many other sacred things—
the sign of the cross and the sacred vessels and vestments9 used in the Eucharist
are mentioned—no rite of blessing is necessary. Icon painters stood within a trad
ition that could be traced back through the Fathers, and in their icons they were
required to follow traditional use (the details of tradition are not actually spelt out
by the Synod), but icons are holy because they depict holy people and holy events.
This is perhaps the heart of the iconoclast objection to icons, or at least the heart
of imperial endorsement of iconoclasm, namely, that what was dangerous about
icons was the way in which they provided uncontrolled access to the holy. It was
just such uncontrolled access to the holy that imperial iconoclasm was at pains to
prevent. What was sought was control over access to the holy,10 which the imper
ial iconoclasts believed would be secured by restriction of such access to three
τύποι: the cross (part of the imperial cult since the time of Constantine), the
church building (called a εἰκὼν καὶ τύπος of God by none other than St Maximos
the Confessor),11 and the mystery of the Eucharist—and of these, the latter two
required priestly (indeed, in the case of churches, episcopal) consecration. In
short, the iconoclast claim—and argument—was that the true ‘image and type’ of
Christ is the one he has provided us with, the consecrated bread and wine of the
Eucharist; this is the true icon ‘made without hands’; and it can only be furnished
through priestly consecration, that is consecration by a defined group over which
the emperors could expect to exercise some real control.
The Orthodox Response and the Eucharist
It would, I think, be fair to say that the iconoclast argument that involved the
Eucharist was not, in fact, about the Eucharist at all. Their argument was about
the nature of the icon. They took for granted that in the Eucharist Christ was truly
present under the types or figures of bread and wine, and argued from this that
the Eucharist was a—the—true consubstantial image or icon of Christ. It was
their orthodox opponents who turned what, for the iconoclasts, was an argument
8 Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova, 13: 268C; translation by Daniel Sahas, in Icon and Logos:
Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations 4 (University of
Toronto Press, 1986), 97.
9 Implicitly, I would argue, from the mention of weavers (Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova,
13: 272A).
10 As Sebastian Brock observed long ago: at the end of his article, ‘Iconoclasm and the
Monophysites’, in Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, 53–7, at 57.
11 Maximos, Mystagogia 1 (PG 91:664CD).
about the nature of the icon into an argument about the nature of Christ’s presence
in the Eucharist.
For the response of the Orthodox defenders of the icons to this argument of
the iconoclasts was to dismiss what their opponents thought was uncontrover-
sial Eucharistic theology and claim that the consecrated elements are not types
and images, but the very body and blood of Christ. Nikephoros argues that the
bread becomes the body ‘which the Word assumed from the moment he became
incarnate’ (antirr. 2: PG 100:333C); it is not a matter of form or shape (μόρφωσις:
compare the word used in the Peuseis), but of truth (διὰ τὴν ἀλήθειαν: 336B). He
goes on to argue about the use of the word ἀντίτυπα of the bread and wine in the
anaphora of St Basil, that ‘they are called this not after the sanctification, but
before being sanctified’ (οὐ μετὰ τὸν ἁγιασμόν τοῦτο, ἀλλὰ πρὸ τοῦ ἁγιασθῆναι
ἐκλήθησαν: 336C). Similarly, St Theodore the Studite makes this rejoinder to his
iconoclast opponent:
But if they [the consecrated body and blood of Christ] are the truth—as indeed
they really are, for we confess that the faithful receive the very body and blood of
Christ, according to the voice of God himself—why do you talk nonsense
changing the mysteries of the truth into types? (antirr. 1. 10: PG 99:340B)
It is has been argued that this change in emphasis led to the Anaphora of St Basil,
which refers to the Eucharistic elements as ‘antitypes’, being dislodged from its
position as the normal liturgy of the Great Church to be replaced by the Liturgy of
St John Chrysostom with its more unequivocal language.12 It may also have led to
a focusing on the epiklesis as the moment of consecration, since the use of the term
‘antitypes’ in the anaphora of St Basil occurs just before that moment in the prayer.
Eucharistic Theology in East and West
This sharpened emphasis on the real, and not symbolic or figurative, presence of
Christ in the Eucharist belongs to the second phase of Iconoclasm, when it was
reintroduced by Emperor Leo V in 815. It is interesting to note that this emphasis
among the Orthodox opponents of Iconoclasm in the East pre-dates the very
similar concerns that occupied the West somewhat later on in the ninth century.13
12 What I presented at the conference as conjecture was confirmed by Fr Stephanos Alexopoulos
from Athens, who outlined the argument of his paper, ‘The Influence of Iconoclasm on Byzantine
Liturgy: A Case Study’. In Worship Traditions in Armenia and the Neighboring Christian East, ed.
Roberta Ervine (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006), 127–37.
13 For a concise summary of these debates, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology
(600–1300), vol. 3: The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 74–80, 184–204.
It could even be that awareness of the Eastern controversy sparked off the contro-
versy in the West. What is more striking, however, is that though we find the same
emphasis on the identity of the Eucharistic body of Christ and his historical body
in both East and West, there seems to be no evidence in the East of the broader
repercussions of this identification that took place in the West which were traced
by Henri de Lubac in his great book, Corpus Mysticum:14 a gradual focusing on
the moment of consecration, leading eventually to the detachment of the
Eucharistic body of Christ from the liturgy and its association with the extra-
liturgical devotions associated with the Corpus Christi cult and, furthermore, the
identification of the corpus mysticum (originally a designation of the Eucharistic
body of Christ) with the Church of the elect, as opposed to the historical institu-
tion of the Church: all of which led to liturgical piety being swallowed up in an
individualistic concern for salvation. Why East did not follow the West in this
matter is not at all clear. Various avenues of enquiry suggest themselves: the
greater robustness of the corporate dimension of the Eucharistic liturgy in the
Byzantine East; the way in which the change in valency of the term corpus mysti-
cum led to an understanding of the Eucharistic sacrifice in the West that stressed
the connection with the sacrifice of the Cross, whereas in the East the link
between the Eucharistic sacrifice and the heavenly sacrifice of Christ remained
primary; or perhaps the fact that the controversy in the West was bound up with
another controversy over the nature of predestination, a topic that did not pre
occupy the East to anything like the same degree. All these concerns lie beyond
the scope of this paper, limited as it is to the doctrine of the Eucharist in the
Iconoclast Controversy, but they indicate some of the repercussions of the
changes, both in theological understanding and liturgical practice, that seem to
have arisen in the context of that controversy.15
14 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum. L’Eucharistie et l’église au moyen age, 2nd rev. edn (Aubier, 1949).
15 This paper has its origins in a paper given at a conference in Moscow in 2007, and published in
Russian translation in the proceedings: Orthodox Teaching on the Church Mysteries, vol. 2: Eucharist:
Theology and Priesthood (Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission, 2009), 124–9. I have some-
what expanded it for publication in Sobornost.
35
Photios as a Theologian
Photios was almost certainly the most learned man of his age, who after a career
in the administration of the Byzantine Empire became patriarch in 858, against
his will, an event that provoked a schism with Rome, in which he perhaps rather
too enthusiastically participated. He became patriarch after the deposition of
Ignatios, and it was that deposition that gave Rome the opportunity to involve
itself in the affairs of the patriarchate. He was himself deposed as patriarch in 867
on the accession of Basil I, whose usurpation of the Byzantine throne left him
vulnerable and in need of any support he could get; dismissing Photios and
reinstating Ignatios would secure the support of Rome. On Ignatios’ death in 877,
Photios again acceded to the patriarchal throne, only to resign finally in 886 on
the accession to the imperial throne of Leo the Wise. He died sometime after 893,
probably shortly after.
Photios lived in interesting times. The Orthodox triumph over iconoclasm was
still being gradually established; it was only in 867, nearly a quarter of a century
after the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ in 843, that a mosaic of the Mother of God, the
first permanent icon to be erected in Hagia Sophia since the overthrow of icono-
clasm, was unveiled, an occasion marked by a famous sermon delivered by
Photios as patriarch. He was directly involved in the conversion of the Bulgarian
Khan Boris, the first step in the conversion of the Slavs, something that further
disturbed relationships with Rome, and a couple of sermons contain information
on the attack on Constantinople by the Russians in 860.
Photios was, as already remarked, the most learned man of his age, and must
have played some part in the revival of learning in Byzantium in the mid-ninth
century, but exactly what role is unclear. The monuments to his learning are
found in his writings: the lexicon he compiled, and, most strikingly, his vast col-
lection of reviews of theological and secular literature, known to posterity as the
‘Library’, Bibliotheca, or ‘Myriad of books’, Myriobiblion, as well as in his letters
and a collection of theological discussions, known as the Amphilochia, after
Amphilochios, bishop of Kyzikos, to whom they are ostensibly addressed. Photios’
scholarship has naturally attracted the attention of scholars, and his dealings with
the Roman pope and the Bulgarian khan have secured him a place on the stage of
world history. In his relations with Rome, he is one of the first—certainly the first
of whom we know anything much—to make the question of the nature of the
Spirit’s procession within the Godhead an issue between Eastern and Western
Photios as a Theologian 367
Christendom, an issue of such gravity as to lead him to accuse the West of heresy
for asserting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son—Filioque.
It is these important matters that have naturally attracted the attention of
scholars. Most recently, Professor Henry Chadwick has written illuminatingly on
Photios’ role in the growing rift in the Church between East and West.1 Photios’
contribution to, and place in the history of, classical scholarship has been authori-
tatively dealt with by Nigel Wilson in his work Scholars of Byzantium.2 For his
role in the conversion of Bulgaria, Professor Dimitri Obolensky’s chapter in The
Byzantine Commonwealth remains important.3 My concern here is with appar-
ently less important matters: his theological works, what kind of a theologian he
was, and how he fits into the history of Byzantine theology. Hans-Georg Beck was
undoubtedly right when he remarked at the beginning of his discussion of
Photios in his Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich that ‘to
measure the importance of Photios [as a theologian, that is] against that of a John
Damascene or a Maximos is kein fruchtbarer Versuch—not a fruitful task’.4 But
the historian, even the historian of theology, is likely to get a distorted picture of
the past if he passes over those who are less interesting or original.
In trying to get some picture of the interests and resources of Photios as a theo-
logian, my hope is to be able to form some sense of how he fits into the history of
theology in the Byzantine period. For it is not difficult to see that Photios has
some importance for the history of theology, quite apart from the high-profile
matters—particularly, indeed virtually exclusively so far as theology is concerned,
his role in the Filioque controversy—to which attention has hitherto been usually
directed. On the one hand, he represents a tradition of theology that by no means
died out in Byzantium, even though general surveys of Byzantine theology pass
over it: namely a continuing lay tradition of reflection on Scripture and the theo
logical tradition.
Histories of Byzantine theology (though this is scarcely a genre!) rather too
easily give the impression that interest in dogmatic theology died with the icono-
clast controversy to be replaced by a theology that was predominantly ascetic
and—dread word!—‘mystical’. The only real exception to this is the continuing,
and growing, polemical, or sometimes eirenic, concern with the West in the run-
up to the schism and then, after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, in attempts to
heal the schism, or prevent the betrayal of Orthodoxy thereby. After iconoclasm,
1 Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church (Oxford University Press,
2003), esp. 106–92.
2 N. G. Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (Duckworth, 1983), 89–119.
3 Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth. Eastern Europe 500–1453 (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971), 69–101.
4 Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische LiteraturIm byzantinischen Reich (C. H. Beck’sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1959), 520.
it is suggested, the Byzantine theologians we should look at are such as Symeon the
new Theologian, his disciple Niketas, and then such as Gregory of Sinai, Theoleptos
of Philadelphia, and Gregory Palamas—what one might call the ‘Philokalic’
tradition, for it is men such as these whose writings fill the later parts of the
Philokalia, the anthology of ascetic texts collected by St Nikodimos of the Holy
Mountain and St Makarios of Corinth, and published in 1782 in Venice. I think I can
safely say that no one is likely to think that I have anything against the ‘Philokalic’
tradition of theology, but this was not the only tradition of theological reflection in
Byzantium, and we risk misrepresenting the history of theology in Byzantium, and
indeed misunderstanding such a controversy as the hesychast controversy of the
fourteenth century, if we consign the continuing lay tradition of theology to oblivion.
In his book, The Eastern Schism, Sir Steven Runciman remarked,
Throughout the history of the Easter Empire there was a large lay population
that was as well educated as the clergy. The professors, the government servants,
and even the soldiers were usually as cultured as the priests. Many of them were
highly trained in theology, and almost all of them felt themselves perfectly com-
petent to take part in theological discussions. No one in Byzantium thought that
theology was the exclusive concern of the clergy.5
One might consider that, in a way, Sir Steven reflected this lay interest in theology
in his own person. He was not afraid, as many Byzantine scholars are, to enter
into the arcana of theology, as he did, both in his The Eastern Schism and in his
The Great Church in Captivity (which contains one of the few discussions in
English, until the publication recently of Jaroslav Pelikan’s Credo,6 of the so-called
‘Symbolic Books’, which sought to define Eastern Orthodoxy in the context of
Western Christianity after the Reformation),7 and his affection for the ‘lay tradi-
tion’ in Byzantine theology is revealed in his Wiles Lectures for 1968, published as
The Last Byzantine Renaissance.8 It is this lay tradition of theology that attention
to Photios may illuminate, for before his election as patriarch at the age of nearly 50,
Photios had pursued a lay career. Even his consecration as bishop may not distance
Photios fundamentally from the lay tradition of theology, for ‘lay’ in this context
indicates primarily a contrast with monastic theology rather than clerical theology.
Our focus will be the collection of theological treatises called the Amphilochia.9
This means, to repeat, that we shall pass over the Filioque as discussed in the letter
5 Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism (Clarendon Press, 1955), 7.

6 Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo (Yale University Press, 2003).
7 Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge University Press, 1968).
8 Steven Runciman, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
9 Now available, together with Photios’ letters, in a magnificent edition begun by B. Laourdas and
completed by L. G. Westerink: Photius, Epistulae et Amphilochia, 7 vols. (Teubner, 1983–8). Before
this edition, neglect of this aspect of Photius’ work was perhaps excusable.
of 867 addressed to the Eastern patriarchs, unquestionably an important witness

to Photios’ theological expertise, as well as the other, actually relatively few, works
that also are concerned with the Filioque: the late Mystagogia, and the also late
letter 291, addressed to a metropolitan of Aquilaea. I shall also pass over a huge,
and hugely important, letter— letter 284—addressed to Ašot, the Armenian
prince of princes, in 878 or 879, in which Photios explores the possibilities of
doctrinal union with the Armenians, who rejected Chalcedon. I shall omit dis-
cussion of this, because the whole question of Photios’ engagement with the
Armenians has recently been the subject of careful and illuminating scrutiny by
Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, who is able to draw on the indispensable Armenian
sources.10 These, however, are part of the public figure that Photios cut, whereas
our concern is with his more everyday theological concerns.
The Amphilolochia are a collection of 329 mainly brief treatises (often no more
than a paragraph) almost entirely concerned with resolving various theological
problems. Very many of these problems are concerned with the interpretation of
Scripture: difficult or puzzling passages (e.g., the meaning of the blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit in Matt. 12:31 f.; how many women anointed Christ—
there are four accounts, one in each Gospel?); contradictions in Scripture (why
did the disciples baptize in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in contradiction of
his command in Matt 28:19 to baptize in the name of the Trinity? Or the contra-
diction between the Old Testament requirement of an ‘eye for an eye’ and Jesus’
command ‘Not to resist evil’). Others are concerned with difficulties in Christian
doctrine: these are mostly on the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of the
Incarnation, and the technical philosophical language that had evolved to deter-
mine it. There are also a few discussions of difficult passages in the Fathers, such
as Gregory Nazianzen, ‘the Theologian’, though there is an isolated discussion of a
passage from John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent. Some of the Amphilochia
are excerpts from other writers, such as Theodoret (mainly his series of questions
on the books of the Old Testament), or Olympiodoros (from his commentary on
Ecclesiastes), or are heavily dependent on other theologians (notably a series of
questions that parallel the review in Photios’ Bibliotheca of an otherwise unknown
sixth-century writer, Job the monk). There are a series of excerpts on the
Aristotelian doctrine of the categories, drawn presumably from some sixth-
century Aristotelian commentator. Many of the Amphilochia are drawn from
Photios’ correspondence.11
10 Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, Arméniens et byzantins à l’époque de Photius. Deux débats théologiques
après le triomphe de l’Orthodoxie, CSCO 609, Subsidia 117 (Peeters, 2004). For a brief account see Igor
Dorfmann-Lazarev, ‘The Conception of Orthodoxy in the Polemics between the Patriarch Photius
and Isaac Mŕut (820? –890?), the Bishop of Tayk´’. In Byzantine Orthodoxies? The Proceedings of the
36th Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. A. Louth and A. Casiday (Ashgate, 2005), 185–203.
11 See the index in Photius, Epistulae et Amphilochiae, VII, 5–6.
First it would be useful to reflect on what kind of theology the Amphilochia

represent. For they belong to a well-established and influential theological genre
in Byzantine literature, namely the ‘Question-and-Answer’, Erotapokrisis, some-
times called a ‘difficulty’, ἀπορία, or ambiguum. The first person to use this form
extensively—apart from the kind of commentary that concerned itself with points
of difficulty in Scripture: ζητήματα in Greek, quaestiones in Latin—was none
other than St Maximos the Confessor in works such as his two sets of Ambigua,
his Quaestiones ad Thalassium—which constitute his most important works—and
his so-called Quaestiones et dubia.12 They reappear throughout Byzantine theo
logical literature, a later exponent than Photios being Michael Psellos, another
neglected Byzantine lay theologian.13
In the history of theology it is important to pay attention to genre, for it tells
one something about how theology was conceived. In this case, theology
expressed in the genre of the ‘difficulty’ or ambiguum is a form of reflection on an
already established tradition of theology. It is not kerygmatic theology, as was
much of the theology of the Fathers: expressed in sermons or homilies. It is not
catechetical theology, again another important patristic category of theology, and
in the form of centuries and monastic catechetical homilies, a monastic category,
too. It is not exactly commentary, though it is often concerned with matters of
exegesis. It is not what one might call ‘celebratory’, that is theology expressed in
liturgical poetry, whether in the form of the kontakion, the ‘sermon in song’
whose greatest exponent was Romanos the Melodist, or the meditative monastic
form of the canon, or other groups of troparia. It is certainly not systematic,
though, as in the case of St Maximos, a series of ‘difficulties’ can be informed by
a theological vision. But it is reflective and traditional; it is concerned with making
the sources of the theological tradition, whether Scripture or the writings of the
Fathers, or even liturgical texts,14 accessible.
The 329 Amphilochia do not constitute a uniform group, and indeed the title
Amphilochia perhaps only strictly applies to the first seventy-five. This first group
of seventy-five (here I am simply reporting what Westerink says in the introduc-
tion to his edition15) are the original collection. They consist of what purport to
be answers to seventy-five difficulties raised by Amphilochios, then bishop of
Kyzikos, a town at the base of the peninsula that juts into the Sea of Marmara
12 Maximus Confessor, Ambigua. In Patrologia Graeca XCI, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris 1865), cols.
1031–418. The ‘later’ Ambigua, or the Ambigua ad Thomam, are now available in a critical edition:
Bart Jannsens, ed., Ambigua ad Thomam una cum epistula secunda ad eundem, CCSG 48, (Brepols,
2002); Carl Laga and Carlos Steel, eds., Quaestiones ad Thalassium, CCSG 7, 22 (1980–90); José
H. Declerck, ed., Quaestiones et Dubia, CCSG 10 (1982).
13 Michael Psellus, Theologica, vol. 1, ed. P. Gautier (Teubner, 1989); vol. 2, ed. L. G. Westerink and
J. M. Duffy (K. G. Saur, 2002).
14 Cf. Amph. 315, on a passage from the liturgical book, the Oktoekhos, though this Amphilochium
is probably a later addition to the corpus, and not by Photios.
15 Photius, Epistulae et Amphilochia IV, XVI‒XXII.
from its southern coast. They are almost all concerned with scriptural passages,
except for six that are concerned with theology, and one concerning a matter of
discipline. A few of them are reworkings of matters already discussed in epistles.
Westerink argues that they were written between 873 and 875, when Photios was
in exile. The rest of the Amphilochia differs, Westerink asserts, ‘toto caelo’ from
the original seventy-five chapters. Certainly there is a lot more reworking of other
material, including passages from other works by Photios. Eighty of these
Amphilochia are reworkings of epistles, thirteen are taken from the Bibliotheca, a
series of eleven are from some libellum de categoriis, thirty- two are from
Theodoret’s Quaestiones in various books of the Old Testament; and there are
other Amphilochia taken from other sources—Germanos’ On predestined terms of
life appears as Amph. 149, a discussion of the causes of obscurity in the Scriptures
(Amph.152) is a passage from Polychronios of Apamea, the brother of Theodore
of Mopsuestia.
To say that Amph. 76 ff. differs toto caelo from the original seventy-five chap-
ters, however, seems to me an exaggeration. For the original collection contains
reworkings of Photios’ epistles, though on a much smaller scale, and it also con-
tains a series of chapters lifted from another source: in this case, Olympiodorus’
commentary on Ecclesiastes, which is the source of Amph. 61‒6, and 68‒9; there
is more discussion of difficulties occasioned by the Scriptures in the original col-
lection than in the additional chapters, but such discussion is by no means miss-
ing from these chapters. There is the same mix of original discussions by Photios,
reworkings of his own material, and the borrowing of passages from elsewhere;
the same mixture of problems caused by Scripture, Christian doctrine, and other
matters: it is simply the proportions that are different between the earlier and
later Amphilochia. And even of that we cannot be entirely sure, as it is very likely
that some of the Amphilochia in both collections are drawn from sources that we
can no longer identify. Chapters 76 ff. seem to fall into three sections: Amph.
76‒300, which together with the original seventy- five chapters constitutes,
Westerink argues, the first edition, which he dates to some time between 875 and
877, when Amphilochios was transferred from Kyzikos to the metropolitan see of
Nicaea, Amph. 301‒13 being chapters added a little later; while Amph. 314‒29 are
later still, perhaps few of them being genuinely Photian, though several of them
are written by someone who describes himself as γῆρας καὶ νόσος, old and sickly.
Westerink’s dating of the Amphilochia depends, in part, on taking quite literally
their being addressed to Amphilochios, bishop of Kyzikos. One might accept this
for the original collection, but many of the additions would have to be seen as
readdressed to Amphilochios, since they are from letters in which Photios had
answered questions put to him by a wide range of correspondents. Moreover,
among these correspondents Amphilochios himself does not figure prominently.
Only four letters to Amphilochios appear in the additional Amphilochia, taken
from the mere seven letters addressed to him from among the 299 letters in
Photios’ correspondence. Amphilochios does not appear to have been someone

particularly close to Photios. On the face of it, then, it is surprising that the ori
ginal collection of difficulties was a response to questions put by Amphilochios.
Well, there is much that we do not know about Photios and his circle, so there
may be nothing surprising in this.
It may be, however, that in presenting the collection of difficulties as addressed
to Amphilochios, Photios, or maybe, especially for the additional 250 or so diffi-
culties, someone compiling a collection of theological material to be published
under the name of Photios, was making an allusive bid for authority. For there is
another collection of Amphilochia, though not known as such, in the letters of St
Basil the Great; these are the letters to Amphilochios, bishop of Ikonion, who was
one of Basil’s ‘friends’, along with Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa,
placed in sees in Cappadocia by Basil as he tried to preserve his ecclesiastical
powerbase in defiance of the Emperor Valens’ attempt to limit it by dividing the
province of Cappadocia. In Basil’s correspondence, there are nineteen letters
addressed to Amphilochios, and of these seven are of particular importance: the
three so-called canonical letters (epp. 188, 199, 217), consisting of a series of deci-
sions on canonical matters by Basil that are the source for most of the canons
ascribed to Basil and preserved as such in canonical collections, and four other
letters, three expressly addressed to ‘Amphilochios who asked a question’, con-
cerned with theological matters—ep. 233 on the nature of νοῦς; ep. 234 on the
knowledge of God which contains the distinction, later to become important,
between God’s οὐσία and his ἐνέργειαι; ep. 235 on knowledge and faith; and ep. 236
on various questions (Christ’s professed ignorance, fate, baptism, the meaning of
the word φάγος, and the distinction between οὐσία and ὑπόστασις).
Could it be that in calling the collection of difficulties—first the original
seventy-five and then the later augmented collections—Amphilochia, addressed
to Amphilochios, Photios, or his editor, was making a claim to quasi-patristic
authority for the great patriarch of Constantinople, by suggesting a comparison
with the great Basil of Caesarea? It is pure speculation, but it would explain why
someone who does not appear from anything we know to have been particularly
close to Photios was chosen to be the recipient of this collection of questions-and-
answers. If it is true—and maybe even if it isn’t—we might also call in question
Westerink’s claim that the whole edition of 300 difficulties must be dated to the
period when Amphilochios was still bishop of Kyzikos, for if Amphilochios is a
mere cipher, then it would not matter very much where he was bishop, so long he
was once bishop of Kyzikos.16 But this is all speculation.
16 Maximos’ so-called early Ambigua were also addressed to a bishop of Kyzikos, but this is one
work of Maximos’ that Photios seemingly did not know, so perhaps it was not known in Constantinople
in the ninth century. It would certainly be to advance deep into speculation to suggest that
‘Amphilochios of Kyzikos’ was intended to evoke both ‘Amphilochios of Ikonion’ and ‘John of Kyzikos’,
and claim of Photios the mantles of both Basil and Maximos.
The Amphilochia invite a number of questions relevant to Photios’ qualities as a

theologian. What were his sources or favoured authorities, and what does this tell
us about his theology, and the tradition of theology with which Photios was
acquainted? What theological interests did Photios have? And how good a theo-
logian was Photios?
As to sources, it would be useful first of all to recall Photios’ extensive theo
logical learning as revealed in his Bibliotheca. There he reviews works by, among
others, the Church historians Julius Africanus, Eusebios of Caesarea,
Philostorgios, Gelasios of Caesarea, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, of Kyrrhos,
Evagrios, John of Aegae, Basil of Cilicia, Gelasios of Kyzikos, and Philip of Side;
the acts (in some sense) of all the œcumenical synods save Constantinople I,
together with a few other synods; exegetical works by such as Hippolytos,
Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Theodore of
Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Kyrrhos, John Philoponos, Procopios of Gaza; theo
logical works by Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Methodios of
Olympos, Pamphilos, Pierios of Alexandria, Eusebios of Caesarea, Athanasius
of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Eunomios of Kyzikos, John Chrysostom, Cyril of
Alexandria, John Philoponos, Maximos the Confessor; the works against heresy
by Irenaeus, Hippolytos, Epiphanios of Salamis; works of ascetical theology by
such as Basil of Caesarea, Cassian, Diadochos of Photike, Mark the Monk, John
Moschos; hagiography including George of Alexandria on John Chrysostom, and
several anonymous works (he is also quite familiar, too, with what one might call
pagan hagiography: lives of Pythagoras, Apollonios of Tyana and Isidore, whose
life by Damascios is reviewed twice); homilies by John Chrysostom and many
others. His interest in post-Chalcedonian Christology is also manifest in the
Bibliotheca in reviews of works by an otherwise unknown Job the Monk, already
mentioned, as well as better known works by Eulogios of Alexandria, John
Philoponos, John of Scythopolis, Sophronios of Jerusalem, and Maximos the
Confessor; as is his interest in problems to do with providence and fate, on which
he reviews works by Diodore of Tarsus, Methodios of Olympos, Synesios of
Cyrene, Hierocles of Alexandria (again twice), and various other works that bear
on this question indirectly.
This is impressive. How much of this learning appears in the Amphilolochia? A
good deal of the Amphilochia, we have seen, is concerned with problems in
Scripture. Here one of his main sources is Theodoret of Kyrrhos, whose
Quaestiones on the Old Testament books he plunders, sometime openly and
directly. He also uses, as we have seen, Polychronios, the brother of Theodore of
Mopsuestia, and Theodore himself, and draws on the sixth-century Olympiodoros’
commentary on Ecclesiastes, and exegetical homilies both genuinely by
Chrysostom and those falsely ascribed to him. This fairly faithfully reflects the
kind of exegetical works reviewed by Photios in his Bibliotheca. We must, how-
ever, be cautious of drawing what might appear the natural conclusion, that
Photios favoured what for a couple of centuries now we have been accustomed to
call the ‘Antiochene’ style of exegesis, as opposed to that characteristic of
Alexandria, namely a literal form of exegesis as opposed to allegory. It seems to
me that Photios’ fondness for Antiochenes such as Theodoret is not because he is
opposed to ‘Alexandrian’ allegory, but because he finds the kind of approach that
Theodoret mostly adopted—that of dealing with ‘difficult’ passages in Scripture,
rather than writing a through-commentary, either in Chrysostom’s homiletic
style, or the more formal commentary that Origen had pioneered—just what he
needed to deal with the kind of difficulties he was faced with in Scripture, espe-
cially all the puzzles found in the Pentateuch for which Theodoret was such a
boon: issues like what Genesis meant when it says ‘and the earth was (ἦν)’, for
Photios is aware that many of the Fathers take the absolute use of ἦν to imply
eternal existence;17 why, after Ham’s sin in looking at his father Noah’s nakedness,
it was his son Canaan who was cursed (Gen. 9:25);18 why the angel fought with
Jacob (Gen. 32),19 and so on. For, in fact, Photios is not at all disinclined to resort
to allegory, indeed the Olympiodoros, an Alexandrian, whose commentary on
Ecclesiastes he used to sort out some of the puzzling passages in that book fre-
quently resorts to allegory. So for Ecclesiastes 11:1 (‘Throw our bread on the
waters’), Photios cites from Olympiodoros a series of allegorical significances for
bread and water: almsgiving and tears, sacred doctrine and the multitude of
humanity, or sacred doctrine and a fount of mercy always flowing, or finally the
bread of the Eucharist and the water of baptism.20
Photios also cites from Olympiodoros the idea that goes back to Origen that
Proverbs corresponds to the ethical, Ecclesiastes to natural contemplation, while
the Song of Songs has as its aim contemplation of the intelligible and what is
beyond sense-perception,21 betraying an attitude to the Song quite different from
that of the Antiochenes, even Theodoret, who had protested against Theodore of
Mopsuestia’s actual exclusion of the book from the Scriptural canon. Quite often,
too, Photios decorates what he has drawn from Theodoret with allegorical glosses.
Amphilochium 294, ostensibly about what Adam was meant to have done in
Paradise, moves on to reflect on why we are told that the tree of life was in the
middle of the garden, but are not told where the tree of good and evil was. Photios’
answer here is that the tree of life was in the centre of the garden, ‘because Christ,
our life, accept the cross for our sake in the middle of the earth’ (something per-
haps suggested by Theodoret’s identification of the tree of life with the tree of the
cross,22 though it is a common enough identification), while we are not told
where the tree of good and evil was, because ‘evil has no place, but is parasitic on
virtue’.
17 Amph. 249. 18 Amph. 257. 19 Amph. 259.

20 Amph. 62. 21 Amph. 64.
22 Theodoret, Quaestiones in Genesim 26.
What about Photios’ handling of questions of doctrinal theology? In many

cases this is difficult to distinguish from his dealing with Scriptural problems.
Issues like what is meant by the image of God in human kind,23 the meaning of
the ‘garments of skin’ in which Adam and Eve were clothed after the Fall,24 or the
reasons for the redemption of the world by the cross, are often posed, and
answered, in terms of exegetical considerations. These are often ingenious, some-
times to a fault. On why Christ was crucified, Amphilochium 247 gives six reasons:
(1) to expose clearly the injustice of the Devil; (2) to demonstrate God’s love for
human kind (τὸ πρὸς ἀνθρώπους φίλτρον); (3) lest any other proclaim himself to
be God; (4) as an example to comfort those in tribulation; (5) to show his power
over death; and finally, (6) that we might become heirs of the kingdom and enter
into and enjoy its unspeakable blessings.
Most of the ‘theological’ Amphilochia are concerned with problems relating to
the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. But before we look at these, let us
ask a more general question about Photios’ approach to theology, for ascetic theo-
logians had long suggested that theological understanding was not a matter of
learning, but a matter of inspiration (something Augustine tackles in the preface
to his De Doctrina Christiana, arguing that ‘there would be no way for love, which
ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were
intermingle with each other, if human beings learned nothing from other
humans’25). There is an Amphilochium directly concerned with this question,
which takes the form of a scholion on a passage from John Climacus,26 where a
geron, John himself, having not yet attained the heights of prayer but only the
middle stage, in a moment of illumination wants to understand the state of the
Lord before the Incarnation, or even now at the right hand of the Father, but
receives the reply that he is not yet ready for this, as ‘the fire of incorruption is not
yet mighty enough’ within him.27 Photios’ scholion simply puts the story in its
context in The Ladder, explaining the three stages that precede the state of hesy-
chia, and accepting that illumination on this matter is a matter of spiritual matur
ity, not ingenious learning. Elsewhere, Photios is conscious of the mysterious
nature of theology (speaking of ‘trembling before the terrible’ as he contemplates
the Incarnation28), explains the apophatic nature of theology, asserting that
23 Cf. esp. Amph. 36. 24 Cf. Amph. 70.

25 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, praef. Green’s translation in: Augustine, De Doctrina
Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Clarendon Press, 1955, 7–9).
26 John Climacus, Scala Paradisi 27.ii.13. 27. 47 in Lazarus Moore’s translation: St John Climacus,
The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Faber and Faber, 1959), the passage is on page 244.
27 Incidentally in the English translations, this exchange is represented as taking place between the
monk and an angel, whereas Photios (or the composer of the scholion, if not Photios himself) envis-
ages ‘our geron’, presumably Climacus himself, and an ‘ancient geron’ (in this agreeing with the text
published by the monk Sophronios on the basis of an Athonite MS, which makes no mention of any
angel: see Ioannou tou Sinaïtou, Klimax (Ekdosis Oikos ‘Astir’, 1979), 154).
28 Amph. 38.
participation in God is not participation properly speaking but some kind of dim
shadow (σκιάν . . . ἀμυδράν);29 another Amphilochium concerned with the
Incarnation begins by emphasizing the wonder of the Incarnation.30 In another
place, Photios reins in his discussion of what he calls τεχνολογία and distinguishes
it from real θεολογία.31
In many of these theological discussion, Photios draws on the mysterious
sixth-century monk Job, already mentioned, who is known to us simply from
Photios, both in his Bibliotheca and in his Amphilochia. The codex on Job is the
longest in the Bibliotheca: seventy-five pages in Henry’s edition, the nearest being
the seventy pages on Himerios’ Declamations, most of the other codices being
nothing like as long, though the three codices on Aelius Aristides together come
to 118 pages.32 Photios clearly found this sixth-century monk of great interest,
though the fact that the runners-up in attracting his attention are Himerius and
Aelius Aristides does not inspire confidence; the Oxford Classical Dictionary con-
cludes that Himerius has a ‘talent for saying nothing gracefully and at length’!33
The questions to which Job addressed himself, and which Photios clearly found
troubling, given the space he devotes to them in both the Bibliotheca and the
Amphilochia, are mostly concerned with problems posed by what one might call a
settled doctrine of the Trinity, that is, a conviction that the idea of God as a Trinity
of three coequal persons is the starting point of theological reflection (an
approach not, incidentally, adopted even by John Damascene’s epitome of patris-
tic doctrine in his Expositio fidei34). If this is your starting point, then the follow-
ing issues become troubling: Why was the Son incarnate and not the persons of
the Father and the Spirit? Why is the Father said to work through the Son and the
Spirit, and not vice versa? Why do we speak of the ‘Spirit of the Father’ and the
‘Spirit of the Son’ and not the Father or Son ‘of the Spirit’? If the three persons are
equal, why is the Father named first? Why is the Son alone to sit as Judge?35
These become problems when the doctrine of the economy, οἰκονομία, gets
detached from the doctrine of θεολογία, to use the terms used by the Fathers
(and thoroughly understood by Photios: see his discussion of economy in Amph.
1.337 ff.). If your ‘theology’, in the narrow patristic sense of the word, speaks of three
coequal persons, and your doctrine of the economy can be expressed in terms of
‘One of the Trinity’, a favoured term from the sixth century onwards, becoming
man, then the question ‘Which one?’ becomes natural. This, and the questions
29 Amph. 180. 30 Amph. 25. 31 Amph. 78.

32 Photius, Bibliothèque, ed. and trans. René Henry, 9 vols. (Société d’Édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’,
1959–91). Job: Codex 222, III. 152–227. Himerios: Codex 243, VI. 56–126. Aelius Aristides: Codices
246–8, VII. 8–126.
33 Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford
University Press, 1996), 707.
34 Cf. John Damascene, Expositio Fidei 1–8; B. Kotter, ed., Die Schriften des Johannes von Damakos, II,
Patristische Texte und Studien 12 (Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 7–31.
35 Amph. 186–90, 192; Amph. 191 is concerned with rather a different problem: why did redemp-
tion not take place through an angel or a human being?
that flow from it, occupied Job, and also Photios. They are questions that had
exercised Latin theology for even longer: Augustine himself, at the end of the
fourth century, was also troubled by the question as to why the Son became incar-
nate, and had no really satisfactory answer.36
What answers does Job give and Photios endorse? First of all, if the Son
becomes incarnate as human, he remains son as incarnate, whereas if the Father
became incarnate, he would combine the properties of Father and son, for he
would have to be born (a suggestion already advanced by John Damascene in On
the Two Wills in Christ37); second, since the Son is creator, he should also be the
re-creator; third, the Son is Λόγος, come to save those who are subject to ἀλογία,
irrationality; fourth, the sole purpose of the Incarnation, redemption, would have
been confused by the incarnation of the Father or the Spirit; fifth, it was appropri-
ate that the word of God should demonstrate the depth of his love for human
kind by lying in a manager with irrational animals—something on the lines of
Lancelot Andrewes’ ‘Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the aeternal Word
no hable to speake a word’38; sixth, it is much more appropriate that the restor
ation of human kind as κατ’ εἰκόνα τοῦ Θεοῦ should be accomplished by the
‘unparalleled and natural image of the Father’; seventh, it is the Son who is to
appear as final judge; and finally, the incarnation of Father or Spirit would have
posed insuperable problems for the Jews.39 The other questions raised by Job are
dealt with mainly by reference to Scripture, though they all bear on the question
of the Filioque, which, in fact, Photios does not mention at all in the Amphilochia;
the question about why the Father is named first is answered by reference to his
being the αἴτιος of divinity, also fundamental for Photios’ objections to the
Filioque.40 These answers are good deal more impressive than Augustine’s embar-
rassed appeal to tradition in ep. 11. To my mind they amount to an attempt to
reconnect the doctrine of the Trinity with the doctrine of the οἰκονομία, without
which the doctrine of the Trinity is little more than a riddle.
Elsewhere there are questions relating to the doctrine of the Trinity, indeed just
before the series of questions drawn from Job there are several questions mainly
revolving around another question posed by starting from the Trinity in the way
suggested above, namely why three persons and not more or less?41 Photios’
responses here are tantalizing because there are throughout Trinitarian reflec-
tions from the late fourth century onwards, echoes of what appear to be ways of
dealing with this by reference to number theory, and in particular the idea that
goes back to Pythagorean speculation that three is the first real, or complete,
36 Cf. ep. 11 to Nebridius, dated about 389.

37 John Damascene, De duabus in Christo voluntatibus 37 (Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, IV, PTS
22, 222).
38 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermon 12 of the Nativitie, in Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons, ed. G. M. Story
(Clarendon Press, 1967), 85.
39 Amph. 187. 40 Amph. 190. 41 Cf. Amph. 180–3.
number, an idea rejected by John Damascene, who asserts that three is the first
complete number because God is Trinitarian, not vice versa.42 But Photios makes
remarks like: ‘God is triad and not dyad, lest bearing in himself the cause and
principle of division and dissipation he mock the single and undivided nature
and the source of all unity’,43 and suggests that duality has traces in it of non-
being, because it is the source of dissolution, division, and separation, while ‘the
undivided triad is mirrored in what is first and undissipated’.44 But mostly,
Photios stays on much safer ground, arguing that divinity, θεότης, is one and indi-
visible, while θέος can be used of each of the persons of the Trinity, so that we
speak of one οὐσία and three ὑποστάσεις, following the use of the Fathers, that
this distinction is not merely grammatical, but refers to reality, πράγματα, and
that to try and go any further would be to pursue the quest for understanding into
the realm of unlearning, ‘seeking out the principles of principles, and being
seduced into asking about the causes of what is beyond any cause’.45
It is worth noting, in connexion with Photios’ discussions of the Trinity, that
one of the Amph. raises an issue that was to crop up time and again in Byzantine
theological discussion, namely the interpretation of John 14:28, ‘the Father is
greater than I’.46 A century or so after Photios, we find the question discussed by
Symeon the New Theologian,47 and in the twelfth century it became an issue,
decided at formal synods convoked by Manuel Komnenos, decisions which were
incorporated in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy in the mid-twelfth century.48 Photios’
discussion advances both the positions decreed acceptable in 1166‒70 and at least
one of the positions condemned.
On the doctrine of the Incarnation, Photios has a sure grasp of Chalcedonian
and post- Chalcedonian Christology, and is able to explain it pretty lucidly.
Indeed, it is clear from his long letter to the Armenian prince of princes, Ašot,
that he is capable of thinking beyond the terminology to the issues themselves,
and in fact argues with the Armenians that their ‘one nature’ Christology is not
necessarily opposed to the doctrine of Chalcedon that speaks of one person and
two natures. But we shall confine our attention to the discussions in the
Amphilochia. Photios seems quite clear about the meaning of the terms nature
(φύσις) and person or ὑπόστασις, when used to express what happened in the
Incarnation, and there are a number of Amphilochia that ably dispose of some of
the problems that had been raised. He understands and represents the position
42 John Damascene, On the Trisagion 28 (Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, IV, PTS 22, 331). Cf. Andrew
Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford University Press,
2002, 115–16).
43 Amph. 181. 114–16. 44 Amph. 181. 126–9. 45 Amph. 27. 46 Amph. 95.
47 Symeon the New Theologian, Theological Discourse 1 (ed. J. Darrouzès, Sources Chrétiennes 122,
96–128), Hymn 21 (ed. J. Koder, SC 174, 130–68). Cf. Hilarion Alfeyev, St Symeon the New Theologian
and Orthodox Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2000), 143–50.
48 See J. Gouillard, ‘Le synodikon d’Orthodoxie: edition et commentaire’, Travaux et Mémoires 2
(1967), 75–81.
known nowadays as ‘Cyrilline Chalcedonianism’, that is, the reading of the

Chalcedonian Definition that developed in the sixth century, and was endorsed
by the Emperor Justinian, largely in response to objections to that Definition
made by Severos of Antioch and other so-called ‘monophysites’. So Photios knows
that the phrase, dear to the later Cyril, ‘one incarnate nature of God the Word’, is
acceptable,49 and himself uses and defends the other term characteristic of
Cyrilline Chalcedonianism, μία σύνθετος ὑπόστασις, ‘one composite hypostasis’.50
So he discusses the conundrum as to whether this one composite hypostasis is
of the same nature as, or of a different nature from—ὁμόφυες or ἑτερόφυες—the
simple hypostasis of the Word (either option yielding a quaternity of hypostases),
solving the conundrum by asserting that the composite hypostasis is identical
with the simple hypostasis of the Word.51
He also embraces the formulation that Maximos was fond of, namely that
Christ is both out of two natures and in two natures and identical with his two
natures.52 Dealing with another puzzle raised by the non-Chalcedonians, whether
the humanity Christ assumed was universal or individual, Photios is quite clear
that neither horn of the dilemma is to be seized, rather ‘we say that he assumed
human nature, while the Logos provided from himself the individual properties,
so that in reality no absurdity follows at all’.53 It is interesting, too, that while
Photios has a clear grasp of what is now called Cyrilline Chalcedonianism, he is
entirely free of the mystification of modern scholarship, known as ‘enhypostatiza-
tion’, the idea that the human nature of Christ finds its reality as it is ‘enhyposta-
tized’, that is in some way incorporated into the hypostasis of the Logos. He knows
the term ἐνυπόστατος, however, as a way of affirming the individual reality of the
humanity of Christ, thereby avoiding another monophysite dilemma, that, if
there are two natures in Christ, Christ’s human nature is either another
hypostasis—which would mean Nestorianism—or is without hypostasis, that is,
ἀνυπόστατος, which the monophysites probably meant to suggest ‘unreal’—which
would entail docetism. So Photios argues that the visible part of Christ is neither
nature nor hypostasis, but ‘part of the composite hypostasis of the Word, which
possesses concrete reality [literally, which is ἐνυπόστατος]’.54
Another Amphilochium discusses very competently the question of the
γνωμικὰ θελήματα in Christ.55 A ‘gnomic’ will is a will that exercises its decision-
making function by virtue of deliberation and choice. St Maximos had argued,
against the monothelites of the seventh century, that Christ had two wills, divine
and human, but that these wills were both natural wills, neither of them ‘gnomic’,
for Christ was not subject to the moral opacity that entails deliberation and choice
in willing either in his human nature or in his divine. As Photios says, ‘the
49 Amph. 243. 50 Cf. Amph. 80. 120, 164–6; 228. 7, 28; 229. 2–32; 230. 87 f.
51 Amph. 229. 2–21. 52 Amph. 230. 53 Amph. 231.
54 Amph. 228. 55 Amph. 80.
doctrine of the gnomic wills in Christ is, on the one hand, difficult, and on the
other, easy’,56 and goes on to say that none of the Fathers has really discussed this,
save ‘Maximos, the great warrior for piety’.57 Photios prepares the way for his dis-
cussion of this (which draws on Maximos, though not slavishly) by defining the
psychological terms needed for an understanding of human willing: will, wish,
desire, searching and thinking, deliberation, choice, and so on. These definitions
are drawn from chapter 36 of John Damascene’s Expositio fidei. I doubt if we are
here dealing with a common source, for Photios’ discussion follows the
Damascene point by point, and frequently word for word.58 Photios somewhat
oversimplifies the discussion of these matters in Maximos (and, indeed, the
Damascene), and reaches his conclusion that a gnomic will is impossible in
Christ, because the gnomic will includes choice, προαίρεσις, which by its nature
can incline either to good or to evil. Photios then goes on to deal with various
scriptural texts, very effectively, and finally faces the objection that, as it is the
gnomic will that fell, it is the gnomic will that needs to be assumed and healed—on
the basis of Gregory of Nazianzus’ famous dictum, ‘the unassumed is the
unhealed’—which entails a lengthy discussion, a crucial part of which is the
denial on Photios’ part that the gnomic will is a natural part of human nature
which he demonstrates from the example of infants, who are fully human but not
able to exercise choice. Photios’ discussion of this question is not the most lucid,
but it is by no means without merit.
It does however raise another question about his theological formation worth a
brief discussion here. In this Amphilochium, Photios makes use of the Damascene,
though he does not mention him by name, which raises the question as to
whether he knew the works of John Damascene. There are several discussions in
the Amphilochia where one might have expected Photios to refer to John, had he
known him; for instance, in his several discussions of issues raised by iconoclasm,
not least in his discussion about different kinds of images, where Photios starts off
a bit like the Damascene, with the Son as a natural image of the Father, man as an
image of God, the law containing images of what is fulfilled in the New Covenant,
as well as pictures as icons, but clearly is unaware of John’s not dissimilar discus-
sion in his first and third treatises against the Iconoclasts;59 or his discussion of
the meaning of Jacob’s venerating the top of his rod, much discussed by John,
though Photios is clearly unaware of it.60 On the other hand, John’s Expositio fidei
must have been known in Constantinople by the end of the ninth century, as the
Old Slavonic translation goes back to the tenth century at the latest,61 and, as we
56 Amph. 80. 3–4. 57 Amph. 6–7.

58 Cf. Amph. 80. 23–91 with Exp. fidei 36. 30–134 (Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 88–92).
59 Amph. 217; cf. John Damascene, imag. I.9–13, III.18–23 (Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, vol. 3 (PTS
17; Berlin, 1975), 83–7, 126–30).
60 Amph. 237, cf. imag. I. 8, III. 38 (Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, 83, 87, 141).
61 Kotter, ed., Die Schriften, XLIII.
have seen, Photios seems to have known of chapter 36, though he does not
mention its author by name. So, I end with a further puzzle about Photios’ place
in the history of Byzantine theology. Learned and with a good grasp of the issues
raised by the theological tradition (and there are plenty of other examples that
time prevents me from discussing here), Photios seems scarcely aware of the
works of the great epitomizer of the Byzantine theological tradition.
But my main conclusion is that Photios represents a kind of interest in the
theological tradition that is, in many ways, I suspect, characteristic of the
Byzantine centuries: disposing of a vast wealth of learning, interested in the issues
raised, and also in tying up any loose ends, but not exactly fired by any great
vision of how it all hung together—a kind of theological pottering about. And I
suspect there were probably many others like Photios, though not many who
could command such extensive learning. In the absence of any professional
theology, such as the rise of the university and scholasticism came to provide in the
West, such theological pottering, respectful of tradition, often quite in awe of the
great figures of the past, but still quite thoughtful, though with no notion of doing
anything very new, has been a not ignoble way of continuing a tradition of
theological reflection. Not peculiar to Byzantium, either, indeed probably the
norm for those many centuries histories of theology tend to pass over quickly, as
containing nothing much of note.
36
Knowing the Unknowable God
Hesychasm and the Kabbalah
Comparative religion, as a discipline, has often proceeded by attempting to compare

different religions and both explore ways in which they are different and—
perhaps more often—discover ways in which they converge. At the centre of this
convergence it is often hoped that there will be found some kind of common core
of human religious experience. My aim in this article is more modest: it is simply
to compare two movements of what would probably be called ‘mystical’ thought
(not a designation on which I am very keen). These two movements were hesy
chasm and Kabbalism: not, I think, two likely candidates for finding common
ground between Christianity and Judaism.
One justification for comparing them is that they were more or less
contemporaneous—not exactly contemporaneous, but close enough. The Zohar
dates from the end of the thirteenth century, and is the result of a ‘process of
development and crystallization lasting more than a hundred years’ (to quote
Isaiah Tishby in his annotated anthology of the Zohar1 on which I shall for the
most part rely for my understanding of kabbalistic teaching). By the end of the
thirteenth century, hesychasm is already underway. Nikephoros the Hesychast
belongs to that period, even though the controversies and the great names of
hesychasm—St Gregory of Sinai, St Gregory Palamas, and St Nicolas Cabasilas—
belong to the fourteenth century. In both cases they build on earlier tradition:
kabbalism on earlier rabbinic tradition and Merkavah mysticism, hesychasm on
the great Christian Fathers of the fourth century, notably St Basil of Caesarea,
St Gregory of Nazianzus, and St John Chrysostom (by this time grouped together
as the Three Great Hierarchs and Ecumenical Teachers), as well as later Byzantine
theologians such as St Denys (Dionysius) the Areopagite of the sixth, St Maximos
the Confessor of the seventh, and St John of Damascus of the eighth century, together
with the ascetical tradition of Byzantine monasticism which can be traced back
to the Egyptian desert of the fourth century, at least.
Both movements, despite drawing on earlier tradition, are original, however
much both hesychasts and kabbalists would have denied it. For the Byzantine
hesychasts would certainly have denied it vehemently: originality for them meant
1 I. Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar (Oxford University Press, 1989), 229.
Knowing the Unknowable God 383
heresy. The same is true of Rabbi Moses de León and the other authors of the
works of the Zohar, as it is all ascribed to the circle of the tanna Rabbi Simeon ben
Yohai, the disciple of Rabbi Akiva, and thus to the second century (while ‘kabbalah’,
anyway, means ‘tradition’). Not only are they original, but in both cases their
originality has the same focus: in both cases it focuses on their understanding of
God and his relationship to the created universe. In both traditions God in him
self is regarded as absolutely unknowable, while yet made known through powers
that are distinct from the essence of God and none the less in some way tran
scendent over the created order and identical with God himself—powers known
as sefirot in the Kabbalah, and as energies in hesychasm. Hence my title: Knowing
the unknowable God.
An Historical Connection?
Before I begin to make what I hope will not turn out to be a series of entirely
inappropriate and unilluminating comparisons, let me make two points. First,
there is no historical connection between these two nearly contemporaneous
movements, so far as I am aware. The only link I can think of might be found via
the Christian heretical movement of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence,
Catharism. Kabbalism may owe something to this (Gershom Scholem at any rate
thought it possible).2 Catharism may itself have owed something to Bogomilism
(there may have been some contact between the Patarenes and the Cathars),3 and
the hesychasts were certainly accused of Messalianism, a teaching which may
have had some influence on the Bogomils. But the link depends on too many
conjectures to be worth pursuing. I take it that there is no historical connection
between hesychasm and the Kabbalah: any similarities discovered in their teach
ing need to be explained in some other way than that of influence.
Differences in Genre?
My second point concerns something that would be worth taking much further.
It concerns the enormous difference of literary genre between the writings of the
hesychasts and the Kabbalah. Whatever similarities we notice occur in literary
contexts which are worlds apart. Let me just quote two passages concerning the
relationship between the unknowable God and his knowable powers or eman
ations. First, from a later section of the Zohar, called Raya Mehemna:
2 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, 1961), 242.

3 See S. Runciman, The Medieval Manichee (Cambridge University Press, 1947), 109, 122.
He understands all, but there is none that understands Him. He is not called by
the name, Yod, He, Vav, He, nor by any other name, except when His light
extends itself upon them. And when He removes Himself from them, He has no
name of His own at all.
‘That which is exceeding deep, who can find it?’ (Eccles. 7:24). No light can
look upon Him without becoming dark. Even the supernal Keter [the first
sefirah], whose light is the strongest of all the levels, and of all the hosts of
Heaven, both the upper and lower realms, is alluded to in ‘He made darkness His
hiding-place’; while of Hokhmah and Binah it is said ‘Clouds and thick dark
ness surround Him’ (Ps. 97:2). This is even truer of the remaining sefirot, and
even truer of the Hayyot, and even truer of the elements, which are dead bodies.
He encompasses all worlds, and none but He surrounds them on every side,
above and below and in the four corners of the globe, and none may go beyond
His domain. He fills all worlds, and no other fills them. He gives life to them,
and there is no other god above Him to give Him life. This is the meaning of
‘You give life to them all’ (Neh. 9:6), and of this Daniel spoke: ‘All the inhabitants
of the earth are reputed as nothing; and He does according to His will in the host
of heaven’ (Dan. 4:32). He binds and joins the species with one another, above
and below, and there is no juncture of the four elements except [by] the Holy
One, blessed be He, existing among them.4
Compare that passage with this, from Gregory Palamas’ One Hundred and Fifty
Chapters:
The essence of God is entirely unnameable since it is completely incomprehen

sible. Thus it is given names on the basis of all its energies although one of the
names there differs from another m its denotation. For on the basis of each and
all the names nothing other is named than the Hidden One, while ‘what it is’ is
in no way known. But in the case of the energies each of the names has a differ
ent meaning, for who does not know that creating, ruling, judging, guiding
providentially and God’s adopting us as sons by his grace are different from one
another? Therefore, those who say that these natural divine energies are created
because they differ from one another and from the divine nature, what else but
God do they drag down to the level of a creature? For things that are created,
ruled, judged and all such things in general are creatures, but not the Creator,
and Ruler and Judge, nor even judging, ruling and creating in themselves, which
are realities observed in his nature.5
4 Zohar III.225a; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 259.

5 St Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, ed. R. E. Sinkewicz, Studies and Texts
83 (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1988), 248–51 (translation slightly modified).
I shall come back in a moment to these passages to compare what they say about
the contrast between En Sof and the sefirot, on the one hand, and the essence and
energies of God, on the other. Here I simply want to draw attention to the differ
ence of literary genre. The passage from the Zohar is intentionally mysterious:
deep mysteries witnessed to in verses of scripture are being revealed. Elsewhere
this becomes even more striking, there are whole passages devoted to the letters
and pointing of the Hebrew text of the Bible, every detail of which can be unrav
elled; there is often use of allusive wordplay, which to my ear recalls James Joyce at
his most playful. In comparison, the passage from Gregory Palamas is a fairly
straightforward piece of philosophical analysis, though intended, certainly, to
preserve the ultimate mystery of the Hidden One.
The Kabbalah on the Godhead
In his introduction to his section on ‘The Godhead’, Tishby makes the point that
what is original about the Kabbalah is its doctrine of the Godhead. Here it stands
in contrast to the rabbinic tradition and also with the mystical tradition found in
the hekhalot literature. Neither of these developed a doctrine of the Godhead:
both of them were fundamentally practical in scope, the rabbinic tradition con
cerned with God’s relationship to his creation, man, and especially Israel, and
therefore with the Torah, and how through observance of the Torah man may
find a relationship with God through prayer, good deeds, and the sanctification of
life. The mystical tradition, too, is less concerned with elucidation of divine mys
teries, than with the awesome experience of seeking God and the rapture of
beholding the glory of God and his entourage. Of course, the philosophical trad
ition in Judaism, represented in the twelfth century especially by Moses
Maimonides, had developed its own doctrine of the Godhead. But the Kabbalah,
though drawing at some points on this philosophical tradition, is really in sharp
reaction to it.
The philosophical tradition is regarded from the viewpoint of the Kabbalah as
rationalistic: something that can be expressed in two ways. First, the philosoph
ical tradition thought of knowledge of the Godhead as the highest stage of intel
lectual perception: by contrast, to quote Tishby, ‘in the Zohar the attainment of
the mystery of the Godhead is confined to the holy soul, which is hewn from a
divine source and is not identical with the rational intellect’: it is called the ‘holy
intellect’ or the ‘true intellect’ and ‘does not perceive logically, but has an intuitive
or visionary grasp while in a state of contemplation. This perception is obtained
through the conjunction of the soul with the divine light that irradiates it’.6 The
6 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 232.

rationalism of the philosophical tradition manifests itself in another way. For the
philosophers to know the Godhead is simply a sublime intellectual achievement.
For the kabbalists, however, a grasp of the mystery of the Godhead gives them
access to divine power. The divine perceived in this way is transmuted within the
one who perceives into active creative energy; ‘the divine spark, which was
quenched when the soul descended into the body, is rekindled in the soul, and
man becomes a real partner with the Creator of the world, both in the hidden life
of the world of emanation and in the direction of the lower worlds’.7
Hesychasm and the Vision of the Uncreated Light
Here we may begin our comparison between hesychasm and the Kabbalah. For
much of what I have just said about kabbalism finds a fairly close parallel in hesy
chasm. Hesychasm has a broad and a narrower sense, and it is in the narrower
sense that I want to use it here. The word derives from the Greek hesychia, quiet
ness or stillness, which is quite generally seen as an aim of the monastic life.
Hesychasm, in the narrower sense, refers to a movement that started in the
monastic settlement on the holy mountain of Athos in the late thirteenth century.
The hesychast was a monk (though later hesychasm has not been confined to
monastic circles) who sought silence of the heart to enable him to practise inward
prayer. The way to this silence was through practice of the Jesus prayer that is (in
its developed form) the simple prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy
on me, a sinner’—and also by the use of physical techniques through which the
rhythmic repetition of this prayer was linked to regular breathing. It was claimed
that through this prayer one could come to an experience of God as the Uncreated
Light—like the light that shone from Christ when he was transfigured on Mount
Tabor during his earthly ministry. This claim was ridiculed as superstitious and
idolatrous by various Byzantine theologians, notably Barlaam of Calabria; the
physical techniques also struck them as objectionable. The hesychasts—their way
of prayer, their claims to a direct experience of God through the vision of the
Uncreated Light—were defended, most notably by St Gregory Palamas, the arch
bishop of Thessaloniki, who had himself been a monk on the Holy Mountain.
Central to his defence of the hesychasts was his doctrine of the distinction
between the unknowable essence of God, and his energies, through which he
makes himself known. The Uncreated Light, which the hesychasts claimed to see,
was just such an energy of God—neither a creature nor the essence of God, but
God communicating himself in one of his energies. In himself, God was unknow
able, but in his energies, which were God himself, not just some divine influence,

he made himself known. In the narrowest sense, hesychasm refers to the doctrine
of inward prayer, using the Jesus prayer and some of the physical techniques
(though in fact little emphasis is placed on these techniques by Gregory Palamas),
together with the philosophical defence mounted by St Gregory. Hesychasm, in
this narrowest sense, is equivalent to Palamism.
Three Aspects of the Hesychastic Way
That is a brief and superficial survey, though I hope it is clear as far as it goes. But
there are three points I want to develop a little further.
First, the place of the heart. The hesychasts draw on a long tradition that
regards the heart as the most inward part of the human person. Hesychast
prayer is a way of finding the heart: by the practice of interior prayer, the mind
(or intellect—in Greek nous) descends into the heart. When this happens there
is a sense of a joyful homecoming, says Nikephoros. But at the same time the
intellect finds it constricting, and so Nikephoros advises:
accustom it [the intellect] not to come out quickly. At first it grows very weary
of being narrowly enclosed within; but, having once become used to this, it no
longer yearns to wander abroad. For the kingdom of heaven is within us.8
Having found the heart, the intellect becomes entirely luminous, aware of its own
simplicity, and free to pray in a way that is free from images and discursive think
ing. The finding of the heart by the mind is the attainment of a state of simplicity,
a recovery of the fundamental unity of the human person, that we normally
experience in a diffuse and distracted way.
This leads to my second point. Hesychasm does not see prayer, and conse
quently knowledge of God, simply as an intellectual process. It is the intellect that
knows, or knows that it does not know—knows through unknowing; but it is only
the intellect that has been reunited with the whole human person, body and soul,
by rediscovering its centre and home in the heart that can know. The test comes
in relation to God, where fragmented knowing frustrates any real knowing at all.
But I think the point that only the intellect united with the heart can really know
applies to any kind of knowing, both knowledge of the universe, and knowledge
of other people.
My third point is apparently detached from the first two, and is concerned with
the distinction between the essence and energies of God. An immensely powerful
current in Western metaphysics takes as axiomatic the idea that the ultimate is
8 Nikephoros the Hesychast, On Vigilance and the Guarding of the Heart (PG 147.964A), quoted by
Bishop Kallistos Ware in The Study of Spirituality, ed. Jones-Wainwright-Yarnold (SPCK, 1986), 245.
single and simple. So, to take one example, for St Augustine all the divine attri
butes are identical, both with the essence of God and with one another.9 The
Christian Fathers of the East on the whole did not take this line: there is one God,
certainly, but unity is not the ultimate truth.10 For one thing, there are three per
sons in this one Godhead. But further—and here Gregory Palamas develops
something that is certainly implicit in, say, Maximos the Confessor, though his
language is not so clear—there are different energies in God, though they all
derive from the single, indivisible essence of God.
Mysticism and Asceticism
From what I have said about hesychasm, I hope my first comparison with kabba
lism is already sufficiently clear: they both reject rationalism in our understand
ing of the Godhead. And it seems to me that the ways they do this are closely
analogous. Both reject the idea that knowledge of God is an extension—even if
the pinnacle—of our ordinary discursive ways of knowing. They also see that
knowledge of God involves a kind of reconstruction of the human person, and
the discovery of a kind of lost part of ourselves. The two traditions seem to me to
put this differently: kabbalism seeing the ‘holy intellect’ as some kind of divine
emanation, ‘hewn from a divine source’, as Tishby puts it,11 whereas hesychasm
rather sees the finding of the heart as an overcoming of the fragmentation of the
human state, the soul not being an emanation but created out of nothing and hav
ing no natural kinship with God at all.
Even the final point that Tishby makes—about knowledge of God leading to a
‘powerful interdependent relationship’ between man and his creator—has close
parallels in hesychasm. In hesychasm, knowledge of God— beholding the
Uncreated Light—is deifying: the human person is transformed by this know
ledge into God. The literature of hesychasm sees this deification mainly in terms
of being possessed by the divine love in a way that is of profound benefit to our
fellow human beings. But the lives of the saints are open to more straightfor
wardly miraculous manifestations of such union with the love of God, among
them clairvoyance, in the sense both of knowing the secrets of other people’s
hearts and of being able to predict the future, as well as miraculous gifts of heal
ing. But to say this is to stray into a dimension of hesychasm (and perhaps of
kabbalism) that is superficially exciting, though really not central.
9 See Augustine, de Trinitate VI.7.8 (et eadem bonitas quae sapientia et magnitudo, et eadem veritas
quae ilia omnia): Bibliotheque augustinienne 15, ed. M. Mellet and Th. Camelot (Beauchesne,
1955), 488.
10 This is even the position of Denys the Areopagite: see his de Divinis Nominibus 13.3.
At the heart of hesychasm is asceticism. Although finding the heart cannot be

achieved without divine grace, neither can it be achieved without ascetic struggle.
And the heart of ascetic struggle is trying to overcome temptations and acquire
virtues. This is not something glamorous, rather a matter of patient faithfulness.
Something similar seems to be true of kabbalism. Much kabbalistic writing is
concerned with the sefirot, but parallel, as it were, to the sefirot are the mitsvot, the
commandments (of the Torah). The practical side of kabbalism, as important as its
theoretical, visionary side, is fulfilment of the mitsvot with kavvanah, intention or
devotion. So, we are told, ‘the mitsvot were given only to refine [le-tsaref] human
beings’, or alternatively, ‘to join human beings’: ‘they are the thread that binds those
who fulfil them with God . . . like a thread joining two pieces of cloth’.12 The mitsvot
have also a cosmic aspect: they are ‘not intended to teach beneficial opinions, but
rather to maintain the existence of the world’.13 Gershom Scholem speaks of fulfil
ment of the mitsvot as ‘a contemplative walk in the spiritual world’.14 For his part,
D. C. Matt sums up the link between mitsvot and the sefirot thus:
Theological understanding and speculation are incomplete without deeds.

Through ritual, God’s inner life (the sefirot) is explored and known, imitated and
effected. These sefirot are the manifestations of En Sof, the divine attributes. Here
God thinks, feels, and responds. The sefirot link En Sof with the world; mitsvot
are the mystical tool that enable one to contact the otherwise unknowable God.15
The Unknowable and the Knowable in God
But let me go back to the two quotations with which I began. Both of them, I sug
gested, make a distinction between the unknowable and the knowable in God:
between En Sof and the sefirot in the Kabbalah, and between the essence and
energies of God in hesychasm. It might seem that the similarities end there.
Looking at the two passages there seem to be at least two striking dissimilarities.
On the one hand, the sefirot seem to be beings rather than simply attributes, in
contrast to the energies of God: En Sof is spoken of as being hidden even from the
sefirot. On the other hand, the sefirot seem to constitute a definite body of beings
(there are, in fact, ten of them), whereas the energies seem to be in principle
infinite. These two points seem to me to go together: the energies are posited, not
12 Quoted by D. C. Matt, ‘The Mystic and the Mizwot’, Jewish Spirituality I, ed. A. Green (Routledge,
1986), 393.
13 Quoted by Matt, ‘The Mystic and the Mizwot’, 394.
14 Quoted by Matt, ‘The Mystic and the Mizwot’, 396.
15 Matt, ‘The Mystic and the Mizwot’, 396.
the object of speculation, whereas the sefirot are the object of extremely fertile
speculation.
This speculation takes many forms, but I want to consider just two: first, specu
lation about the relationship between En Sof and the sefirot; second, speculation
about the constitution, so to speak, of the realm of the sefirot. Let us see if we can
draw any parallels between hesychasm and the Kabbalah on these two points.
So, first of all, speculation about the relationship between En Sof and the sefirot.
Tishby gives various examples of such speculation, among them:
Come and see: The Holy One, blessed be He, produced ten crowns, holy diadems,
above, with which He crowns Himself and clothes Himself, and He is they, and they
are He, like a flame attached to a burning coal, and there is no division there.16
The ten crowns are evidently the ten sefirot: their unity with En Sof is like the
union of flames with the burning coal. It is an analogy familiar in Christian the
ology, though I am not aware of its being used to illustrate either the unity of the
Trinity or the unity of the energies with the essence of God. But in the closely
related form of an iron plunged into a fire it is certainly used to illustrate the
union of the divine and human natures in Christ.17 Another analogy of the rela
tionship between En Sof and the sefirot mentioned by Tishby is that of lights and a
lamp: ‘like a lamp from which lights spread out on every side, but when we draw
near to examine these lights, we find that only the lamp itself exists’.18 As Tishby
points out, this analogy is only superficially like the flames and coal analogy, for
the lights that appear to be different rays from the flame of a lamp are an optical
illusion: close inspection shows that the lights do not exist. As Tishby says, ‘the
meaning of this simile is that the sefirot in themselves have no ontological
existence’.19 This analogy is however found in a Christian context, and indeed in
one of the most important sources for the hesychasts, namely, in Denys the
Areopagite. In Divine Names 2.4, he says:
In a house the light from all the lamps is completely interpenetrating, yet each is
clearly distinct. There is distinction in unity and unity in distinction. When
there are many lamps in a house there is nevertheless a single undifferentiated
light and from all of them comes the one undivided brightness. I do not think
that anyone would mark off the light of one lamp from another in the atmos
phere which contains them all, nor could one light be seen separately from the
others since all of them are completely mingled while being at the same time
quite distinctive . . . .20
16 Quoted in Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 239.

17 See, for example, Origen, de Principiis II.6.6.
18 Quoted by Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 240. 19 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 240.
20 Translation by C. Luibheid in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1987), 61f.
This passage is particularly interesting, because it is not at all clear what Denys is
talking about. It is often taken to be a simile for the unity of the Trinity, but it
could equally be taken as illustrating the unity in distinction and distinction in
unity of the divine attributes, what the hesychasts came to call the divine energies.
Tishby introduces a further term used in explaining the relationship between
En Sof and the sefirot: the botsina dikardinuta, the ‘spark of blackness’: ‘The light
that does not rest in light (En Sof) reveals and produces the spark of blackness,
and this activates the will of wills (Keter), and is concealed within it, and is
not known.’21 It is difficult not to recall the ‘super-essential ray of divine darkness’
(ἡ ὑπερούσιος τοῦ θείου σκότου ἀκτίς) to which, according to Denys, the
Christian soul is united in her ascent to God.22 What these parallels amount to,
I am not sure. In all these cases we are treading a path in which knowledge can
only be imparted in paradox, and perhaps similes of paradox are limited.
When we turn to the speculation about the constitution of the realm of the
sefirot, it might seem that parallels between hesychasm and kabbalism will be thin
and arbitrary. That would be the case if we contented ourselves with simply
noticing similarities. But it has always struck me as important when looking at
different systems of belief, or metaphysical systems, to be aware of the context pro
vided by the whole framework. Isolated images or theories falsify, if we do not pay
attention to the context and function. It is this that we need to keep in mind here.
The sefirot constitute a group of beings that, within the Godhead, mediate
between the unknowable En Sof and the lower world. There are ten of them:
Keter Elyon, Hokhmah, Binah, Hesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netsah, Hod, Yesod, and
Malkhut, that is: supernal crown, wisdom, understanding (or intelligence), love,
power, beauty, eternity (or endurance), majesty, foundation, kingdom (or sov
ereignty). And they constitute a structure. For instance, in one place the ten
sefirot are introduced thus:
These ten sefirot follow the order in which they are one long, one short, one inter
mediate. You [viz., En Sof] are the one who guides them, and there is no one to
guide You, neither above, nor below, nor on any side. You have prepared garments
for them, from which the souls fly to the children of men. Several bodies have You
prepared for them, which are called ‘body’ in respect of the garments that cover
them. And they are named, in this arrangement, as follows: Hesed—right arm;
Gevurah—left arm; Tiferet—torso; Netsah and Hod—two legs; Yesod—the com
pletion of the body, the sign of the holy covenant; Malkhut—mouth, which we
call the oral Torah. The brain is Hokhmah, the inner thought; Binah is the
heart, of which it is said ‘the heart understands’. Of these two it is written, ‘The
hidden things belong to the Lord, our God’ (Deut. 29:28). The supernal Keter
is the crown of royalty (malkhut), of which it is said, ‘It declares the end from
21 Quoted by Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 243f.

22 Denys the Areopagite, de Mystica Theologia, 1.1.
the beginning’ (Isa. 46:10), and it is the headpiece of the tefillin. Inwardly it is
Yod, He, Vav, He, which is the way of emanation. It is the watering-place of the
tree, with its arms and its boughs, like water that waters the tree, and it grows
because of the watering.23
Another passage reads thus:
Come and see. Thought [Hokhmah] is the beginning of all, and in that it is
thought it is internal, secret, and unknowable. When this thought extended far
ther it came to a place where spirit [Binah] dwelt, and when it reached this place
it was called Binah (understanding), and this is not so secret as the preceding,
even though it is also secret. This spirit extended itself and brought forth a voice,
comprised of fire, water and wind, which were north, south and east . . . .24
Both these passages suggest to me that the structure of the sefirot is to be seen as a
kind of world behind the world (or better: worlds, for there are angels as well as
human beings). Like the Greek kosmos, to speak of the world in this way is to see
it as balanced and harmonious, and to see the harmony as pointing beyond itself,
ultimately to God. More than that, the mystery of sexuality that lies behind the
continuation of life in this world is also being used as a key to unlock the mysteri
ous world of the sefirot: it is this which gives the second of these passages its gnos
tic feel. Elsewhere this is made quite explicit:
It is taught: When Atika Kadisha [‘the holy old man’: a designation of Keter], the
mystery of all mysteries, sought to prepare itself, it prepared everything in the
form of male and female. Once male and female had been included, they existed
in no other way except as male and female. This Hokhmah, which includes
everything, when it emerged from, and was illuminated by, Atika Kadisha, was
illuminated in no other way except as male and female; for this Hokhmah
extended itself and brought forth Binah from itself, and so there existed male
and female. Hokhmah father, Binah mother, Hokhmah and Binah were equally
weighed, male and female, for were it not so they would not survive . . . .25
Here, we might think, we have something utterly remote from anything in hesy
chasm. But I wonder—and along these lines. Part, at least, of what is going on in
this part of the Kabbalah is the drawing out of a speculative understanding of
cosmic reality, so as to make sense of the cosmic significance of the mitsvot to which
I alluded earlier. One feature of cosmic reality, as we know it, is the distinction
23 From Tikkunei ha-Zohar, second preface, 17a‒b; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 260f.
24 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 326. 25 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 341.
between the sexes: in that is rooted the mystery of generation, the continual repro
duction and development of animal and human (and, indeed, some plant) life.
Byzantine theology is by no means unaware of all this. One of the most
important speculative theologians of the Byzantine tradition, and a profound
influence on the hesychasts, was the seventh-century monk, Maximos the
Confessor. In several places, notably in the first book of his Difficulties (usually
called the Ambigua)26 and in his commentary on the Liturgy, called the
Mystagogia, he sees the whole of reality as characterized by division. Underlying
everything there is the division between uncreated and created reality: between
God and everything else. Created reality is divided into intelligible and sensible
reality; sensible reality into heaven and earth; earth into paradise and the
inhabited world (the oikumene). And in the inhabited world there is a division
between male and female. These divisions can either separate, and hold apart or
lead to fragmentation, or else they can be bridged and contribute to the rich
ness and variety of reality. For Maximos, of course, they are to be bridged.
Fundamentally they are bridged in the incarnation: and that bringing together
is celebrated and effected in the Liturgy (which is why he introduces the theme
into his Mystagogia). But this objective bridging is realized in the world through
ascetic struggle. This gives asceticism a cosmic dimension. It is not simply a
matter of individual struggle and attainment: through all this something is
being achieved that is of cosmic significance.
The Transfiguration and the Shekhinah
One of the symbols of the cosmic significance of the ascetic struggle within
hesychasm, or so I would interpret it, is the transfiguration of Christ. It is in the
light with which Christ was transfigured— the Uncreated Light of the
Godhead—that the hesychasts hope themselves to be transfigured. It is also in
the transfiguration, as Maximos demonstrates in the longest of his Ambigua,27
that all the divisions in reality are overcome. This suggests, perhaps, a final par
allel between hesychasm and the Kabbalah. The lowest of the sefirot, Malkhut, is
manifest in the world, and especially in Israel, as the Shekhinah, the divine pres
ence of Targumim and Haggadic literature. The Zohar presents a complex doc
trine about the Shekhinah, both in its relation to the higher sefirot and En Sof
and in its relation to the lower world. In both cases we are concerned with the
mystery of unification (sod ha-yihud), so that in practical terms the Shekhinah
is something like a link between the divine realm and the lower world. So the
Shekhinah can be introduced thus:
26 Ambigua 41: PG 91.1304D–1315A. 27 Ambigua 10: PG 91.1106C–1205C.

Come and see. When the Holy One, blessed be He, desired to create the world,
He brought mist out of the spark of blackness, and it began to shine from the
midst of the darkness, and it remained aloft, and it came downward. This dark
ness shone and sparkled with one hundred narrow-broad pathways, and the
house of the world was made.28
Or spoken of like this:
And yet it says ‘My dove, my undefiled, is but one. She is the only one of her
mother’ (S. of S. 6:9). This is the holy Shekhinah, emerging from the protective
vessels, the light of light, illuminating all, and she is called ‘mother’.29
Tishby explains the significance of the Shekhinah in these terms:
The basis of unification in mystical terms is the mystery of intercourse between

the Shekhinah and her ‘husband’, Tiferet; that is to say, her inseparable connec
tion with the sefirotic system. And man’s religious task is to sustain this unifica
tion through devotion in prayer and the fulfilment of the commandments. Only
through concentration on this unification is man both able and permitted to
draw near to the Shekhinah and to serve her in divine worship, and then she
becomes a window through which the divine light may shine, a channel for the
transmission of influence to the lower worlds, and a gate through which the soul
may enter the divine realm.30
This strikes me as very close to the way in which the transfiguration of Christ is
understood in the hesychastic tradition, as a symbol and summing up of the
union between God and man, heaven and earth, manifest in the incarnation,
and attained in actual experience in the lives of those who become transparent
to the divine glory and thus deified through grace, prayer, and ascetic struggle.
For deification in hesychasm seems to be parallel to the mystery of unification
in kabbalism.
Two Parallel Traditions?
It seems to me that what we are perhaps finding is that, although the understand
ing of either hesychasm or kabbalism involves exploration of a way of thought
28 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 389. 29 Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 133.
and life that is very demanding and expressed in very different terms, at their
heart we find profound and far-reaching analogies. This does not mean that we
have discovered something that transcends the different religious traditions. Yet if
it should so transcend them, then here is something that seems largely beyond
human reach—except through the patient pursuit of one religious tradition or
the other.
37
Aquinas and Orthodoxy
The engagement of Eastern Orthodox theology with St Thomas Aquinas is a

complex and shadowy affair. Within a century of Aquinas’ death, some of the
works of the theologian were available in Greek translation in the Byzantine
world, and were greeted with both enthusiasm and dismay. Our understanding of
this early Byzantine reaction to Thomism is complicated by a number of factors.
First of all, the works of Aquinas became known in the full flush of the ‘Palamite
controversy’, by which time positions had already hardened. The first work of
Aquinas’ to appear in Greek, the Summa contra Gentiles, was published in 1354;
the three synods in Constantinople that supported Palamas are dated 1341, 1347,
and 1351, while the Agioretic Tome, the statement of the monks of the Holy
Mountain in support of Palamas, dates from 1341. Aquinas did not so much
influence the controversy, as fit into largely predetermined positions, though
often enough in a rather bewildering variety of ways. It is important to remember
this, as our understanding of the engagement between Thomas and Byzantine
theology in the fourteenth century is made the more difficult by the fact that in
the twentieth century, the Palamite controversy came to be seen as definitive for
understanding the nature of the schism between Eastern and Western
Christendom—Palamism defining the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy in opposition
to Western Christendom defined by scholasticism (or sometimes by a more com-
plex duality embracing scholasticism and the emerging non-dogmatic mysticism
of the Western later Middle Ages). Virtually all Orthodox scholarship on the
fourteenth century—and most of the Western scholarship—has been affected by
the sense that here we find ourselves at the theological core of the schism, and
this, in turn, has been affected by the more immediate encounter between
Orthodox theologians (to begin with, mostly Russian Orthodox theologians) and
the West that took place in the twentieth century. Put (too) bluntly, the contro-
versy of the fourteenth century has been seen from the perspective of the Russian
Orthodox encounter with early twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology, in
which Aquinas appeared either as the inspiration of a debased scholastic theology
or as the hero of Neo-Thomism. The interpretative categories employed in analys-
ing the fourteenth-century debates derive from twentieth-century engagement
rather than that of the fourteenth century, with the favoured view being granted
the palm of being ‘existentialist’! Even to begin to disentangle this is more than
can be attempted in a single paper, which must therefore remain extremely
provisional.
Aquinas and Orthodoxy 397
The Eastern Orthodox encounter with Aquinas, however, either in the four-
teenth century or the twentieth (or the centuries in between) is not perhaps the
place to begin. For Aquinas himself engaged with traditions that we would call
Eastern Orthodox and he knew to be Greek, though in a Latin dress. Aquinas was
indebted, in his theology, to a long tradition of theological reflection that had
been shaped decisively by the Greek traditions of the Christian East. Indeed,
although Aquinas is cast in the Orthodox mind as the Scholastic, par excellence,
this is to oversimplify. Unlike many of the schoolmen, Aquinas’ early education was
in a monastic school—at Monte Cassino, the monastery founded by St Benedict
himself—where lectio divina and a meditative approach to the scriptures would
have made prayer and study inseparable. Although this education was later
supplemented by study at the University of Naples, an imperial foundation inde-
pendent of the Church, the basis of Aquinas’ learning was monastic, and thus
much closer to the tradition of what the Byzantines called the ‘inner wisdom’.
Furthermore, it was argued long ago that in his Christology Aquinas was uniquely
well informed, in comparison with his contemporaries, by the Greek patristic
tradition,1 and more recently the once-popular idea that Aquinas departed from
an earlier Platonic tradition under the influence of the newly discovered Aristotle
has been shaken, and a strong Neoplatonic influence recognized.2 Finally, it is
worth mentioning that, when Aquinas died in 1274, he was on his way to the
Council of Lyon in an attempt to heal the schism between East and West. In gen-
eral terms, then, Aquinas appears more open to, and concerned for, ‘Eastern’
influences than the common Orthodox preconception might suppose. In more
strictly theological terms, and especially in relation to the Summa Theologiae,
Aquinas’ indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition may be considered further
with reference to two theologians determinative of the Orthodox tradition:
Dionysios the Areopagite and St John Damascene.3
Dionysios the Areopagite
The works ascribed to the disciple of the Apostle Paul, Dionysios the Areopagite,
have had an unparalleled influence on Eastern Orthodox theology.4 To put it
briefly, these writings provided a unifying theological vision that picked up the
characteristic emphases of Byzantine theology as they had developed by the
1 See I. Backes, Die Christologie des Hl. Thomas und die griechischen Kirchenväter (F. Schöningh, 1931).
2 Argued à outrance in W. J. Hankey, God in Himself (Oxford University Press, 1987); see Fergus
Kerr, After Aquinas (Blackwells, 2002), 9–10.
3 See, also, the brief discussion of Aquinas’ debt to the Greek tradition in Gilles Emery OP, ‘A Note
on St. Thomas and the Eastern Fathers’, Trinity, Church, and the Human Person: Thomistic Essays
(Sapeintia Press, 2007), 193–207.
4 See, most recently, the relevant articles in Modern Theology 24:4 (October 2008), devoted to
Dionysios and his reception.
beginning of the sixth century, when the Corpus Areopagiticum first appeared. It
is a cosmic vision, focused on the Eucharistic celebration and associated sacra-
mental rites, in which the heavenly and earthly realms are united; the whole cre-
ated order is governed by a principle of hierarchy, by which everything is drawn
more deeply into union with God, a principle of hierarchy manifest in its purity
in the ranks of celestial beings; the creaturely orders are seen as engaged in praise
of God, using the terms—the ‘names’—by which God has revealed himself in the
Scriptures, for the interpretation of which Dionysios introduces the terminology
(borrowed from Neoplatonism) of apophatic and kataphatic theology (theology
of denial and theology of affirmation); it is through this praise that creatures are
united to God, and in this progress towards union there can be discerned a
sequence of purification‒illumination–union, the goal of which is an ecstatic
union with God in love, experienced as darkness, since it is beyond any creaturely
capacity. The writings of the Areopagite became known in the West, initially
through the ninth-century Latin translations of Hilduin, abbot of St-Denys, and
Eriugena; the version Aquinas knew was the still later revision by John the
Saracen.5 In both East and West focus is initially directed towards the works on
the hierarchies, which became the subject of repeated commentary; such an
approach preserved a sense of the integrity of the Areopagite’s vision. In the West,
this approach seems gradually to fall away, so that with Aquinas it is the work, The
Divine Names, to which he devotes a commentary. The extent of the influence of
the Divine Names on Aquinas’ theology, and especially the Summa, is apparent from
the index of citations of that work, given in Pera’s edition of the commentary.6
What lies behind this new approach to Dionysios is not clear, but it may well
have something to do with the fact that, while the liturgical rites on which
Dionysios commented remained recognizably similar in the East, liturgical devel-
opment in the West had led to a practice of liturgy significantly different from
that presupposed by the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Although the Celestial Hierarchy
remained important for Aquinas’ angelology (for which he was justly famous),
attention to the Corpus Areopagiticum in the West shifted to the Divine Names
and the Mystical Theology—and there seems something emblematic in the fact
that Thomas, and later schoolmen, comment on the Divine Names, while the
Mystical Theology becomes the handbook of the emerging school of later medi
eval mysticism (compare, for example, the Middle English translation and com-
mentary on the Mystical Theology by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing).7
5 For a brilliant account of the influence of Dionsyios on Aquinas’ metaphysics, see Fran O’Rourke,
Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, 2nd edn (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
6 Ceslas Pera OP, ed., In librum Beati Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus Expositio (Marietti, 1950),
399–407.
7 For an account of this development in the West, see the remarkable essay by Simon Tugwell OP,
‘Albert and the Dionysian Tradition’, Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, Classics of Western
Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1988), 39–95, 116–29 (notes).
This shift of attention heralds a change in interpretation, which may be brought

out by noting an early comment on the Divine Names, preserved in the scholia.
On Divine Names V. 8, the scholiast comments, ‘As the cause of all, therefore, God
is hymned; for he did not say, These things are predicated of the same, but prop-
erly speaking hymned’.8 In other words, the Divine Names is about how we use
language to praise God, not about the narrower logical issue of how we predicate
qualities of God. This distinction seems to be lost to Aquinas; his commentary on
the Divine Names is about divine predication; the connection with worship,
explicit in Dionysios, has vanished.9 This relates, as we shall see, to one of the
principal bones of contention between Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas:
the charge that, for Aquinas and the schoolmen generally, theology has become a
matter of concepts, it has been reduced to a rationalist enterprise. The Summa
Theologiae itself can be cited in support of this contention—and also against it.
The Summa is composed of quaestiones, questions, the genre that came to domin
ate Western theology in the newly founded universities. Although the quaestio is
related to the older genre of questions-and-answers (erotapokríseis), that became
important (and remained important) in the Byzantine world, in the world of the
universities it developed its own role.10 As Fergus Kerr has put it, the method
behind the use of quaestiones in disputations,
was not intended to reach a compromise or supposed consensus, by splitting the

difference between conflicting interpretations. It allowed the disputants to dis-
cover the strengths and weaknesses of opposing views; but the aim was to work
out the truth by considering and eliminating error, however common or plaus
ible or seemingly supported by authority.11
The Summa Theologiae is a collection of quaestiones, in which Christian doctrine

is interrogated, and set out as an array of propositions, supported and defended
by reason. It could, in the circumstances, hardly be other than an exercise in con-
ceptual theology. On the other hand, the structure of the Summa suggests some-
thing beyond this. The arrangement of the quaestiones is far from arbitrary; it can
be interpreted as following a movement out from God into the created order, and
then back through the human to God in a process of contemplation, the whole
cycle being made possible by God’s uniting himself with human kind and
8 PG 4: 328A (my italics). The scholiast may be St Maximos the Confessor; this scholion does not
seem to belong to the initial set prepared by John of Scythopolis.
9 Of course, Thomas is eloquent in his praise of God in his hymns and prayers, most notably in the
office he composed for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Nonetheless, he still takes the Divine Names to be a
treatise on predication.
10 For the Erotapokriseis, see Yannis Papadoyannakis, ‘Instruction by Question and Answer in Late
Antiquity: The Case of Late Antique Erotapokriseis’. In Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism,
Didacticism, Classicism, ed. Scott Johnson (Ashgate, 2006), 91–105.
11 Kerr, After Aquinas, 8.
overcoming human sin in the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of
God. Underlying the conceptual distinctions there is a fundamental concern with
the return of creation to God—reflected in the cycle, rest–procession–return, of
Neoplatonic provenance—so that the core concern of the Summa is the deifica-
tion, or theosis, of creation.12 As Fergus Kerr puts it, in lapidary fashion, ‘the
Summa Theologiae is a study of the transcendental conditions of beatific vision;
not foundationalist apologetics but a set of practices for receiving the gift of
beatitude’.13
Another point of contrast between Dionysios and Thomas concerns their dif-
fering uses of the word analogy, analogia. This is perhaps less significant than it
once was when Thomists reduced Thomism to the principle of analogia entis.14
Nonetheless, analogia is important to Aquinas, and is concerned with how we
interpret our language about God: Aquinas seeks a middle way, the way of ana
logy, between the idea that our concepts apply to God in the same way as they
apply in the created world (univocity), and the idea that our concepts as applied
to God and to creaturely reality have nothing in common (equivocity). It is a con-
ceptual puzzle. Analogy in Dionysios, however, means something completely dif-
ferent: it refers to the creaturely capacity to receive and understand; it is the kata
to dynaton—‘as far as it possible’—of Platonism, which qualifies anything we say
about the creature’s participation in the divine. Again, the contrast is between a
conceptual issue and one concerned with our capacity to receive and understand.15
St John Damascene
This perhaps provides a cue for consideration of the other major ‘Eastern
Orthodox’ influence on Aquinas: the work of St John Damascene. It is commonly
asserted that the work known in the West as De Fide Orthodoxa, ‘On the
Orthodox Faith’, by the Damascene, lies behind the dogmatic structures of
12 See, fundamentally, M.-D. Chenu OP, Introduction à l’étude de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Institut
d’Études Médiévales, 1954), 266–76. See also, A. N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in
Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press, 1999).
13 Kerr, After Aquinas, 161.
14 Classic account in Erich Przywara SJ, Analogia Entis. Metaphysik (Kösel & Pustet, 1932). See also
M. T.-L. Penido, Le rôle de l’analogie en théologie dogmatique, Bibliothèque Thomiste 15 (Librairie
Philosophique J. Vrin, 1931). The mid-twentieth century saw a rethinking of the place of analogy in
Aquinas’ thought. See Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World: An Investigation of
its Background and Interpretation of its Use by Thomas of Aquino (Almquist & Wiksells Boktryckeri
AB, 1952); and fundamentally George P. Klubertanz SJ, St Thomas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and
Systematic Synthesis (Loyola University Press, 1960).
15 See Vladimir Lossky, ‘La notion des “analogies” chez le ps.-Denys l’Aréopagite’, Archives d’histoire
doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 5 (1930), 279–309. The view I have presented as a matter of his-
torical hermeneutics is discussed at greater length by Christos Yannaras in To Prosopo kai o eros, 4th
edn (Domos, 1987), 257–81. ET by Norman Russell, Person and Eros (Holy Cross Orthodox Press,
2007), 201–20.
Western scholasticism.16 It certainly seems to be true that this work provides the
ground plan for the comprehensive surveys of Christian dogma put forward by
the schoolmen, from the Sentences of Peter Lombard to the Summas of High
Scholasticism. But the step from the Damascene’s Century of Accurate Exposition
of the Orthodox Faith (as the Greek work might well be called)17 to De Fide
Orthodoxa is more than a matter of translation. St John Damascene’s work
belonged to the genre of the ‘century’, a collection of a hundred ‘chapters’ (any-
thing from a sentence to a group of paragraphs), invented by the fourth-century
monk of the Egyptian desert, Evagrios of Pontos, first used for collections of
ascetic wisdom, and later incorporating succinct statements of Christian doctrine
(e.g., by St Maximos the Confessor). But the century remained a monastic genre,
and John would have been conscious of this. His Century covers Christian teach-
ing in a roughly credal form—God–creation and human kind–Christology and
Redemption–Church, sacraments, and worship—but though intended in some
way to be comprehensive (aspiring to the fulness of the ‘century’), it was certainly
not intended to be exhaustive, nor is the structure particularly systematic. It is an
account of Christian doctrine, intended certainly for monks living under Islam,
who needed to be clear about what Orthodox Christianity stood for, but even
more to help them to understand how to progress, through faithful prayer and
worship, to union with God. The Latin version, De Fide Orthodoxa, translated by
Burgundio of Pisa in the mid-twelfth century (probably 1153–4) is different in
significant ways.18 Apart from detailed points of translation, the most striking dif-
ference is that De Fide Orthodoxa is divided into four books: on God, on Creation,
on the Incarnation and Redemption, on the Sacraments (though mostly about
other matters). This division reflects the four books of Peter Lombard’s
Sentences—on the Mystery of the Trinity, on Creation, on the Incarnation of the
Word, and on the Doctrine of Signs—and underlies the sections of the medieval
Summa, not least Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. But the Lombard’s division is
clearly of Latin—not to say, Augustinian—inspiration, with its movement from
the mystery of the Trinity to the doctrine of signs, by way of creation and
Incarnation, which suggests that the parallel between the fourfold division of the
Latin version of the Damascene and the fourfold division of the Lombard’s
Sentences is to be explained, not so much by the Lombard basing his division on
the Damascene, but by the Latin translator, or some later editor, of the
Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith trying, with only moderate success, to fit the
16 For the view of the Damascene presented here, see Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition
and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford University Press, 2002).
17 Bonifatius Kotter, ed., ‘Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos II’, Expositio Fidei, Patristische
Texte und Studien 12 (Walter de Gruyter, 1973).
18 For the text, see Saint John Damascene, De Fide Orthodoxa: Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus,
ed. Eligius M Buytaert OFM (The Franciscan Institute, 1955).
Damascene’s work to a Latin structure.19 Furthermore, in such Latin dress, the

Damascene’s work now looks much more systematic, with pretensions to exhaust
iveness, than the original Greek version.
How does this bear on Thomas’ debt to Eastern Orthodox tradition as repre-
sented in the Damascene? First of all, De Fide Orthodoxa was, for Thomas, a
treasury of Greek theology, which he draws on throughout the Summa and his
other writings. The mystery of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, the
nature of the angels, the focal role of the human as God’s image in the created
order, the post-Chalcedonian developments of Byzantine Christology, the pro-
found sense of the importance of the bodily underlying both the Incarnation, and
the sacramental order of the Church: all this Aquinas draws on gratefully, even if
some—indeed much—of it was firmly established in the Western tradition inde-
pendently of the contribution of the Damascene’s De Fide Orthodoxa. Second,
however, the form of De Fide Orthodoxa, suggested by the Latin division into four
books, may have suggested to Aquinas that Greek theology had a much more sys-
tematic form that was in fact the case. The form in which the Damascene’s work
was known in the Greek East was still as a century (or a variant on this); in fact,
the commonest form in which it is found in medieval manuscripts is probably the
original form intended by John Damascene—not as part three of The Fountain-
head of Knowledge, as the existing preparatory letter to Cosmas of Maïuma
suggests—but as the last two-thirds of a work known as One Hundred and Fifty
Philosophical and Theological Chapters, the first part being an introduction to
logic known as the Dialectica. It was this work that formed the model for Palamas’
One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, his summary—and by no means exhaustive—
statement of his position in the hesychast controversy.20 The lack of system in
Greek theology—both with the Damascene and Palamas—is part of a more pro-
found sense of apophaticism before the mystery of God, which we know through
participation and cannot express in any exhaustive way.
The Fourteenth-Century Controversy
We are now in a position to look at the other side of the engagement between
Eastern Orthodox theology and Aquinas: the reception of the Angelic Doctor in
19 See Magistri Petri Lombardi, Sententiae in IV Libris Distinctae, Spicilegium Bonaventurianum
IV–V (Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1971–81). Clearly my suggestion above
depends on the priority of the Lombard’s Sentences over the Latin translation of the Damascene. What
evidence there is suggests that Burgundio’s translation and Lombard’s Sentences were close in date.
Furthermore, the division into sections of De Fide Orthodoxa is not found in the earliest manuscripts,
and so is likely to have been introduced later, which lends support to my suggestion above.
20 See my ‘Τὸ σχῆμα τῆς Ὀρθοδοξίας στοὺς ἁγίους Γρηγόριο Παλαμᾶ καὶ Ἰωάννη Δαμασκηνό’ (The
Shape of Orthodoxy in Saints Gregory Palamas and John Damascene). In Ὁ Ἅγιος Γρηγόριος ὁ
Παλαμὰς στὴν Ἱστορία καὶ τὸ Παρόν (Saint Gregory Palamas in History and the Present), ed.
Georgios I. Mantzaridis (Iera Megisti Moni Vatopaidiou, 2000), 645–51.
the East from the fourteenth century onwards. This will fall into three parts: first,
the engagement in the fourteenth (and fifteenth) century; second, the place of
what we might call, with some reservations, ‘Thomism’ in Orthodox theology
from the fall of Constantinople up to the twentieth century; and finally, engage-
ment with Aquinas in the twentieth century. We shall follow the chronological
order, although, as already remarked at the beginning, the ordo cognoscendi is
perhaps the reverse.21
Aquinas’ works were by no means the first to be translated into Greek.22
Already, at the end of the thirteenth century, Augustine’s De Trinitate had been
translated by Maximos Planoudis, and other works followed in the fourteenth
century. Augustine’s works were widely read, and not just among those in
Byzantium who looked to the West with admiration. Even Gregory Palamas read
Augustine’s De Trinitate, though the use he made of it is sometimes surprising. As
well as introducing into Byzantine theology Augustine’s notion of the Spirit as the
love between the Father and the Son, he also found in Augustine fuel for his
attack on the double procession of the Holy Spirit!23 Planoudis also translated
into Greek, probably in about 1295, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy.24
The first work of Aquinas’ to be translated into Greek was his Summa contra
Gentiles, the translation of which by Demetrios Kydones was published in 1354.25
This seems to have been popular, with a wide circulation; at least forty manu-
scripts survive.26 Demetrios later translated parts I and II of the Summa
Theologiae, and his brother Prochoros translated some of the third part.27 By this
time the Palamite controversy was well under way. The tide had turned for
St Gregory Palamas in 1347, with the accession to the imperial throne of John VI
21 For a systematic attempt to present the history of (primarily Greek) Orthodox theology from the
Middle Ages to the present, see Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxia kai Dysi stin neoteriki Ellada (Domos,
1992). Somewhat abridged ET by Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell, Orthodoxy and the West
(Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006).
22 Fundamental for this period is Gerhard Podskalsky, Theologie und Philosophie in Byzanz,
Byzantinisches Archiv 15 (C.H. Beck, 1977). For the questions of translations from Greek into Latin,
see especially pp. 173–80. See also, Elizabeth Fisher, ‘Planoudes’ De Trinitate, the Art of Translation,
and the Beholder’s Share’ In Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. Aristotle Papanicholaou and
George E. Demacopoulos (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 41–62.
23 See Reinhard Flogaus, ‘Palamas and Barlaam Revisited: A Reassessment of East and West in the
Hesychast Controversy of 14th- Century Byzantium’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42
(1998), 1–32.
24 Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii De Consolatione Philosophiae, traduction grecque de Maxime
Planude. Édition critique par Manolis Papathomopoulos. Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi—
Philosophi Byzantini 9 (Athens–Paris, 1999).
25 On Demetrios Kydones, see Norman Russell, ‘Palamism and the Circle of Demetrios Cydones’.
In Porphyrogenita: Essays on the History and Literature of Byzantium and the Latin East in Honour of
Julian Chrysostomides, ed. Charalambos Dendrinos et al. (Ashgate, 2003), 153–4, and the literature
cited there.
26 L.G. Benakis, ‘I parousia tou Thoma Akinati sto Vyzantio’, Byzantini Philosophia: Keimena kai
Meletes (Parousia, 2002), 633–46, here 634.
27 On Prochoros Kydones, see Norman Russell, ‘Prochoros Cydones and the Fourteenth-Century
Understanding of Orthodoxy’. In Byzantine Orthodoxies, ed. Andrew Louth and Augustine Casiday
(Ashgate, 2006), 75–91.
Kantakouzenos and Palamas’ own elevation to the metropolitical throne of

Thessaloniki, which was followed by Palamas’ vindication at synods in
Constantinople in 1347 and 1351. Palamas’ defence of his position against
Barlaam, the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts, had been published c.1338
and his One Hundred and Fifty Chapters between the two synods; the defence of
Palamas by the monks of Mount Athos, the Agioretic Tome, had been issued in
1341. The principal issue of this controversy—whether through their prayer the
hesychast monks could attain to deifying participation in God, and in particular
whether the vision of the divine light was a vision of God himself or a vision
referring to God, or even simply a hallucination—had been resolved by Palamas
through his utilization of the distinction between God’s essence and activities or
energies, a distinction drawn from the Greek theological tradition going back to
St Basil the Great, according to which God is unknowable in his essence, and yet
truly known through his energies, which are not created effects of God’s activity,
but God himself in his activity. Those who opposed Palamas—initially Barlaam
the Calabrian monk, then Gregory Akindynos (probably himself an Athonite
monk) and the learned scholar, Nikephoros Gregoras—regarded the distinction
between the essence of God and his uncreated energies as infringing the divine
unity and simplicity, and effectively introducing into Christianity pagan polythe-
ism. They made this point independently of any knowledge of Aquinas, but the
availability of Aquinas’ works in the Greek world provided further support for
those who rejected the distinction between the divine οὐσία and ἐνέργειαι, such a
rejection being implicit in the fundamental Thomist affirmation of the identity in
God of esse and essentia, of existence and essence (see STh I. 3. 4).
There was a further issue on which Aquinas’ voice was important, both for
those who welcomed him and those who opposed him. This was the long-
standing doctrinal issue between East and West that had frustrated the attempt at
union at the Council of Lyons which death had prevented Aquinas from attend-
ing: the question of the Filioque, that is, whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from
the Father, as the original version of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed had
asserted, or whether he proceeds from the Father and the Son (Filioque), as
asserted in the Western addition to the ecumenical Creed. Aquinas’ arguments in
support of the Filioque in the Summa Theologiae (I. 36. 2) form a succinct version
of the argument presented at greater length by Anselm in his De Processione
Spiritus Sancti and like that argument proceed from purely logical considerations,
without any direct reference to the witness of Scripture or the tradition of
the Church.
Reactions to Aquinas varied. On the one hand there were those who opposed
his theological method, his use of Aristotelian logic (‘syllogisms’; though the
Greek word συλλογισμός has a wider connotation than the English word); on the
other hand, there were those who seemed to welcome his theological method, but
lamented his theological position. Notable among the latter was Gennadios
Scholarios, the first patriarch of Constantinople under the Ottomans, who apos-
trophizes Thomas thus:
Come now, excellent Thomas, O that you had not been born in the West, so that
you were bound to act as advocate for the deviations of that Church, both in the
case of the procession of the Spirit and the difference between the divine essence
and energies, for otherwise you would have been infallible in matters theo
logical, as you are in matters ethical!28
(though Gennadios himself admired other aspects of Thomas’ theology, e.g. his
doctrine of transubstantiation). But such a reaction seems to have been rare.
Those who attacked Aquinas on the matter of the Holy Spirit or the relationship
between essence and energies also frequently attacked his theological method.
Notable among those was Neilos Kavasilas, who succeeded Palamas on the throne
of Thessaloniki, and whose attack on the Latin doctrine of the Procession of the
Spirit includes an attack on the rationalism of Aquinas’ argumentation (in mod-
ern language he opposed Eastern apophaticism to Aquinas’ rationalism), but he
also attacks the appeal made by the Latins to Scripture and the Fathers.29
The procession of the Holy Spirit was a defining issue between East and West.
Those who were attracted by Thomas’ theological method and embraced his
theological opinion on this issue frequently ended up by making their peace with
the Latin Church; these included Demetrios Kydones. In relation to the question
of the relationship between the divine essence and energies, the situation was dif-
ferent. There were those, like Prochoros Kydones, the younger brother of
Demetrios, who embraced Thomas’ theological method and argued against the
Palamite position, yet remained Orthodox. But there were others, like Theophanes
III, Metropolitan of Nicaea, who were thoroughly Aristotelian, not just in their
argumentation but also in their metaphysics, and from this position defended the
Palamite understanding of the divine light of Tabor against the attacks of such as
Prochoros Kydones. The tendency in scholarship over the last century to see the
controversy in Byzantium in polarized terms—on the one side, Platonist, anti-
Western monks, and on the other, Aristotelian, Western-inclining lay scholars—is
certainly simplistic and needs to be resisted. If so, the reception of Thomas and
the Thomism of the Summa will be correspondingly complex.
28 Quoted in Michael Rackl, ‘Eine griechische Abbreviatio der Prima Secundae des hl. Thomas von
Aquin’, Divus Thomas 9 (1922), 50–9, here 52–3.
29 See Nil Cabasilas, Sur le Saint- Esprit, ed., intro., and trans. Hieromonk Théophile Kislas,
Théologie Byzantine (Cerf, 2001).
The Babylonian Captivity of Orthodox Theology
The next stage in the reception of Thomas and the Summa is the period of what
Florovsky called, borrowing from Luther, the ‘Babylonian Captivity of the
Orthodox Church’.30 In this period, the Orthodox Church, at first primarily the
Church of the Ottoman Empire, increasingly found itself caught up in the after-
math of the Reformation in the Western Church. Protestants— and later
Catholics—looked to the Eastern Orthodox Church for support in the ensuing
controversy. In 1629, Cyril Loukaris, patriarch of Constantinople several times in
the 1620s and 1630s, published a Confessio Fidei, in which the Orthodox Faith
was presented in thoroughly Calvinist terms. This produced a reaction within the
Orthodox world, and led to Loukaris’ condemnation at Constantinople (1638,
1642), Iaşi (1642) and Jerusalem (1672). The synod of Iaşi, as well as condemning
Loukaris, ratified the Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila, metropolitan of Kiev,
which, even in the revised form adopted by the synod, expressed the Orthodox
faith, by contrast, in markedly Latin and Scholastic terms. In these confessions
(and others: by Metrophanes Kritopoulos (1625) and Dositheos, patriarch of
Jerusalem (1672)), Orthodox theologians were attempting to express their faith in
relation to the debates of the Reformation, and inevitably falling under the sway
of issues and concepts quite foreign to traditional Orthodoxy. Those who inclined
more to Roman Catholic ideas fell under the influence of the ‘baroque’ scholasti-
cism of the day. It was these Catholic-inclining confessions that became influen-
tial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and defined the approach to
theology found in the theological academies, established first in Kiev and then
later throughout Russia from the time of the Petrine reforms. Until the middle of
the nineteenth century, teaching in these academies was in Latin, using Western
scholastic text-books, leading to an inevitable Latin influence.
How far one can think of this as any kind of engagement with Aquinas in gen-
eral or the Summa in particular may be doubted. From the point of view of mod-
ern Thomist scholarship, the ‘Thomism’ of this period was debased (too indebted
to Suárez, the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian and com-
mentator on Aquinas), just as from the point of view of modern Orthodox the
ology, the Orthodox theologians of this period are generally dismissed as
corrupted by their encounter with Western theology. The Orthodox theologians
may have drunk deep, but the source was thoroughly muddy.
30 Georges Florovsky actually says ‘the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Russian Church’, referring to
the period from the Petrine reforms (see, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert L. Nichols, part I,
vol. 5: The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (…), 121), but others have extended it to include the
period of the Greek Church under the Turkokratia: cf. the section entitled ‘I vavylonios aichmalosia
tis Orthoxias sta symbola’ in Stelios Ramfos, O Kaimos tou Enos (The Longing for the One) (Ekdoseis
Harmos, 2000), 188.
Modern Orthodox Theology
The revival of Eastern Orthodox theology over the last two centuries was mostly
in fairly conscious opposition to the West. The influence, at first in the Slav coun-
tries and then in Greece, of the Philokalia, a collection of Byzantine ascetical texts
compiled and published by St Makarios of Corinth and St Nikodimos of the Holy
Mountain in 1792, has ensured that an important strand in Orthodox theology
has laid emphasis on prayer and spiritual experience, and looked back to St
Gregory Palamas. The initial intellectual reception of the Philokalia was among
Slavophils, such as Kireevsky and Khomiakov, who were anxiously seeking to
define what it was that distinguished the Orthodox experience of the Slavs from
the newly encountered West. Russian personalism as opposed to the perceived
individualism of the West, the Russian sense of sobornost´, ‘togetherness’: it was
with a sense of identity defined in such terms that the Russian intellectuals,
expelled by Lenin in 1922, found themselves in a welcoming, but unfamiliar West.
It is not surprising that, out of the encounters with Western thinkers through
groups such as the Berdyaev Colloquy in Paris entre deux guerres, a sense of
Orthodox identity emerged that rejected the narrow ‘scholasticism’ of seminary
theology and—for some at least—fashioned itself as a kind of mirror image of the
Neo-Thomism of Maritain and Gilson. It called itself the ‘Neo-Patristic synthesis’
(perhaps in conscious opposition to—and imitation of—‘Neo-Thomism’), and it
is hardly surprising that it saw the hesychast controversy as a kind of archetypal
clash of West and East, of ‘Thomist scholasticism’ and ‘Palamite spiritual experi-
ence’, of Western essentialism and Eastern existentialism (despite the fact that the
Thomas of Neo- Thomism was also cast as an existentialist by Gilson and
Maritain). This sense of the meaning of Orthodoxy has been immensely fruitful,
and has been received and developed throughout the Orthodox world: by
Dumitru Stăniloae in Romania, now St Justin Popović in Serbia, and with great
élan by theologians and philosophers of the stature of John Zizioulas, Christos
Yannaras, and Stelios Ramfos in Greece. Such a sense of where Orthodoxy stands
is not very propitious for any authentic encounter with Aquinas. There is some
positive appreciation of Aquinas in Ramfos, but it seems to be based on second-
ary sources, rather than any engagement with Aquinas.31 There has been some
attention paid to Aquinas by the remarkable Russian scholar and polymath,
Sergei Averintsev († 2004), who also translated some passages from his works; his
interest seems to have been inspired by the theories of art expounded by Neo-
Thomists such as Maritain and Gilson.32
31 See Ramfos, O Kaimos tou Enos, 135–41 (I owe this reference to Norman Russell).
32 See, for instance, ‘Jacques Maritain, Neotomism, Katolicheskaya theologiya iskusstva’ (Jacques
Maritain, Neo-Thomism, the Catholic Theology of Art), Voprosy Literatury 10 (1968), 126–43.
A genuine Orthodox engagement with St Thomas Aquinas has yet to begin.

It will demand of the Orthodox a willingness to abandon (or at least put on hold) a
tendency to see the ‘West’ as the cause of the problems of modern civilization,
and trace these back to the Middle Ages and the Schism. Whether this is possible
remains to be seen.33
33 This paper was originally written for inclusion in The Cambridge Companion to the Summa
Theologiae, ed. Philip Cosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 305–18, as
‘Orthodox Traditions’. It had been written several years before the date of publication (sometime in
2012, I would guess), and in the meantime I had reshaped it as a lecture called either ‘Aquinas and
Orthodoxy’ or ‘Orthodoxy and Aquinas’. It was written before I had read Marcus Plested’s book,
Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2012), and I have not attempted to revise my
lecture in the light of my reading of it as, despite the similarity of their titles, their focus is rather dif-
ferent. Nor have I attempted to revise my paper in the light of Norman Russell’s outstanding book,
Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2019),
which fills in the picture, with detailed learning, sketched in the last section of my lecture.
Details of Original Publication
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College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2021. (Previously unpublished.)
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Patristica 19 (1989): 198–202.
3. ‘Ignatios or Eusebios: Two Models of Patristic Ecclesiology’, International Journal for
the Study of the Christian Church 10 (2010): 46–56.
4. ‘On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity: St Basil the Great between the Desert and the
City’, in Christians Shaping Identity from the Roman Empire to Byzantium: Studies
Inspired by Pauline Allen, ed. Geoffrey D. Dunn and Wendy Mayer (Leiden-Boston:
Brill, 2015), 85–99.
5. ‘St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor: The Shaping of Tradition’,
in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine. Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles,
ed. Sarah Coakley-David Pailin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 117–30.
6. ‘St. Gregory the Theologian and Byzantine Theology’, in Re-Reading Gregory of
Nazianzus: Essays on History, Theology, and Culture, ed. Christopher A. Beeley
(Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 252–66.
7. ‘ “Di inizio in inizio”. Il progresso spirituale continuo in Gregorio di Nissa’, in La Età
della vita spirituale, ed. Luigi d’Ayala Valva et al. (Magnano: Edizioni Qiqajon, 2014),
141–52. (English original published here for the first time.)
8. ‘St Makrina: The Fourth Cappadocian?’ (Previously Unpublished.)
9. ‘Evagrios: The “Noetic” Language of Prayer’. Lecture 1 of Wisdom of the Byzantine
Church: Evagrios of Pontos and Maximos the Confessor, 1997 Paine Lectures in
Religion, University of Missouri-Columbia (Department of Religious Studies,
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 1998), pp. 45.
10. ‘Evagrios on Anger’, Studia Patristica 47 (2010): 179–85.
11. ‘Augustine on Language’, Journal of Literature and Theology 3 (1989): 151–8.
12. ‘St Augustine’s Interpretation of the Transfiguration of Christ’, Studia Ephemeridis
Augustinianum 68 (2000): 375–82.
13. ‘Love and the Trinity: Saint Augustine and the Greek Fathers’ (2001 St Augustine
Lecture), Augustinian Studies 33 (2002): 1–16.
14. ‘Heart in Pilgrimage: St Augustine’s Reading of the Psalms,’ in Orthodox Readings of
Augustine, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY:
SVS, 2008): 291–304.
15. ‘Pagan Theurgy and Christian Sacramentalism in Denys the Areopagite’, JThS 37
(1986): 432–8.
16. ‘ “Truly Visible Things Are Manifest Images of Invisible Things”: Dionysios the
Areopagite on Knowing the Invisible’, in Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages, ed. Giselle de Nie, Karl F. Morrison, and Marco Mostert, Utrecht
Studies in Medieval Literacy 14 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 15–24.
17. ‘The Reception of Dionysius up to Maximus the Confessor’, Modern Theology 24
(2008): 573–83.
410 Details of Original Publication
18. ‘The Reception of Dionysius in the Byzantine World: Maximus to Palamas’, Modern
Theology 24 (2008): 585–99.
19. ‘Dionysios the Areopagite: The Unknown God and the Liturgy’. (Previously unpub-
lished English original of: ‘ “Een verborgen auteur”: an introduction to the first com-
plete translation of the Corpus Areopagiticum into Dutch: Dionysius de Areopagiet,
Verzamelde Werken (Zeist: Christofoor, 2015), 17–44.).
20. ‘St Maximos the Confessor between East and West’, Studia Patristica 32 (1997): 332–45.
21. ‘From the Doctrine of Christ to the Person of Christ: St Maximos the Confessor on the
Transfiguration of Christ’, in In the Shadow of the Incarnation: Essays on Jesus Christ in
the Early Church in Honor of Brian E. Daley, S.J., ed. Peter W. Martens (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 260–75.
22. ‘Eucharist and Church According to St Maximos the Confessor’, in Einheit und
Katholizität der Kirche, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, and Gregor Emmenegger,
Pro Oriente XXXII, Wiener Patristische Tagungen IV (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-
Verlag, 2009), 319–30.
23. ‘The Views of St Maximus the Confessor on the Institutional Church’, in Knowing the
Purpose of Creation through the Resurrection, Proceedings of the Symposium of St
Maximus the Confessor, Belgrade, October 18–22, 2012, ed. Bp Maxim (Vasiljević)
(Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2013), 347–55.
24. ‘Virtue Ethics: St Maximos the Confessor and Aquinas Compared’, Studies in Christian
Ethics 26 (2013): 351–63.
25. ‘St Maximos’ Doctrine of the Logoi of Creation’, Studia Patristica 48 (2010): 77–84.
26. ‘Mystagogy in Saint Maximus’, in Seeing Through the Eyes of Faith: New Approaches to
the Mystagogy of the Fathers, ed. Paul van Geest (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 375–88.
27. ‘The Lord’s Prayer as Mystagogy from Origen to Maximos’, in Prayer and the
Transformation of the Self in Early Christian Mystagogy, ed. Hans van Loon, Giselle de
Nie, Michiel Op de Coul, and Peter van Egmond (Leuven: Peeters, 2018), 303–17.
28. ‘St Maximos’ Distinction between λόγος and τρόπος and the Ontology of the Person’, in
Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher, ed. Sotiris Mitralexis et al. (Eugene,
OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 157–65.
29. ‘Pronoia in the Life and Thought of St Maximos the Confessor’, in Pronoia: The
Providence of God / Die Vorsehung Gottes, ed. T. Hainthaler, F. Mali, G. Emmenegger,
and M. T. Ostermann (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2019), 341–50.
30. ‘Sophia, the Wisdom of God, in St Maximos the Confessor’, in Sophia, The Wisdom of
God, Die Weisheit Gottes, ed. Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, Gregor Emmenegger,
and Mantė Lenkaitytė Ostermann, Pro Oriente Bd XL, Wiener Patristiche Tagungen
VII (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2017), 349–57.
31. ‘The Doctrine of the Image of God in St Maximos the Confessor’, in Imago Dei, ed.
Theresia Hainthaler, Franz Mali, Gregor Emmenegger, and Alexey Morozov
(Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2021), 379–94.
32. ‘The Holy Spirit in the Theology of St John Damascene’, in Der Heilige Geist im Leben
der Kirche, ed. Ysabel de Andia and Peter Leander Hofrichter, Pro Oriente Band XXIX,
Wiener Patristicshe Tagungen II (Innsbruck-Vienna: Tyrolia-Verlag, 2005), 229–36.
33. ‘John of Damascus on the Mother of God as a Link between Humanity and God’, in
The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. Leslie Brubaker and
Mary B. Cunningham, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies (Farnham /
Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), 153–61.
34. ‘The Doctrine of the Eucharist in the Iconoclast Controversy’, Sobornost 37/2
(2015): 7–15.
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35. ‘Photios as a Theologian’, in Byzantine Style, Religion and Civilization: In Honour of

Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Elizabeth M. Jeffreys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 206–23.
36. ‘Knowing the Unknowable God: Hesychasm and the Kabbalah’, Sobornost 16/2
(1994): 9–23.
37. ‘Orthodox Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae, ed.
Philip McCosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016),
305–18. (This is a published version of the piece. The version published in Chapter 37
of this volume was given as a lecture, and is somewhat expanded from the published
article.)
Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Adeodatus 116–17 apophatic theology 103–4, 138, 143–4, 168–9,
Afanasiev, Nikolai 31–5 186–7, 189, 194–5, 198–202, 204–6, 210,
agape/ἀγάπη 60 229–32, 287, 330–1, 397–8 and
Agioretic Tome 396, 403–4 see Christological turn, kataphatic
Agony in the Garden 225–6, 228 Apophthegmata Patrum 39–40
aitia/αἰτία 201–2 apostolic see 246–7, 252
Akindynos, Gregory 194–5, 403–4 Aquinas, St Thomas 7–8, 211–12, 257, 264–6,
Alexander of Alexandria 21 269–70, 279–80, 396–408
Alexander of Aphrodisias 72 archē/ἀρχή/beginning 79–81, 169, 344
Alexandria 218 Aristotle 18, 68–72, 172, 199, 257–60, 263–6
Alexandrian theology 21–5 Arius 21, 67
Alfeyev, Hilarion 72–3 Armenian Church 216
‘alone to the alone’ 93 Armstrong, A. H. 271–2
alpha-privative, prefixed to divine asceticism 44, 88–91, 144, 259–62, 267–70
attributes 186–7 Ašot, Armenian king 68–9
Ambrose 125–6, 259–60, 280–2, 293 Assumption, Feast of 350
Ambrose, Origen’s patron 294–5 ‘assymmetrical Christology’ 353–4
America, Orthodox Church in 36–7 Athanasios of Alexandria 21–3, 41–2, 89,
Amphilochia 68–9, 366–81 172–3, 344–5
allusion to Basil’s letters of Amphilochios and Athens 11
claiming equivalent authority 372 Augustine 39–40, 115–54, 280–2,
anagogy [uplifting] 158–9 292–3
analogy 199, 258, 288 and see analogia entis ‘Doctor of Grace’ 145–6
anamnesis/ἀνάμνησις 50 autocephaly 28–9
anaphora, Eucharistic, consummated in the Averintsev, Sergei 182–3, 407
martyr 243–4 Ayres, Lewis 6
Anastasios, emperor 215
Anastasios of Sinai 313–14 Baker, Augustine, see English Mystics
Anastasius the Librarian 245–6, 248–9, 251–2 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 4, 15–20, 165, 174–5,
‘ancient homeland’ 37 187–8, 211–12, 223, 227, 272–4
Andrew of Crete 217 baptism 80–1, 280–1
Anger 108 Barlaam the martyr 163–4
angelic mediation [in Dionysios and Barlaam the Calabrian 194–5
Palamas] 195–6 Barsanouphios of Gaza [the ‘Great Old
Annisa 85–6, 91 Man’] 53–4, 64–5
Anselm 404–5 Basil of Caesarea (‘the Great’) 39–51, 63–5,
Anthony of Sourozh, Met. 36–7 70–1, 83–94, 162–3, 190, 313–14, 404
Antony the Great 39–42, 89 beauty 14–15, 19, 165–6, and see κάλον
apatheia/ἀπάθεια 138–9, 262 Beck, Hans-Georg 367
apocatastasis 178–9 Behr, John 6
Apocryphal New Testament 351–2 being–life–wisdom 319–20
Apollinarian forgeries 172, 174–5 being–well being–eternal being 261, 277–8,
Apollinaris of Laodicea 24, 87–8 286, 310
Apollo 12 Benedict, St, and his Rule 39
414 Index
Bernard, R. 329–30 cosmic Christ, liturgical celebration of 319–20

between/μεταξύ 15–16 creation 21–2, and see uncreated/created
Blowers, Paul 275–6 Cross 8, 12, 20, 336–7
Boersma, Hans 77–8 Crouse, Robert 7
Bouyer, Louis 321 Crouzel, H. 329–30
Brakke, David 41–2, 90–1 Cyprian 282
Bréhier, Émile 272 Cyril of Alexandria 23–5, 87–8, 172–3, 215,
Brubaker, Leslie 359 246–7, 344–5
Buddhism 108 Cyril of Jerusalem 280–1, 293
Bulgakov, Sergii 4, 29–30, 321–2, 327–8 Cyril Loukaris 406
Bunge, Gabriel 108, 111–12, 281–2, 292 Cyril of Skythopolis 66
Burghardt, W. J. 329–30 Cyrilline Chalcedonian [Neo-Chalcedonian]
Burning Bush, Apse mosaic of monastery of 59–60
[Sinai] 225–6, 229–30 Cyrus, Patriarch and Augustal Prefect of
Byzantine theology 63–75, 106–7, 360 Alexandria 218
Cambridge Platonists 98 daimon 15–16

Camelot, Th. 329–30 Dalmais, Irénée-Henri 272–3
canons 34–5, 46 Damaskios, last diadochos 198
Cappadocian Fathers/theology 58–62, 83, Daniélou, Jean 76–7
162–5, 170 darkness (gnophos) 154, 397–8
Cavafy, Constantine 4–5 David, King 78, 113–14
century, literary genre 400–2 Davies, Brian 2
Chadwick, Henry 3–4, 350, 367 Davis, S. J. 94
Chalcedon, Council of 63–4, 217–18, deification 15–16, 278, 287, 304
230–1, 307 Demetrios of Alexandria 294–5
‘Chalcedonian logic’ 239, 274 demons 108, 110–12, 116
Chaldaean Oracles 70–1 Deogratias 120
change, see transformation, transmutation desert 39–51
Chinese boxes 290, 339–40 Desert Fathers 279–80
Chitty, Derwas 40, 89 des Places, Édouard 156–7
Christ 8, 12, 20, 149–50, 355 Didymos the Blind 68–9, 97–8, 344–5
‘Christian Hellenism’ 29–30 difficulty/aporia/ambiguum 56–62
Christian Platonism 7–20, 97–8, 101–2, 105–7 Diognetos, Epistle to 37
Christology 59–60, 234 Dionysios of Alexandria 313–14
Christological turn 230–5 Dionysios/Denys the Areopagite 2, 54–61,
Church 31–2, 81–2, 238–41 155–210, 229–33, 241, 271, 276, 279–80,
Clement of Alexandria 130–1, 135–8, 305, 324–5, 333–4, 340–1, 397–400
300, 313–14 ‘Christological corrective’? 187–9
Clément, Olivier 4 Diotima 10
Climacus, St John, see John of the Ladder disciplina 117
cloud 124 disciplina arcani 282
Cloud of Unknowing 397–8 Disdier, M.-H. 329–30
Coleridge, S. T. 8 Divine Liturgy 185, 210, 242–3, 279, 292,
communication 115, 118–22 see also Eucharist
communion/κοινωνία 159–61 divisions of nature/being 288
conscience 152 Dodds, E. R. 313–14
Constantia Augusta 227 dogma 106
Constantine V 360 Donatists 145–6
Constantinople II (553) 64–6, 97–8, 231–2 donare, to give 149
Constantinople III (680–1) 221–2, 253 donum Dei 131–2, and see gift
contemplation/contemplative stillness 124, Dorotheos of Gaza 73–4
233–6 Dositheos of Jerusalem 406
convention 116 Dostoevsky, Fedor 29–30, 211–12
Index 415
dual/duality/dualism, see twofold Florovsky, Georges 29–30, 353–4

dyad 60–1 Foot, Philippa 257
Dysinger, Luke 113 foreknowledge/πρόγνωσις 312–13
Forerunner, title of the Baptist misapplied 54–5
Ecclesiasticus, see Sirach, Wisdom of forest of images 342
ecclesiology 31–5, 237–49 forms (Platonic) 282
Ekthesis (638) 219–20 fortitude 268–9
Ecumenical Teachers 63 Fouracre, Paul 5
education, Christian 85–8 freewill 11, and see responsibility
Edwards, Mark 10
Egeria 94 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4
Ekphrasis 164 Garrigues, J. M. 211–12
elite, see elect Geerard, Maurice 63–4
Elijah/Elias 124, 126–9, 226–8, 233 genesis–movement–rest [γένεσις-κίνησις-
Eliot, T. S. 76, 129 μονή] 52–3, 273–4
Elm, Susanna 94 George/Gennadios Scholarios 313–14
Elsner, Jaś 225–6 Germanos, Patriarch 217, 313–14, 359–60
Elytis, Odysseus 4–5 geron/geronda/elder 55, 289
enkyklikos paideia 87–8, and see education Gethesame 152
ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας/‘beyond being’ 15, 202, 330–1 Gibbon, Edward 215–16
epektasis 76–7, 80–1 Gideon 202
Ephesos I (431) 63–4, 355 gift 131–3
epiklesis/ἐπίκλησις 50–1, 282, 348–9 Gilson, Étienne 407
epiousios/ἐπιούσιος 297 gnosis of the divine things 324
ἐπιστροφή/epistrophe/‘return’ 17–18 gnostic/gnostics 138
Eriugena, John Scotus 52, 159–60, 279, 397–8 God, unknowability of 197
eros /ἔρως 14–18, 60 God as Mother 137–8
eschatology 50–1 Goldsmiths College, University of London 5
essence/energies distinction 403–4, see activity Golitzin, Alexander 181, 185–6
Eucharist 359–365, see also Divine Liturgy Good Samaritan, parable of 136
eucharistic ecclesiology 237–49 grace 145–6, 259–60
euchē/εὐχή and proseuchē/προσευχή 282–3, Greek and Latin traditions [theological and
295–6 hermeneutical] 123, 127, 130–1, 142–4
Eusebius of Caesarea 26–7, 227 Greek theology, see Byzantine theology
Eustathios of Sebaste 90–1 Grégoire, José 344–5
Eugene I, pope 255–6 Gregory the Great, Pope 180–1
Evagrianism 56, 58, and see Evagrios Gregory of Nazianzus (‘the Theologian’) 9–10,
Evagrios 39–40, 89, 97–107, 186–7, 259–60, 271, 41–4, 52–75, 83–5, 87–8, 90–3, 130–1
314, 318–20, 322–3, 400–2 Gregory of Nyssa 41–2, 76–88, 90–1, 95–6,
Evergetinos of Paul Evergetis 223 100–1, 229–30, 282, 293, 298–302,
ἐξαίφνης/sudden, immediate 14–15, 20 341–2, 344–5
existentialism 396 Gregory the Presbyter 54–5, 63–4
Gribomont, Jean 44–5
face [of God/Christ] 124, 127, 189 Grillmeier, Aloys 215, 236
Fall, the 118–19, 122, 284, 318–19 Grosseteste, Robert 159–60
fate (εἰμαρμένη) 11, and see Plato, Stoics, Alcinous Guillaumont, Antoine 259–60
Father God, invisibility of 138
‘Father is greater than I’ [John 14: 28] Hadot, Pierre 10
controversy 69–70, 72–3 Hadrian I, pope 162–3
Festugière, A.-J. 2, 4 Hadrian II, pope 245–6, 252
Filioque 130–1, 142, 145–6, 217, 367, 404 Hadrumetum, monks of 144
flesh 12 Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), Great Church
flesh vs heart 127–8 of 321, 327–8
Florensky, Pavel 4, 321 Haldon, John 359
416 Index
Hankey, Wayne 7 Isaiah 202

Hardy, G. H. 8 Islam 212–13
Harmless, William 40, 89
Harnack, Adolf von 83 Jacob 113, 202
Harrison, Carol 2 James, William 1
Hatlie, Peter 41–2, 90–1 Jerome 57, 126–7, 139
heart 116–17, 120–2, 145–54 Jesus Christ, see Christ
henad/ἑνάς 281 Job the monk 183–4
Heraklitus 178–9 John the Apostle 162–3
Herbert, George 147 John Chrysostom 63, 163, 205–6, 280–1,
Hermes Trismegistos 10 293, 313–14
hesychasm 123, 226, 386–8, and see essence/ John of the Cross 76
energies, Kabbalah John of Dalyatha 179
Hierarchy 166–7, 175–7, 180–1, 206–7, 397–8 John Damascene 2, 9–10, 25, 70–1, 73–4, 125,
Hiereia, Iconoclast Synod of (754) 360–2 162–4, 186–7, 221–2, 280–1, 319–20,
Hierotheos, bp of Athens 55, 205–6 343–58, 400–2
‘Book’ of 178–9 John Italos 9–10
Hilduin, abbot of St-Denis 397–8 John of the Ladder (‘Climacus’), St 70–1,
Holy Mountain, see Athos, Mount 225–6, 267–8
homoousios, see consubstantial John Moschus 218
Honorius, pope 213, 219–20, 246–7 John Philoponos 9–10
hope 225–6 John of Scythopolis 172–7, 181, 187–8, 217–18
human 263–4, 301, 318–20, see also image of God John ‘the Other Old Man’ 53–4
humanist tradition in Byzantine theology John (Zizioulas), Metropolitan 281, 407
183–4, 368 Joseph Hazzaya 179
hymn, to/ὑμνεῖν [God], see praise judgment 148–54
hymnography, liturgical 61–2, 73–5 Julian the Apostate, emperor 64, 87–8
Hypatius of Ephesos 172–3 Julian of Norwich 201–2
hyper/ὑπέρ, prefixing divine attributes justice 133, 148–51, 194–5, 258–9, 264–5, 285, 301
186–7, 200 Justin Martyr 355
Justinian, emperor 26–7, 64–6, 171, 212–13
Iamblichus 155–9
icon/iconography 235, 359–65 Kabbalah 389–93
icon ‘made without hands’/ἀχειροποίητος 362 Καλόν, τὸ/‘the beautiful’ [Form/Idea of] 15–16,
iconoclasm 227, 235, 361–3 and see beauty
Eucharistic theology in 359–65 Kallistos (Ware), Metropolitan 2–4
identity, Christian/national 36–7, 39–51 Kavasilas, Neilos 405
ἴδιος/own 21–5 Kavasilas, Nikolaos 196
idolatry 359–60 Kelly, J. N. D. 57
Ignatios of Antioch 31–2 kenosis/κένωσις [self-emptying] 69–70,
image 162–70, 186–7, 336–40, and see icon 283–4, 304
Image of God, human in/κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ θεοῦ 11, Khomiakov, Aleksei 407
50, 65, 68–9, 261, 285–6, 323, 332–3 Kinnamos, John 72–3
image identified with intellect/νοῦς 330, 332 Kireevsky, Ivan 407
image, distinct from likeness/ὁμοίωσις ‘Know yourself ’ I. 135–6
330, 336–7 Kosmas the Melodist 74
imagination 143–4, 164–9 Kydones, Demetrios and Prochoros 403–4
Incarnation 119, 150, 283–4, 297 Kyriakos, abba 66
intellect see nous
intelligible vs sensible 118, 127–8 Ladner, Gerhart 329–30
invisible vs visible 162 Lamoreaux, John 172–5
inward vs external 118 language 118–19
inwardness of intelligible world 341 Larchet, Jean-Claude 331–3
Irenaeus, St 225–6, 355 late antiquity 98–9
Isaac the Syrian 179, 267–8 Lateran Synod (649) 237–8, 251, 253
Index 417
Latin and Greek traditions, see Greek and Latin Memory/μνημή 43–4, 113
traditions mercy 148
lay tradition in Byzantine theology, see humanist Merki, H. 329–30
tradition metempsychosis 15–16
leisure/σχολή 43–4, 92–3 Metrophanes Kritopoulos 406
Leo III, emperor 359–60 miaphysite, see monophysite
Leys, R. 329–30 Michael III, emperor 246–7, 253
Liber Pontificalis 359–60 Michael Glykas 313–14
Lights, Feast of [Epiphany, Theophany] 64 Michael Psellos 63–4, 67, 70–2, 183–4
likeness/ὁμοίωσις 336–40, and see image of God mimesis 204
liturgy 156–61, see Divine Liturgy monad/μονάς 60–1, 286
logismoi 109–11, 259–60 monasticism 39–51, 185–6
logos/Logos 119, 265–6 monastic tradition in Byzantine theology 183,
logoi/λόγοι [of being, creation] 56, 263, 271–8, 185–6
316–18 in contrast with humanist tradition, q.v
logos/tropos distinction 263–4, 305–11 monenergism 216
Lord’s Prayer, the 281–3, 292–304 monophysite 171–5, 350
Lorentzatos, Zisimos 4–5 monothelete 55–6, 228, 251
Lossky, Vladimir 4, 141, 182–3, 282 moral order 106
Lot-Borodine, Myrrha 130–1 More, Dame Gertrude, see English mystics
Loudovikos, Nikolaos 281 Moscow Sobor [1917–18] 29–30
love 113–14, 121–2, 130–44, 262, 265–6, Moses 113–14, 124–9, 202–3, 225–8, 231, 233
269–70, 397–8, and see eros Mother of God [Theotokos, Bogoroditsa],
Lubac, Henri de 4, 54–5 see Mary, the Mother of God
Luke, Gospel according to Mourners [Syriac term for ascetics] 44, 93
Luther, Martin 406 movement 60–1, 209–10
lyre 289, 339–40 Murdoch, Iris 257
mystagogy 280–1, 292–304
Macé, Caroline 66 mystery [of God, of Christ] 185
MacKinnon, Donald 3–4, 15 mystical/mystical theology 301
makranthropos, cosmos as 190 mystical union, see union with God
Makarian Homilies 225–6 myth 15
Makarios, of Corinth 192–3, 407
Makrina, St 41–2, 83–96 Naukratios 84–5, 91
Makrina the elder 83–5 nature/φύσις 265–6, 284
Mallarmé, Stéphane 203–4 nature, integrity of 229, 307–8
Mandylion 362, see icon made without hands name, theology of 297, 397–8
Manichee 145–6 Nazi regime in Germany 267–9
Manuel I Komnenos 67, 69–70, 72–3 Nemesios of Emesa 272, 313–14, 316–20
Mark Eugenikos 313–14 Neo-Patristic synthesis 29–30, 407
Marion, Jean-Luc 201–2 Neoplatonism 7, 70–1, 173–4, 198, 279–80
Maritain, Jacques 407 Neo-Thomism 396, 407
Martin, St 39–40 Newman, John Henry 1
Martin, Pope 22, 227, 237–8 Nicaea II (787) 227, 359–60
martyr/martyrdom 243, 252 Nicene Orthodoxy 86
Mary, the Mother of God 350–8 Nicetas Stethatos 192–4
matter 204 Nicholas I, pope 245–7, 252–3
Maximos the Confessor, St 2, 52–64, 67–9, 113, Nicholas of Methone 313–14
125, 130–1, 139–41, 171, 183–4, 187–92, Nikephoros, patriarch 258–9
211, 225–342 Nikephoros Gregoras 403–4
Maximos, compared with Bulgakov 328 Nikodimos, of the Holy Mountain, St
Maximos Planoudis 403 192–3, 407
Maximos of Simonopetra (Nicholas Nock, A. D. 4
Constans) 316–18 noesis/noema [νόησις/νόημα] 17–18, 97–107,
Mayer, A. 329–30 and see nous
418 Index
Nonnos of Panopolis 64 Photios, Patriarch 63–4, 67–70, 72, 89,

Norris, Fred 63, 73 313–14, 366–81
North Africa 218–19 physike, see contemplation/natural
nous [intellect] 18, 111, 173–4 Pieper, Josef 268–70
number and numerology 123, 125–6, 229 pilgrimage 145–54
Pius XII, pope 350
Obolensky, Dimitri 367 Plato/Platonism 2, 7–20, 68–71, 83, 97–8, 110–11,
O’Donovan, Oliver 130–1, 135–6 118, 166, 199, 202, 257–8, 265–6, 274–5,
oikonomia/οἰκονομία [divine economy/ 295–6, 300, 304, 315–16, 319–20, 330–1
dispensation] 271, 277, 346 Plotinos 15, 17–20, 279
one–many [ἕν–πολλά] 18 Plutarch 76–7
ontological [change] 280–1, 289–90 Polycarp of Smyrna 243
‘Only-begotten Son’/Ὁ Μονογενὴς Υἱος, Popović, St Justin 407
hymn 216 Porphyry of Tyre 155–6
Origen 43, 52–4, 64–6, 85–6, 97, 100–1, 111–12, Possidius 145, 147
123–6, 167, 177–8, 192, 225–9, 231–4, 271, praise/celebration, theology as 57, 103–4,
282, 294–7, 313–14, 319–20, 322–3 180–1, 201
Origenism 177–8, 273–4 praktike/physike/theologia 231, 243–4
original sin 145–6, 154 prayer 92–3, 97–107, 111–12, 297
original state of creation 64–5, and predestination 145–6
see restoration/ἀποκατάστασις ‘predestined terms of life’, Byzantine
Orphic Hymns 70–1 philosophical genre 313–14
Ouspensky, see Uspensky pre-existence of souls 64–5, and
see restoration/ἀποκατάστασις
Pachomios, St 39, 47–8 preordination/predetermination/προορισμός
Palamas, St Gregory/Palamism 29–30, 77–8, 312–13
142–3, 194–5, 225–6, 279–80, 319–20, pride 109–12, 118–19, 122, 153
402–4 processions [religious, liturgical] 242–3
as defining (Eastern) Orthodoxy 396 Proclus/Proklos, Patriarch of
Palamite controversy 396 Constantinople 355
Palestine 217–18 Proclus/Proklos, Platonic diadochos 11, 70–1,
Papadiamandis, Alexandros 4–5, 28–30 166, 183–4, 198–206, 313–14
Paschal Mystery 96, 225–6, 243–4 Prohaeresius 87–8
Pascha (meaning of word) 73–4 Protevangelium of James 351–4
Pater, Walter 13 providence/πρόνοια 11, 295–6, 312–20
Paul the Apostle 11, 78, 133, 142, 150, 171, 197 Psalms 145–54
Pelikan, Jaroslav 83–4, 368 Psellos, Michael, see Michael Psellos
pentarchy 28–9, 219 Pseudo-Dionysios, see Dionysios the Areopagite
Perictione 12 pseudonymity 198
Perl, Eric 205–6 purification 43–4, 206–7
persecution 145–6, 280–1 purification–illumination–union 166–7, 180–1,
person, ontology of 305–11 206–7, 397–8
personalism 142–3 Pyman, Avril 4–5
Peter, St 124, 226–7, 229, 248–9 Pyrrhos, patr of Constantinople 246, 260, 285
Peter (of Cappadocia) 84–5 Pythagoras/Pythagorean 118
Peter the Great 29–30
Peter Lombard 400–2 quaestio 7–8, 399
Peter Mogila 406
Peuseis/Inquiries, by Constantine V 360–2 Rabbinic distinction between aggadah and
Philo 105–6, 279 halakah 352–3, 358
Philokalia of Origen (c.360 ) 43, 53–4, 64–5, Ramfos, Stelios 407
85–6, 221–2 Reformation 145
Philokalia (1782) 183, 192–3, 223, 267–8, 407 remaking [of doctrine] 53, 61–2
philosophy as ‘a way of life’ 10, 14, 93, 103 Renaissance 98
Index 419
res vs signum 115–19 Sophronios, Patr of Jerusalem 55, 175–7,

resentment/μῆνις 113 183–4, 217–18
responsibility/αὐτεξουσία 11 Špidlík, Tomas 321, 327–8
rest/remaining–procession–return 164–5, 190, Spirit, Holy 48–51, 132–3, 300, 343–9, and
273–4, 277–8 see Filioque
restoration/ἀποκατάστασις 64–6, 178–9, spiritual vs material 77–8
308–9, 318–20 spiritual progress 76–82
Resurrection 80–1, 133 spirituality 99–100, 106–7
rhetoric 57, 148, 164, 170, 203–4 Stăniloae, Dumitru 224, 266–9, 407
Riou, Alain I. 243–4, 281 starchestvo, see fatherhood, spiritual
ritual, intelligibility 156, 158–9 Steiner, George 56–62
Romantic/Romanticism 98 Stoics 10
Rome 213–14, 217, 219, 245–9, 251–6, 366–7 Struck, Peter 203–4
Rorem, Paul I. 158–61, 172–7, 208 Studite monastic reform 89–90
Rousseau, Philip 108 Suárez, Francisco 406
Rowe, Christopher 13 Suchla, Beate 174–5, 187–8, 218
Rubenson, Samuel 87–8 symbolism 171, 203–6, 209–10, 280–1
Rufinus, Tyrannius I. 45, 89–90 like/unlike 167–9, 203, 206–7
Runciman, Sir Steven 183, 368 Symeon the New Theologian 72–3, 103–4,
Russell, Norman 4–5 192–3, 226, 378
Russia, Holy 29–30 symphonia 26–8, 35
Synesios of Cyrene/Kyrene 10–11, 74
sacrament 155–61, 208–9 Synod in Trullo, see Quinisext synod
S. Apollinare in Classe, apse icon of 225–6 Synodikon of Orthodoxy 9–10, 69–70, 378
Sarrazin [John the Saracen] 159–60, 397–8 Syria 217
Scholasticism 8, 145, 399 Syrian Christianity 171
scholia 55–6, 174–5, 187–8, 217–18
Scripture(s) 44, 87, 92–3, 96, 118–19, Tabor, Mount 225–6, 229–30, 386–7, 405
159–60, 202 tantum-quantum formula 334
Seferis, George 4–5 Tertullian 282
self-reversion 166 theandric [energy/activity] 172–3, 177–8, 217, 220
senses, spiritual [esp. linked to taste, touch, Thekla, St 84–5, 94
smell] 208–9, 280–1 Theodore, unknown priest 183–4
Sergios of Reshaina 174, 178–9 Theodore of Mopsuestia 215, 280–1, 293, 373–4
Severus of Antioch 171–3, 217, 219, 221 Theodore the Studite 169, 235, 364
Shekhinah 124, 390, and see Transfiguration Theodore of Tarsus, abp of Canterbury 219
Shenouda of the White Monastery 89 Theodoret of Cyrrhos 215, 313–14, 373–4
Sherrard, Philip 4–5 Theodosios, bp of Caesarea 312–13
Sherwood, Polycarp 52–3, 55, 67, 211–12, 227, theology/economy, distinguished 103–4, 138–9,
272–6, 316–18 142, 344
Sikelianos, Angelos 4–5 theopaschite 59–60, 215
silence 50–1, 53–4, 140–1, 149–50, 191, 196, Theophanes III, Metropolitan of Nicaea 405
230–1, 290–1, 386–7 theophany 207
Silvas, Anna 45–6, 85–6, 91, 93–4 Theophilos of Alexandria 97–8
Sinai, Mount 229–30 Theophylact Simocates 313–14
singing 149–51 theoretical, see practical/theoretical
Slav Philokalia, see Dobrotolyubie Theosebeia 84–5
Slavophil 407 theosis/θέωσις, see deification
sobornost´ 407 theurgy/θεουργία 155–61
Socrates 10, 12–13, 83–4, 105 Three Chapters 64–5, 214–15, 218–19
solitude/ἐρημία 43–4, 92–3 Thunberg, Lars 227, 271–3, 290, 330–1,
Song of Songs 76–82 339–40
Sophia 70–1, 81–2, 113, 202, 321–8 Tillemont, Le Nain de 84–5
sophiology 321–2 Tollefsen, Torstein Theodore 281
420 Index
Törönen, Melchisedec 282–4 virtue, nature of 257–60, 264

Torrance, T. F. 3–4 virtues 257–70, 285–8, 332–3
tradition 52–62 visible, see invisible
see remaking Vitalian, pope 219, 246–9, 253, 255–6
trance 124 voice 80, 124, 152, 154
tranquillity/ἡσυχία 43–4, 92–3 Völker, Walther 330–1
transcendence/immanence [of God] 18, 20
transformation/transfiguration 80–1 Wainwright, Geoffrey 2
Transfiguration of the Lord 52–3, 123–9, 189, Ware, Kallistos (Timothy), see Kallistos, Met.
225–36, 308, 318, 393–4 Way of a Pilgrim, The 29–30
triad/τριάς 60–1, 286 Webb, C. C. J. 15
trihypostatic/τριυπόστατος, complementing Welt/Erde, see κόσμος
consubstantial/ὁμοούσιος (q.v.) 61 Whittow, Mark 360
Trinity 59–61, 63–4, 66, 69–70, 72–3, 124–6, Wiles, Maurice 3–4, 53
130–44, 178–9, 283–4 Wilken, Robert I. 283–4
Trisagion, hymn of 215–16 Williams, Rowan 21
twofold/ness 161, 186–7, 239–40, 341, 348, 377–8 Wilson, Nigel 183–4, 367
typological imagery for Mother of God 355–7 wisdom 18, 60, 70–1, 81–2, 113, 205–6, 242–3,
typological narrative 352–3, 355 258–60, 318–19, 321, 332–3, 337–40, and
typologies of place 356 see Sophia
Typos (648) 247–8 wisdom, manifold/πολυποίκιλος 81–2, 113,
318–19, 322–3
Una Sancta 145–6 Witt, R. E. 12
uncreated light 226, 234, 318, 386–8, 393 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 281
unions and distinctions 194–5 Word of God, see Logos
ὑπόστασις, see hypostasis
Xanthopoulos brothers 267–8
Valens, emperor 86, 372
Vargish, Thomas 1–2 Yannaras, Christos 4–5, 28–30, 34–5, 182–3,
Varsanuphios, see Barsanouphios 281, 407
vice[s] 259–60, see logismoi Yarnold, Edward 280–1, 293
Victorinus, Marius 87–8
virtue ethics, vs deontological or consequentialist Zizioulas, John, see John (Zizioulas),
ethics 257–8 Metropolitan of Pergamon

Andrew Louth - Selected Essays - Volume I - Studies in Patristics (Ed. Lewis Ayres &amp; John Behr)

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Selected Essays

Lewis Ayres and John Behr

Details of Original Publication 409

Perhaps I should say something about influences on my intellectual development,

Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that

which had, in fact, already been incorporated into a fundamentally Platonic

doctrines by appeal to the Scriptures, so at best they could be regarded as ‘Platonic

9 Synesios of Cyrene, Ep. 105.

we would simply make everything far too complicated to understand. We under­

Pater’s exposition begins: ‘Platonism is not a formal theory or body of theories,

What seems to me important about this procedure of understanding is that it

14 Pater, Plato, 158.

[the cosmos] is manifestly a vast ensouled organism, in which individual souls,

23 Balthasar, Glory, 207.

Balthasar goes on to expound familiar aspects of Plotinos’ thought: the stress on

26 Balthasar, Glory, 282. 27 Balthasar, Glory, 283. 28 Balthasar, Glory, 290.

It is this perception, conviction, that lies behind Plotinos’ deepened understand­

Balthasar concludes his chapter by making the following comment:

31 Balthasar, Glory, 302 (my italics). 32 Balthasar, Glory, 303.

Cyril in a Christological as in a trinitarian context (most of the examples of the

The Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 and his subsequent

world’, in which there is harmony, συμφωνία, between Empire and Church: an

needed to seek more deeply for an authentic ecclesiology. In articulating their

cre­ativ­ity. As Afanasiev puts it, ‘Orthodox teaching recognizes in principle the

11 Afanasiev, ‘The Church’s Canons’, 42.

hardly anyone would reject—­namely, the principle of praying, both privately

I am not sure that thinking through an alternative to the dominant Eusebian

1 Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Basil Blackwell, 1966).

14 Basil, Ep. 2.3; Deffarari, trans., St Basil, 1.16.

The soul’s assimilation to the Spirit is not a matter of spatial approach . . . but is

21 Basil, Ep. 2.3. See n. 16 above.

edition) and is a sustained meditation on the Transfiguration of our Lord. For

supplement the allegorical explanations of people associated with the Passion of

And, in a word, what is exalted is to be ascribed to the Godhead, to that nature

For Maximus the movement spoken of by Gregory is really a movement in the

There is therefore no explanation of the transcendent cause of beings, but rather

of Orthodoxy as Gregory and Maximus. But if Gregory is to be seen as part of the

In the Byzantine tradition, St Gregory of Nazianzus was “the Theologian”; in later

fathers, he came to be regarded as of signal importance—­an authority par excellence.7

utterances on Christology and Trinitarian theology. Alongside the Christological

Cyril of Skythopolis, in his Life of Kyriakos, represents himself as a young man

As Macé points out, Abba Kyriakos is represented as quoting Gregory against

The involvement of Gregory the Theologian in the Origenist controversy—­

classical literature (and, in the case of Psellos, Greek philosophy). Nonetheless, in

Psellos goes on to compare Gregory’s words to precious and semi-­precious stones

30 Psellos, Opusc. 23.128–31. 31 See n. 26 above.

In his homily on Pentecost (Or. 41.5), Gregory had exclaimed:

leaving what has already been accomplished in oblivion’.1 It is really Daniélou’s

5 Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I. 270. d. Jaeger, GNO I, 105, 19–20.

oppositorum,12 that God’s οἰκονομία according to Christ is worked out among

To the three Cappadocians should be added, as ‘the Fourth Cappadocian’,

2 Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, 357.

6 Page reference to Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord.

(Rufinus is astonishingly candid about his translation technique), comparison

17 On this, see Silvas, Asketikon, esp. 102–45.

is conscious of the paradox he has uttered, for the monasticism of withdrawal

ostentatious; food is to be simple and adequate, preceded and followed by prayer;

his friend is something he discovered, not something he established. The features

30 Vita 382:15–19; Petersen, trans., Handmaids of the Lord, 60.

2 For a brief exposition of this, see my contribution to the article on Plato/Platonismus,

with supernatural grace (and thus no longer psychikos but pneumatikos, in

Prayer is converse with God, contemplation of things invisible, the assurance of

Prayer is all this, because, since it is converse with God—­theou homilia—­it is

5 Gregory of Nyssa, De Orat. Dom. 1 (8, l. 30–9, l. 4).

Andrew Louth - Selected Essays - Volume I - Studies in Patristics (Ed. Lewis Ayres & John Behr)

Andrew Louth - Selected Essays - Volume I - Studies in Patristics (Ed. Lewis Ayres & John Behr)

Details of Original Publication 409

we would simply make everything far too complicated to understand. We under

It is this perception, conviction, that lies behind Plotinos’ deepened understand

creativity. As Afanasiev puts it, ‘Orthodox teaching recognizes in principle the

hardly anyone would reject—namely, the principle of praying, both privately

fathers, he came to be regarded as of signal importance—an authority par excellence.7

The involvement of Gregory the Theologian in the Origenist controversy—

Psellos goes on to compare Gregory’s words to precious and semi-precious stones

Prayer is all this, because, since it is converse with God—theou homilia—it is

That, at least, confirms my suspicion of a quarter-of-a-century ago. What I would

This letting-go of our memory of offences done to us is fundamental. It is, in pass-

it up wholly in a way befitting of the good, wholly and impassibly in a divinely-

But if someone corrupts himself, if he over-throws God’s temple in himself,

Dionysios’ understanding of how imagery or symbolism—mainly visual, as we

Prominent representatives of this humanistic tradition were the great ninth-