The Incarnation in the Theology of Maximus the Confessor

Stephen Lawson
Emmanuel Christian Seminary
Stone-Campbell Journal Conference
Lincoln, Illinois
14 April 2012
Introduction

The Christian faith affirms that God has spoken to his creation. The question naturally
arises, then, how has God spoken and what is the relationship between what God has said
throughout the ages? These questions are central, particularly for those who hold that God is
unchanging, immovable, and incorporeal while at the same time affirming that God was fully
present as Jesus of Nazareth. These are the questions of revelation, and they are at once both
theological and cosmological―they concern the nature of God, the nature of created reality
and how the two relate to one another.

These questions are not just abstract speculative exercises, the answers of which have
no practical consequences. Rather, the answers to these important questions about God’s
speech will inevitably affect the way in which Christians posture themselves in this world. As
such, it is of utmost importance for Christian theology to have a robust theology of God’s
revelation (as the work of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar in the last century testify).
The rich theology of Maximus the Confessor contains an extraordinarily important
perspective on these questions. Perhaps the most famous of these is Maximus’s idea of the
multiple incarnations of the Logos.

The Three Incarnations

In his Ambiguum 33, Maximus seeks to clarify Gregory of Nazianzus’s ambiguous
phrase, “The Logos becomes thick.”1 Maximus enumerates three possible ways in which the
incorporeal Logos could be said to ‘become thick.’ First, the Logos “deemed it worthy also to
thicken himself through his incarnate presence―as born from us, for our sake, and like us
yet without sin.” 2 For Maximus, the first thing to be said regarding the Logos ‘becoming thick’
is to point to the historical appearance of the Logos as Jesus of Nazareth. Second, it could
also be said that the Logos “‘becomes thick’ in the sense that, having ineffably hidden himself
in the principles (logoi) of created beings for our sake, he indicates himself proportionately

1 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 38.2.

2 Ambiguum 33. Translated by Paul M. Blowers in Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor:

An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity, vol. 7, (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991) 119.

1
 2

through each visible thing, as through certain letters.” 3 The center of created matter, the
hidden logoi that give shape to all being, have been invested by the Logos with the fullness of
himself. Third, it could be said that the Logos ‘becomes thick’ in the sense that “he consented
to embody himself for our sake and to be represented through letters and syllables and
sounds.” 4 That is to say, the Logos has fully invested himself in Scripture, being represented
and witnessed to by grapheme.

As beautiful and intricate at Maximus’s idea is, there are several questions that initially
arise. First, how can the incarnation of the Logos in the person of Jesus (what I will call the
historic incarnation) retain primacy? This primacy seems to be necessary, as the writer of the
epistle to the Hebrews says, “God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the
prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all
things, through whom he also created the worlds” (1:1-2 NRSV) Second, in what way can the
Logos be said to be present in the logoi of creation which has been penetrated by sin and
discord? Can he in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5) be fully present in, or
perhaps even as, creation that is fallen and corrupt? Third, in what way might it be said that
the Logos is fully present in Scripture while still allowing the Logos to be fully free and
undivided? That is to say, how can we speak of the Logos being present in texts and in what
way might his presence be discerned? There are other concerns and questions about
Maximus’s idea of the three incarnations, but these are here recounted to hint at some of the
potential problems with Maximus’s compelling theory. It will be shown that, understood in
light of the rest of his work, Maximus’s theology can adequately attend to all of these
concerns.5

On The Primacy of Jesus Christ

How can it be said that the historic incarnation of the Logos has priority over the other
incarnations? This question has several levels, the first being chronological. Since the historic
appearance of the Logos in Jesus was chronologically posterior to the creation of the cosmos
and even to the writing of (at least some) Scripture, how can it retain primacy? The answer
for Maximus is that while, chronologically speaking, the incarnations have an order of
occurrence, they are, theologically speaking, simultaneous. The three incarnations are
common aspects of the single mysterion of divine condescension from the heights of glory to
created, temporal existence through incarnation. While it is true that the Logos becomes

3 Ambiguum 33. Translated by Blowers, Spiritual Pedagogy, 120.

4 Ambiguum 33. Translated by Blowers, Spiritual Pedagogy, 120.

5 Rather than attempting to systematize in a way that is foreign to Maximus’ perspective, I will attempt

to approach the theory by attending to specific concerns. This approach seems to me to be more in line with the
ways in which Maximus ‘does theology.’
 3

incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, it is also true that the transcendent Logos cannot be
conceptualized without reference to this becoming. In this respect, Maximus’s thoroughly
Chalcedonian christology is apparent. Christ is always one person in two natures. Him who
rests in stasis preserves without change God’s immovable nature in his very movement in
becoming.

The Logos of God, who is himself fully God, is the Creator, and, as such, is
ontologically anterior to all of his incarnations. Yet, the Logos can not be discussed without
reference to his incarnation, for in this movement he preserved his ontological immovability.
As Maximus says of the historic incarnation, “it was fitting for the Creator of the universe,
who by the economy of his incarnation became what by nature he was not, to preserve
without change both what he himself was by nature and what he became in his incarnation.” 6

How can the historic incarnation of the Logos both transcend and consummate the
cosmological and scriptural incarnations? The answer is, in part, that the incarnation of the
Logos in Jesus of Nazareth is the purpose (skopos) of both of the other incarnations. This is to
say that the very creation of the cosmos as well as God’s revelation in Scripture is proleptically
dependent upon the incarnation of the eternal Logos in Jesus. Creation is dependent upon the
Logos in Jesus, for he is both the plan and the goal of existence. From Ad Thalassium 60, “The
Logos, by essence God, became a messenger of this plan when he became a man
and...established himself as the innermost depth of the Father’s goodness while also displaying
in himself the very goal for which his creatures manifestly received the beginning of their
existence.” 7 Blowers has rightly summarized the primacy of the historic incarnation, by saying
that for Maximus, “the historical incarnation is not merely another provisional economy but
carries in itself, from the beginning of time, the eschatological key both to the destiny of
creation and the fulfillment of scripture.” 8

The importance that Maximus places on the the incarnation of the Logos in the person
of Jesus is difficult to overestimate. This might sound alien to heirs of the Western theological
tradition in which the incarnation is not as organically related to creation as it is in the East,
but is rather thought of as a soteriological (conceptualized in postlapsarian terms) event. For
Western theologians, the incarnation is a necessary step that must be taken so that the real
purpose of God―cross and resurrection―can be accomplished. On this account, Christ is
God’s rescue mission for wayward creation and incarnation is simply the necessary condition
that must be met for this rescue to take place. However, this conceptual framework is foreign

6 Ad Thalassium 60. Translated by Paul Blowers and Robert Wilken in, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus

Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, (Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, New York: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003) 124.

7 Ad Thalassium 60. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 125.

8 Blowers, Spiritual Pedagogy, 118.
 4

to Maximus and to most Eastern theology. The question of whether the incarnation would
have happened if the fall never occurred―a question that had occupied many theologians
(especially in the West)―is never addressed by Maximus. Perhaps this is because Maximus’s
theology does not progress from creation to fall to redemption, but begins with the mysterion of
the incarnation. The incarnation then is the “lens through which to interpret the protology and
teleology of the universe.”9 On this account, creation itself is a part of redemption.

The Logos in Logoi

There is no doubt that Maximus is influenced by and concerned with the theology of
Origin and those who took up his doctrines, particularly those doctrines related to cosmology.
Maximus develops his original cosmology in critical engagement with a certain strand of
thinking that developed out of Origen’s speculative doctrine of the pre-existence of souls.
Both Maximus and the Origenists held that there had been a fall and that there is a striving.
They both accepted the triad of becoming (genesis), rest (stasis), and movement (kinēsis), but
disagreed on their order and direction. The Origenists taught that souls were are rest in God
until movement away from God led to becoming, that is, creation. This mythic structure was
able to explain creation, theodicy, and sin in one stroke by collapsing creation and fall into a
single event―all the while safeguarding God’s unity, impassibility, and freedom.
Nevertheless, Maximus finds significant flaws with this scheme. He argues that if rational
beings had reached their proper end, stasis in God, and had ‘slipped’ out of that perfect
existence then that would entail that God was unable to supremely satisfy every desire of his
creation. Moreover, if rest in God leads to movement away from God which results in
becoming then how are rational beings ever able to rest? For, if the Origenist doctrine is
correct then,
it must be assumed that under similar circumstances rational beings will necessarily
undergo such changes indefinitely. If God can be abandoned once for the sake of
experiencing something different, there is nothing to prevent this from happening
again and again. If reasonable beings are thus to be carried about and have no place to
rest and cannot hope to have any abiding steadfastness in the good, what could be
greater reason for despair?10

Maximus retains the triad, but reorders it and radically transforms the notion of
movement. For Maximus, becoming is the beginning and is followed by an historic fall which is
only then followed by movement. Movement in this case is toward, rather than away from,
God, and has as its end the stasis of eternal rest in unity with God.

9 See, Paul M. Blowers, “Introduction,” Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 33.

10 Ambiguum 7. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 46-7.
 5

With this cosmology in mind, it becomes easier to discern how the Logos could be said
to be fully present in a creation that is admittedly fallen. For Maximus, the act of bringing
being out of non-being, which only a sovereign God can do, can only be thought of in light of
a common beginning (archē) and ending (telos) of being in God. Therefore, as the source and
goal of all being, the Logos himself is in the principles (logoi) of his creation. Even more than
being revealed or represented in the logoi, the Logos himself is the logoi. For, if nothing wills
itself into existence, but rather has the Logos as its source, then everything is equally related
to the one Logos, which is the true nature of all things.
If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was
brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s
imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and
turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (logos)
according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is
many logoi?11

On the Relationship between the Logos in the Logoi of the Cosmos and Scripture

For Maximus, both creation and Scripture contain the fullness of the Logos in their
logoi. As such, they function together and are mirror images of one another. This comes out in
several places in his work, especially in his conceptional framework of the three laws. At the
most universal level there are three laws, the natural law, the scriptural law and the law of
grace.12 Creation (the natural law) and Scripture (the scriptural law) mirror one another in
that they both have equal access to the Logos whom they reveal, even while they conceal him.
They testify to the same thing, as Maximus says, “both the natural law and the written law are
of equal honour and teach the same things; neither is greater or less than the other.”13
Moreover, they can both be conceptualized using overlapping analogies. The natural world
can be thought of as a kind of book in which the Logos has consented for himself to be
written. Just like a book, the individual ‘letters’ of the cosmos are gathered to form words
which together reveal the Logos. The meanings of the individual letters cannot be divorced
from the meaning of the whole sentence. Likewise, Scripture is itself a kind of ‘cosmos’ in
which “the author of existence gives himself to be beheld through visible things.”14

11 Ambiguum 7. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 54.

12 Ad Thalassium 64. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 167.

13 Ambiguum 10. Translated by Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Early Church Fathers Series,

(New York: Routledge, 1996) 109.

14 Ambiguum 10, Translated by Louth, Maximus, 110. For more on this point see, Paul M. Blowers, “The

Analogy of Scripture and Cosmos in Maximus the Confessor,” 145-149 in Studia Patristica 27, ed. Elizabeth
Livingstone, (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993).
 6

It is important for Maximus that these laws are read together, yet he does not argue
that they each only contain a portion of the Logos. The Logos is fully present in the logoi of
both Scripture and creation. Yet these two laws should be read together for they show
“different things to be the same by fitting one into another―so the written law is potentially
the natural and the natural law is habitually the written, so the same meaning is indicated and
revealed, in one case through writing and what is manifest, in the other case by what is
understood and concealed.” 15

The true meaning of both the natural world and the scriptural word is the Logos who
is both the source and proper end of both of them. The Logos is fully present in all of his
incarnations, even if the first impression (i.e. the literal meaning of scripture or the actual
physicality of the world) of them seem to obfuscate his presence. The true interpretation of
both the cosmos and Scripture, therefore, is the one that unveils the Logos. For a reader of
Scripture or an observer of the cosmos to attain to this level of interpretation requires that
they be formed by the Logos through the virtues. The formed reader will have attained to
their own true nature, and thus be able to naturally discern the presence of the Logos in all of
his incarnations. As Blowers notes, “For Maximus, real vision is granted only to those who
delve into the ever thickening plot of the Theo-Drama, who join in the dense cosmic and
scriptural ‘cloud of witnesses’―heavenly and earthly brings, animate and inanimate
things―pressing to unveil the fullness of the mystery of Jesus Christ.” 16

The relationship between the laws of nature and scripture on the one side and the law
of grace on the other is further enlightened by Maximus’s discussion of the Transfiguration. In
the long and complex Ambiguum 10, Maximus discusses this scene and suggests that both the
law of Scripture and the law of creation can be thought of as the garments of Christ in this
story or icon. They reveal his glory as they glow with his radiance even as they conceal his
fullness. They contain, but do not constrict the fullness of his presence―the garments are
malleable to his movement. When the radiance of Christ shines through the garments, they
become became “shining and clear.” For Scripture this means that its meanings can be
“grasped by the mind without any riddling puzzle or symbolic shadow, revealing the meaning
that lay hidden within them.” Similarly, the garments can be seen as a kind of creation. The

15 Ambiguum 10. Translated by Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 110.

16 Paul M. Blowers, “The World in the Mirror of Holy Scripture: Maximus the Confessor’s Short

Hermeneutical Treatise in Ambiguum ad Joannem 37,” pp. 408-426 in In Dominico Eloquio―In Lordly Eloquence:
Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, Paul M. Blowers, et al. eds. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2002) 426.
 7

radiance of the Logos shine forth and reveal those “wise variety of various forms” that are
normally hidden from deceiving senses.17

The incarnation in the person of Jesus transcends but does not nullify the incarnation in
Scripture and creation. Christ is the true logoi of both Scripture and creation they cannot be
understood apart from him, for he is their true nature. This is clear in Maximus’ figurative
reading of the passion in one of his chapters on knowledge,
Pilate is the figure of the natural law; the crowd of Jews a figure of the written law.
The one who does not surpass by faith the two laws cannot receive the truth which
surpasses nature and reason, but really crucifies the Word. As a Jew he regards the
Gospel as a scandal, or else as a Greek supposes that it is foolishness.18

It is a matter of course that followers of the Logos in Christ cannot dispense with
either Scripture or natural objects for contemplation. Jesus’ coming has not nullified, but has
made clear creation and Scripture. As such, contemplation of creation and Scripture should
not be abandoned, but should be discerningly considered in light of the testimony they
provide to the culmination of all things in Christ, the Logos. As Maximus says in Ambiguum
19,
If he will walk the straight road to God without error, man, I say, stands in absolute
need of both of the following things: insight into Scripture, through the Spirit, and a
natural contemplation of things that conform to the Spirit. So anyone who desires to
become a perfect lover of perfect wisdom will easily be able to show that both laws are
of equal value and equal dignity, that both of them teach the same things in
complementary ways, and that neither has any advantage over the other or stands in
the other’s shadow.19

Jesus Christ, as the original giver of all laws, unites and fulfills the laws of Scripture
and nature in himself. By bringing another law, one of grace, he foreshadows the ultimate
consummation of all laws when all of reality will be brought into the union through
deification. As Blowers summarizes,
Jesus Christ is the majestic Legislator embodying the spiritual law of grace that brings
together and fulfills the laws of nature and Scripture. He is the Logos ingathering all

17 Ambiguum 10. Translated by Louth, Maximus, 109. For more on this see Andrew Louth’s lecture, “The

Transfiguration in the Theology of Maximos the Confessor,” available at http://www.ofsjb.org/archive/

7_transfiguration_maximos.pdf

18 Chapters on Knowledge, 71. Translated by, George C. Berthold, Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings,

Classics of Western Spirituality, (Crestwood, New York: Paulist Press, 1985) 141.

19 Ambiguum 19. Translated in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus

the Confessor, translated by Brian E. Daley, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998, 2003) 293.
 8

in the world, in the Bible, and in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Christ
actively correlates cosmos and Scripture in a grand macrocosmic plan of integration
and deification.20

On the Fourth Incarnation

The Logos thickens himself in simultaneous incarnations in the person of Jesus, in
creation, and in scripture. In the same way, the Logos can also be said to thicken himself―to
become incarnate―in the virtuous believer. It is difficult to summarize adequately Maximus’s
complex doctrines of humanity and theosis which here converge. Man is, for Maximus, a kind
of cosmos in himself.21 This cosmos, like the natural cosmos, has the Logos as both its source
and proper end. As such, the natural state of man is revealed in his own logos, which is, and
will be, the Logos. From the beginning, the proper end of man was participation in the
hypostatic union of God―to commingle without confusion with the immutable transcendent
and incarnate Logos.22

In Ad Thalassium 22, Thalassius asks Maximus how it can be that the last ages have
come upon us (1 Cor 10:11) if in the last ages God will show his riches (Eph 2:7). Maximus’s
answer is, in part, that while it is true that the last ages are still to come upon us, “since we
have not yet received...the gifts of benefits that transcend time and nature,” it is also true that
believers can experience the riches of God in the present by the mystery of the Logos
incarnating himself in those who allow him. This happens through the practice of the virtues,
and is but a foreshadowing of deification which believers are not yet capable of (since they are
natural, they cannot yet grasp that which transcends nature). Maximus says,
[T]he modes of the virtues and the principles of those things that can be known by
nature have been established as types and foreshadowing of those future benefits. It is
through these modes and principles that God, who is ever willing to become human,
does so in those who are worthy. And therefore whoever, by the exercise of wisdom,
enables God to become incarnate within him or her and, in fulfillment of this mystery,
undergoes deification by grace, is truly blessed, because that deification has no end.23

20 Blowers, “The Analogy of Scripture and Cosmos in Maximus the Confessor,” 145.

21 For example, see, Mystagogy 7. Translated by Berthold, Selected Writings, 196-7. See also, Lars

Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor, (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1997) esp. 71-108. It should be further noted that the singular grammar of this concept for
Maximus forces a gendered reading. For accuracy, I retain Maximus’ original rendering.

22 Ad Thalassium 22. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 115.

23 Ad Thalassium 22. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 118.
 9

Thalassius’s question, then, allows Maximus to discuss the divine drama that is
occurring behind, above, and beneath this reality in the present age. The Logos, who is the
beginning, middle, and end of all the ages, penetrates all levels of reality to bring about his
future. In this present age this means that the Logos takes what is ours into himself―what
we have learned by the practice of the virtues to surrender to him by our own free will. 24 This
allows the space for the incarnation of the Logos to be realized. In other words, by being
virtuous, the believer is learning to be deified. This formation will continue into the future
state in which human nature will be brought to “harmony with the powers on high through
the identity of an inflexible eternal movement around God [and] will be taught to sing and to
proclaim holy with a triple holiness the single Godhead in three Persons.”25

Conclusion

As has been demonstrated, Maximus’s doctrine of the incarnations of the Logos is
intricate, complex, and beautiful. However, the postmodern reader might understandably ask
if there is any room in Maximus’s paradigm for an acknowledgment of irreducible difference.
If the Logos can be incarnated in creation, in Scripture, in the person of Jesus, and in human
beings, then is there any place where the Logos is not, or will not, be? Is there any fall that is
so far that the Logos does not desire to reach down through the mystery of incarnation?
Maximus, in one of his most important statements, answers this question. “[T]he Logos of
God, who is God, wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.”26

Creatures, for Maximus, are first understood as beings that are limited. Their
beginning and their ending is outside of themselves. As such, there must be something
towards which they are moving, for they can only be in “the perpetual state of becoming.” 27
The Logos wills for this becoming to become his own embodiment. In the end, his will will be
done. This telos, which can be experienced even now as a foretaste, is “the divine penetration
of time and eternity at all levels, in all dimensions, through the gracious―and
eschatologically simultaneous―action of God’s ‘incarnation’: supremely in Jesus Christ, yet
also in the cosmos, in the word of Scripture, and at last, in the virtuous Christian.” 28

24 See, Ambiguum 7. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, Cosmic Mystery, 52.

25 Mystagogy, 19. Translated by Berthold, Selected Writings, 202.

26 Ambiguum 7. Translated by Blowers and Wilken, 60. Translation slightly altered.

27 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, English translation, (Cambridge: James

Clarke Press, 1957, 1973) 98.

28 Paul M. Blowers, “Realized Eschatology in Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thalassium 22,” 258-263 in

Studia Patristica 32, ed. Elizabeth Livingstone, (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters Press, 1997) 263.