STUDIA PATRISTICA

VOL. LXXXIX

Papers presented at the Seventeenth International Conference

on Patristic Studies held
in Oxford 2015

Edited by
MARKUS VINZENT

Volume 15:
The Fountain and the Flood:
Maximus the Confessor and Philosophical Enquiry

Edited by
SOTIRIS MITRALEXIS

PEETERS
LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT
2017
 Table of Contents

Sotiris Mitralexis
Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

Dionysios skliris
The Ontological Implications of Maximus the Confessor’s Escha-
tology ................................................................................................... 3

Nicholas loudovikos
Consubstantiality beyond Perichoresis: Personal Threeness, Intra-divine
Relations, and Personal Consubstantiality in Augustine’s, Thomas
Aquinas’ and Maximus the Confessor’s Trinitarian Theologies ............ 33

Torstein Theodor tollefsen

Whole and Part in the Philosophy of St Maximus the Confessor ..... 47

Sebastian Mateiescu
Counting Natures and Hypostases: St Maximus the Confessor on the
Role of Number in Christology .......................................................... 63

David Bradshaw
St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge ................... 79

Sotiris Mitralexis
A Coherent Maximian Spatiotemporality: Attempting a Close Reading
of Sections Thirty-six to Thirty-nine from the Tenth Ambiguum ...... 95

Vladimir cvetković
The Concept of Delimitation of Creatures in Maximus the Confessor 117

Demetrios harper
The Ontological Ethics of St. Maximus the Confessor and the Con-
cept of Shame ...................................................................................... 129

Smilen Markov
Maximus’ Concept of Human Will through the Interpretation of
Johannes Damascenus and Photius of Constantinople ....................... 143

John panteleiMon Manoussakis

St. Augustine and St. Maximus the Confessor between the Beginning
and the End .......................................................................................... 155
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge

David Bradshaw, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

aBstract
Maximus follows Dionysius the Areopagite in holding that God ‘precontains’ the knowledge
of all things as their cause. He develops this idea by interpreting divine foreknowledge as
a consequence of God’s knowledge of the divine logoi, the acts of will by which God
predefines and creates all things. Since among the items God foreknows are creatures’ free
acts, it would seem to follow that such acts are determined by the logoi. Elsewhere, how-
ever, Maximus emphasizes that the full realization of a rational creature’s logos depends
upon that creature’s free choice. There thus seems to be a conflict between Maximus’s
Neoplatonic account of divine knowledge and his commitment to human free will. I argue
that to reconcile this conflict we must distinguish two stages in the existence of the logoi:
an initial stage in which they embody simply the divine intent, and a later stage in which
(as Maximus puts it in Ambiguum 10) they ‘re-enter’ into eternity to the extent that they
have been embodied in the lives of the faithful. The logoi at the latter stage are the joint
product of the divine will and creatures’ free choice. However, the distinction between
the two stages is conceptual rather than temporal; from a point of view within time, the
logoi are always already at the latter stage. This explains how in knowing them from
all eternity God can foreknow, without determining, creatures’ free choices.

The nature of divine knowledge is not a topic that figures prominently among
the Greek Fathers of the first five centuries. Discussions of biblical prophecy
and divine election during this period generally simply take for granted that
God has complete knowledge of the future, including free human actions.1 The
question of whether such knowledge is truly compatible with the capacity to
do otherwise – a question given prominence in the West by Augustine – does
not appear to have caused much concern. Presumably, if it had been raised, the
answer would have been that the mere foreknowledge of an action does not
compel that action to occur. On such a view God is conceived as observing
human free acts but not causing them, save of course in the general sense in
which He causes all things by sustaining them in being.

1
See Dom M. John Farrelly, Predestination, Grace, and Free Will (Westminster, 1964), 73-9;
James Jorgenson, ‘Predestination according to Foreknowledge in Patristic Tradition’, in
John Meyendorff and Robert Tobias (eds), Salvation in Christ: A Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue
(Minneapolis, 1992), 159-69; Matyás Havrda, ‘Grace and Free Will according to Clement of
Alexandria’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 19 (2011), 21-48.

Studia Patristica LXXXIX, 79-93.

© Peeters Publishers, 2017.
80 d. Bradshaw

Despite this general inattention, from an early stage the ingredients of a

somewhat different approach to divine knowledge were present within divine
exemplarism. Many more philosophically inclined Christians readily adopted
the Middle Platonic conception of the Logos as the ‘place of the Ideas’, where
the Ideas are the intelligible paradigms in accordance with which God created
the world. Origen, for example, speaks of the divine Wisdom as containing
‘every capacity and form (virtus ac deformatio) of the creation that was to be,
both of those things that exist in a primary sense and of those things which
happen in consequence of them, the whole being fashioned and arranged
beforehand by the power of foreknowledge’.2 Here presumably ‘those things
that exist in a primary sense’ are the fundamental natural bodies and natural
kinds, and ‘those things which happen in consequence of them’ are naturally
occurring events, such as the cycle of the four seasons. But neither Origen nor,
so far as I am aware, anyone else among those who adopted the theory of divine
Ideas, used it to explain God’s knowledge of specific temporal events, much
less His foreknowledge of human free acts.
A different and more sophisticated approach to the question of divine knowl-
edge was introduced in the early sixth century by Dionysius the Areopagite.
Dionysius discusses this topic in chapter 7 of the Divine Names, which deals with
the divine name of Wisdom. His immediate concern is the issue neither of
creation nor of foreknowledge, but that of how divine knowledge differs from
the knowledge of creatures. He asks, ‘how will God understand (νοήσει) intel-
ligible things when He has no intellectual activity, and how will He know
sensible things when He transcends all sensation?’3 Dionysius’ answer, in brief,
is that God knows all things as their cause: ‘The divine mind embraces all in
its transcendent knowledge of all, precontaining (προειληφώς) in itself the
knowledge of all as the cause of all (κατὰ τὴν πάντων αἰτίαν)’.4 Dionysius
goes on to give the analogy of light, which precontains in itself the knowledge
of darkness simply in virtue of its own activity as light. He concludes: ‘If as a
single cause God gives being to all the things that are, in that one same causal
act He will know all things inasmuch as they are from Him and pre-exist
(προϋφεστηκότα) in Him, and He will not derive from beings (οὐκ ἐκ τῶν
ὄντων λήψεται) the knowledge of them’.5
It is not entirely clear how this Dionysian doctrine of God’s causal knowl-
edge is to be understood. There is, first, the question of God’s knowledge of
temporal events in general. At each moment God causes all things to be by

2
Origen, On First Principles I 2.2; cf. I 4.4, where ‘the Creation was always present in the
divine Wisdom in form and outline’.
3
Dionysius, Divine Names VII 2 (868D), my translation.
4
Ibid. VII 2 (869A). Dionysius’s account of divine knowledge is here close to that of Proclus,
by whom he may have been influenced; see Proclus, Elements of Theology, Proposition 124, with
discussion in E.R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theology (Oxford, 1963), 266-7.
5
Ibid. VII 2 (869B).
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 81

sustaining them in existence, and what He causes at any given moment is slightly
different from what He causes at the next. Does this mean that His knowledge
constantly changes – that God knows now that it is 1:35 p.m., and in a few
moments He will know that it is 1:36? This is probably not what Dionysius
intends, for he emphasizes that God causes all things in a single causal act
and that all are precontained in Him. Yet this answer only makes all the more
pressing a second question, that of God’s knowledge of free human acts. Does
God know these acts as their eternal and unchanging cause? If so, what
becomes of human free will, and how are we to avoid saying that God is the
cause of evil?
The scholia on the Divine Names by John of Scythopolis, which were gener-
ally disseminated with the Dionysian text, do not address these questions
directly. The only comment on the passage before us limits itself to the analogy
with light, observing that the analogy aptly illustrates how God does not pos-
sess knowledge by experience (πείρᾳ), ‘since God would thus be posterior to
knowledge, or would have been at some time unknowing’.6 Elsewhere John
gives the Dionysian teaching a decidedly Plotinian cast. He states that the
divine mind ‘thinks from itself and out of itself’ and that ‘it is what it thinks’;
that ‘God’s acts of intellect (νοήσεις) are the real beings (τὰ ὄντα)’; and that
‘thought for Him is generation for beings’.7 Richard Frank has shown that the
long scholion from which these comments are drawn is a paraphrase of the
description of Intellect in Enneads V 9.8 It is not surprising that John says noth-
ing about God’s knowledge of temporal events or free human actions, for these
are from a Platonic or Plotinian standpoint not objects of knowledge at all, but
objects of belief. Insofar as theological reasoning enters the Plotinian under-
standing of the scope of divine knowledge, it does so through the argument of
Aristotle – long ago absorbed within Neoplatonism – that God, as the most
blessed of beings, must think that which is best, and He must do so without
change and without dependence on anything other than himself.9
Such was the rather confused state of the question when it reached St. Maxi-
mus. As we will see, Maximus shares with Dionysius and John the concern that

6
John of Scythopolis, Scholia on the Divine Names (PG 4, 349A), trans. Paul Rorem and John
C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite
(Oxford, 1998), 228. For John’s scholia I use the critical edition in Corpus Dionysiacum IV/1:
Ioannis Scythopolitani Prologus et Scholia in Dionysii Areopagitae Librum De Divinis Nominibus
cum Additamentis Interpretum Aliorum (Berlin and New York, 2011), which includes the PG
pagination in the margins.
7
John of Scythopolis, Scholia on the Divine Names (320B-D), trans. P. Rorem and J. Lamoreaux,
John of Scythopolis (2011), 220.
8
Richard M. Frank, ‘The Use of the Enneads by John of Scythopolis’, Le Muséon 100 (1987),
101-8. Frank actually notes only that the first part of the scholion is drawn from Enneads V 9.5;
Rorem and Lamoreaux observe more fully that the entire scholion is based on Enneads V.9.5-8
(P. Rorem and J. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis [2011], 219 n. 81).
9
See Aristotle, Metaphysics XII 9 (1074b15-35).
82 d. Bradshaw

God’s knowledge should be entirely self-originated and not a response to any-

thing other than himself. However, he also affirms the traditional Christian
belief in human self-determination (τὸ αὐτεξούσιον), including the human
capacity to resist decisively the divine will. This introduces a tension into his
position which, so far as I can see, he never successfully resolved.
Already in one of his earliest works, the Questiones et Dubia, Maximus
shows a keen interest in our question. In response to the query, ‘what does the
short saying of the 104th Psalm show, “He (God) turned his heart to hate His
people”’, he replies:
God not only knows before the ages the things that are, since they are in Him, in the
Truth itself, but even if all these same things, both the things that are and those that
shall be, did not receive simultaneously being known and actual being on their own,
but each receives being at the proper time – for it is impossible for the infinite to exist
simultaneously with things finite – nevertheless the goal of the disposition of each
occurs according to movement. For there is neither time nor age separating this move-
ment from God. For nothing in Him is recent, but the future things are as the present,
and the ‘times’ and the ‘ages’ indicate the things that are in God, not for God, but for
us. For we must not think that when God does something, it is then that His knowledge
of it begins.10

Maximus here endorses the Dionysian view that God knows all things
‘before the ages’ in a single act, in virtue of their being contained within Him
as their cause. The sweeping reference to ‘both the things that are and those
that shall be’ indicates that he has in mind not only naturally occurring events,
as in earlier forms of divine exemplarism, but the entire sweep of human his-
tory. Lest there be any doubt on this point, he goes on to give the example
of the disposition to evil of the Egyptians and that to piety of the Israelites
He explains:
Since God allowed such dispositions that had been hidden and had earlier been held
back by Him to proceed to actuality (εἰς ἐνέργειαν ἐλθεῖν), because of this He is said
to ‘have turned around’ (their hearts). For when a tightened valve holds back by force
the pressure of the water, if something by chance should turn it, suddenly the water
releases its hidden pressure; so also, when Providence allows it, both wicked and good
dispositions are brought through intervening events into manifestation.11

The analogy with water is evidently an attempt to make room for human free
will, since the fact that the water is under pressure is not itself the doing of the
one who releases the valve. Judged in that light, it is not very successful. In the
first place, it is hard to see how the analogy is consistent with the earlier assertion
that all things are known to God because they are precontained in Him. This

10
Maximus the Confessor, Questiones et Dubia 121, CChr.SG 10, 89; trans. Despina D. Prassas,
Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts (DeKalb, IL, 2010), 106, modified.
11
Ibid., trans. Prassas, modified.
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 83

must include human dispositions as much as anything else, so they too must be
determined ‘before all ages’. Secondly, the analogy seems too weak to capture
what the Christian tradition, Maximus included, actually wishes to say about
human free will. On the traditional view, the acts that people perform are in
general not determined even by their own dispositions; human action has an
ongoing lively spontaneity that any analogy with a mechanistic system, such
as that of water under pressure, is inadequate to capture.
Maximus returns to the subject of divine knowledge in his mature work, the
Ambigua. In Ambiguum 7 he enlists for this purpose his well-known concept
of the logoi of beings. It is in knowing the logoi that are present with Him from
all eternity, Maximus says, that God knows creatures:
The logoi of all things are steadfastly fixed, and it is on the basis of these that God is
said to know ‘all things before they come into being’ (Susannah 42), for in absolute
truth, in Him and with Him are all things, even though all things – things present and
things to come – were not called into existence simultaneously with their logoi or with
their being known by God. (1080D)12

A little later he adds that it was precisely in order to describe divine knowledge
that ‘the disciples of Pantainos’ were among the first after Dionysius to invoke
the divine logoi:
For when they were approached by some of those who boast in their secular learning,
and were asked what Christians believed about the manner in which God knows beings
…, they answered that God neither knows sensory things by sensation, nor intelligible
things by intellection (for it is not possible, as has been demonstrated, that He who is
beyond all beings should know beings in a manner derived from beings, but we say that
He knows beings as His own wills), after which they added the following logical proof:
If God created all things by His will – which no one denies – and if it is always pious
and correct to say that God knows His own will, and that He willingly made each of
the things that He made, it follows that God knows beings as His own wills. (1085A-B)

The statement that God does not know sensory things by sensation or intel-
ligible things by intellection is obviously an echo of Dionysius. So too is the
general point that God knows things in virtue of His own causal activity. Max-
imus makes this point more specific, however, by identifying the activity in
question specifically as that of willing. The definition of the logoi as ‘divine
wills’ (quoted by Maximus just before this passage begins) is also from Diony-
sius, although Dionysius does not connect it, as Maximus does here, to the issue
of divine knowledge.13

12
Except where noted, text and translation of the Ambigua are from On Difficulties in the
Church Fathers: The Ambigua, ed. and trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge, MA and London,
2014); further references in the text.
13
See Dionysius, Divine Names V 8 (824C).
84 d. Bradshaw

It is plain that for Maximus the logoi or ‘divine wills’ are the sole source of
divine knowledge, encompassing not only the general outline of creation but
also the details of human action. The same point emerges in Ambiguum 42,
where Maximus returns to the subject of divine knowledge. After again criticiz-
ing the idea that God begins to know something only when it comes to be, he
continues:
We, however, believe that God eternally contains and foreknows all things in His will
… and that there is nothing at all, in any manner whatsoever, that was conceived by
Him at a later stage and then received being and substance. I am of the opinion that
those of pious mind should not think that God knows particular things, the principles
(λόγους) of which are eternally contained in His foreknowledge and infinite power,
only when they are created and brought into being. For time and the ages show us each
thing wisely being created at the proper, predetermined moment, at which point it is
brought into being, just as the divine apostle says concerning Levi, namely that ‘he was
still in the loins of his ancestor’ (Heb. 7:10) before he came into being. When the
perfect time arrived, the one who existed potentially in the patriarch Abraham was
brought into actual being through conception, and thus in order and sequence, according
to the ineffable wisdom of God, we have been led to understand and believe that all
things are brought into being at a time that has been foreknown. (1328C-D)

The picture here would seem to be one of complete theological determinism,

God bringing forth all things at the proper time according to His preordained
plan. This impression is confirmed later in the same Ambiguum, where Maximus
indignantly rejects the suggestion that things might fail in any way to conform
to their eternal logoi:
If beings possess perfection by divine foreknowledge, but emerge as imperfect when
they enter existence by means of creation, then either they are not that which was fore-
known, but something other, or else the difference between the two constitutes a clear
weakness on the part of the Creator, who was not able to realize fully in creation what
He had envisioned in His foreknowledge, so that its nature might have more closely
approximated its essence. (1340A)

Obviously both of these possibilities – that divine foreknowledge is inaccurate,

and that God is unable to realize His intent – are to be rejected out of hand.
At this point any knowledgeable student of Maximus must surely raise an
eyebrow. If anything is true of the logoi, it is that they do not simply program
our actions beforehand, as if we were mere automata. As is well known, each
among what I have so far referred to as the logoi of beings is in fact made up
of three ‘modes’: the logos of being, of well-being, and of eternal-being.
In Ambiguum 10 Maximus explicitly contrasts these, distinguishing the second
from the first and third by its dependence upon our free will:
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 (γνώμης) and motion,
and through it the extremes are properly said to be what they are, for if the middle term
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 85

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. (1116B)

It seems clear that Maximus wishes to say here that the realization of the
intermediate ‘mode’ of one’s logos – and thus, by implication, that of the two
extremes as well – depends upon one’s free choice. Lest there be any doubt on
this point, in Ambiguum 65 he returns to the contrast among the three modes,
stating explicitly that ‘that of being is first given to beings by essence (κατ’οὐ-
σιαν); that of well-being is granted to them second, by their power to choose
(κατὰ προαίρεσιν), inasmuch as they are self-moved (ὡς αὐτοκινήτοις); and
that of well-being is lavished on them third, by grace’ (1392A).
It is for this reason that commentators have generally seen in the logoi, not
exhaustive predeterminations of the entire course of a creature’s existence, but
– at least in the case of rational beings – something more like an invitation to
respond freely to God’s call, becoming in a sense one’s own co-creator. Alex-
ander Golitzin writes that ‘the λόγοι are … our personal and foreordained
vocations to which we may or may not choose to become conformed, or better
– since they remain transcendent by virtue of their source in God – to which
we may choose to be ever in process of becoming conformed in order thus to
share, as it were, in the eternal process of our own creation’.14 Nikolaos Lou-
dovikos similarly speaks of Maximus as an advocate, not merely of freedom of
choice, but of ‘freedom as dialogue’, in which the deepest core of one’s being
is ‘an internal dialogue between human free will and divine logoi/wills’.15
Although this is surely the right interpretation of the logoi, we ought not to
overlook the problem that it creates for Maximus’s account of divine knowl-
edge. If the logoi are not exhaustive determinations, but dialogical invitations,
then it is hard to see how in knowing them God can know the entire course of
a person’s life. The logoi are divine acts of will; yet, on Maximus’s own
showing, the course of a person’s life is the joint product of the divine will
interacting with human will. How, then, in knowing the divine will alone, can
there be knowledge of their joint product?
One perhaps initially tempting answer can, I think, be readily set aside. One
might think that it is precisely the dialogical interaction of the two wills that
makes knowledge of the divine will alone sufficient. Just as one knows the

14
Alexander Golitzin with the collaboration of Bogdan C. Bucur, Mystagogy: A Monastic
Reading of Dionysius Areopagita (Collegeville, MN, 2013), 116. As Golitzin notes, he is following
here the classic essay of Georges Florovsky, ‘The Idea of Creation in Christian Philosophy’,
Eastern Churches Quarterly 8 (1949), 53-77.
15
Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological
Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity (Brookline, MA, 2010), 8 and 85.
86 d. Bradshaw

shape of a hand by knowing that of the glove that fits around it, so, insofar as the
divine will takes shape in response to that of the creature, knowing the divine
will alone will provide an indirect knowledge of the will and actions of creatures.
The problem with this suggestion is that the logoi are not formed in reciprocal
interaction with created wills; they are instead, for Maximus as for Dionysius,
the predeterminations (προορίσμοι) by which creatures are brought into being.
There can be no reciprocal formative interaction between them and the free wills
of creatures, because when they are formed creatures do not yet exist. Granted,
to speak of ‘when’ they are formed is to use temporal language metaphorically,
since the logoi are in fact eternal. Even so, there can be no question that they are
causally prior to creatures. It is precisely this fact that enables Maximus to say
that in knowing them God knows beings in a manner not ‘derived from beings’.
Maximus has a different approach to our problem, one that, although I do not
think it ultimately succeeds, is nonetheless instructive. It is grounded in the obser-
vation made in the Questiones et Dubia that God knows the things that are
because ‘they are in Him, in the Truth itself’. For Maximus, to turn away from
one’s logos it to turn away from being into a kind of non-being; as he puts it in
Ambiguum 42, ‘only evil is absolutely devoid of reason and wisdom, the being
(τὸ εἶναι) of which is characterized by nonexistence (ἀνυπαρξία)’ (1332A).
In Ambiguum 21, in a brief digression on the nature of damnation, Maximus
offers a chilling description of this movement of the soul toward non-being:
If, however, it (the soul) makes the wrong or mistaken use of these powers, delving into
the world in a manner contrary to what is proper, it is obvious that it will succumb to
dishonorable passions, and in the coming life will rightly be cast away from the presence
of the divine glory, receiving the dreadful condemnation of being estranged from relation
with God for infinite ages, a sentence so distressing that the soul will not be able to con-
test it, for it will have as a perpetually relentless accuser its own disposition, which created
for it a mode of being that did not in fact exist (ὑποστήσασαν τὸ μὴ ὄν). (1252B)

The consequence of such a view for divine knowledge is drawn in one of the
scholia on the Divine Names added after those of John of Scythopolis, presum-
ably by Maximus himself. Commenting on the statement of Dionysius that,
‘before the angels came to be, God knew and brought forth the angels and all
other things from within’ (DN VII 2 [869A]), Maximus cautions that ‘all other
things’ is not to be understood as including evils. On the contrary, he says,
Dionysius has already shown that evil is not among the things that are, but
exists ‘around’ (περί) them, arising from their failure or from some other priva-
tion of that which is according to nature. He adds that it was for this reason
that Dionysius introduced the analogy with light, since darkness similarly con-
sists in the absence of light.16 At this point one must remember that the lesson
Dionysius draws from the analogy is that light knows even darkness, since it

16
Maximus the Confessor, Scholia on the Divine Names (PG 4, 348B-C).
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 87

is, through its absence, the cause of darkness. Maximus evidently wishes us to
infer that God knows evils in the same way, for as the cause of beings He knows
those beings’ failures and privations.
Is this account helpful in addressing the issues we have raised? Unfortunately
not. The analogy with light actually illustrates part of the difficulty. Light does
not spontaneously limit itself; when it fails to penetrate somewhere the reason
is that it encounters some obstacle. In the case of human action, of course, the
‘obstacle’ is an evil or misguided choice. For the analogy to hold, this obstacle
would have to exist independently of God, just as the obstacles that create
shadows exist independently of the light. But how can this be? Any choice,
however wrong it may be, is still the activity of some human or demonic will
which was created by God and is sustained in being by Him. It would seem
that God surely knows the activity of this will directly, in virtue of sustaining
it in being, and not only indirectly as the analogy suggests. If so, then God’s
knowledge of evil is on no different footing than His knowledge of other things.
And that returns us to the question with which we began, that of how God can
know free choices, whether good or evil, when the agent responsible for those
choices does not yet exist.
For our purposes, the question of how God knows evil is a bit of a red her-
ring. The question is not how He knows evil, but how He knows free choices,
whether good or evil, and all that follows from them. If we were to think of
His knowledge as arising in virtue of His ongoing sustaining activity there
would be no difficulty on this score; yet, as mentioned earlier, such an answer
would seem to place God’s knowledge within time, subjecting it to change and
placing foreknowledge in doubt, and it would make His knowledge dependent
upon creatures. Maximus avoids these problems by holding that God ‘precon-
tains’ the knowledge of all things, but he does so at the cost of seeming to
undermine God’s knowledge of free choices.
We face, then, a conflict between Maximus’s Neoplatonism, inherited from
Dionysius, and what Fr. Loudovikos has called his ontology of ‘dialogical
reciprocity’. Faced with a conflict between these two, it seems to me that a
Christian has no choice but to give preference to the latter. Yet this does not
mean that Maximus’s Neoplatonism is beyond salvaging. What is needed is an
understanding of how knowledge of the temporal can be embraced within the
eternal in such a way that the eternal does not wholly determine the temporal,
but is formed partly in response to it. I have elsewhere made some suggestions
along these lines based upon the Dionysian idea that both time and eternity are
divine processions.17 I believe the same approach can be helpful here. It is

17
See David Bradshaw, ‘Time and Eternity in the Greek Fathers’, The Thomist 70 (2006), 311-
66, and id., ‘Divine Freedom: The Greek Fathers and the Modern Debate’, in id. (ed.), Philosophi-
cal Theology and the Christian Tradition: Russian and Western Perspectives (Washington, D.C.,
2012), 77-92. I draw from the first of these essays in the following paragraphs.
88 d. Bradshaw

remarkable that Dionysius, in contrast to all Neoplatonists before him, does not
give ontological priority to eternity over time. Instead he holds equally that God
is ‘the eternity of things that are, the time of things that come to be’, and that
He ‘transcends time and eternity, and all things in time and eternity’.18 Further-
more, unlike the classical Neoplatonic position, he does not privilege the ‘is’
of the present tense as a way of speaking of God. On the contrary, he both
denies that all temporal language – ‘was’, ‘is’, and ‘will be’ – can be applied
to God, and affirms that all such terms are ‘properly hymned’ of Him.19
Maximus follows Dionysius in this regard. In a long scholion on Divine Names
V 8 he elaborates at length on the paradox presented by Dionysius’s statement
that forms of temporality are both to be denied of and ascribed to God:
‘Was’ and every conception accompanying it are fitting to no one other than to God,
because in Him ‘was’ is contemplated as higher than every first principle. And ‘is’ and
‘will be’ (are also fitting to Him) as entirely unchangeable and in every way immutable,
whence also He is called supersubstantial (ὑπερούσιος) … How is it that earlier Dio-
nysius said that neither ‘was’, nor ‘is’, nor ‘came to be’, nor ‘is coming to be’, nor ‘will
come to be’ are said of God (DN V 4 [817D]), but here he says that ‘‘is’ and ‘will be’
and ‘came to be’ and ‘is coming to be’ and ‘will come to be’ are properly hymned of
Him’ (DN V 8 [824A])? Does Saint Dionysius contradict himself? By no means. Above
he said that God is the creator of every existence, subsistence, substance, nature, and
time. He was right to order around Him ‘was’ and the others, so you would understand
that neither from time, nor in time, nor with time did God begin to be, but that He is
higher than being itself; for he said that ‘being is in Him’ (ἐν αὐτῷ τὸ εἶναι). But here,
since he has said that ‘God is multiplied in accordance with every conception’ (DN V 8
[824A]), he rightly says that ‘was’, ‘will be’, and the rest apply to Him, so that whatever
season or time you consider, you will find God there, and beyond the things that are, and
preexisting, and the cause and maker of the things that are – not something among them,
as we say, because He is not one of the things that are, and yet He is in all.20

Maximus does not find in these seemingly opposed statements a contradic-

tion; on the contrary, he finds a reaffirmation of the fundamental Dionysian
theme that God is both present in all things and beyond them as their cause, so
that in creating He is ‘multiplied in accordance with every conception’. The
most radical statement Maximus makes is at the beginning of the passage,
where he goes beyond even Dionysius in asserting that ‘was’ and other tempo-
ral conceptions are ‘fitting to no one other than to God’. Maximus is here
applying to temporality the Dionysian principle that ‘caused things preexist
more fully and truly in their causes’.21 He concludes that God ‘was’ in a higher
sense than creatures, for all ‘was-ness’, all temporality, derives from Him.

18
Dionysius, Divine Names V 4 (817C), V 10 (825B); cf. D. Bradshaw, ‘Time and Eternity’
(2006), 315-20.
19
Dionysius, Divine Names V 4 (817D), V 8 (824A).
20
Maximus the Confessor, Scholia on the Divine Names (PG 4, 328A-C), my translation.
21
Dionysius, Divine Names II 8 (645D).
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 89

It is helpful to bear this passage in mind in reading another important Maxi-

mian discussion of time and eternity, that of Ambiguum 10. As is well known,
Maximus takes Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration as figures, respectively,
of time and nature, each appearing in order to pay homage to Christ. Moses is
a particularly apt figure of time because he did not himself enter into the Holy
Land with those he had escorted to it. Maximus explains:
For such is time, not overtaking or accompanying in movement those whom it is accus-
tomed to escort to the divine life of the age to come. For it has Jesus as the universal
successor of time and eternity, even if the logoi of time should abide differently in God,
as the entry (into the promised land) of the law given through Moses in the desert with
those who receive the land of possession mystically reveals. For time is eternity, when
it ceases from movement, and eternity is time, whenever, rushing along, it is measured
by movement; since by definition eternity is time deprived of movement, and time is
eternity measured by movement. (1164B-C)22

Maximus does not explain the meaning of the ‘logoi of time’, but they are
presumably the Creator’s intent as expressed in and through temporal pro-
cesses; that is, they are much like the logoi of beings, but differentiated with
respect to times and processes rather than distinct substances.23 Although time,
represented by Moses, does not enter into the Promised Land, the logoi of time,
represented by the Mosaic Law, do so. Their entry indicates the manner in
which they ‘abide in God’. Historically, the Law entered the Promised Land
precisely to the extent that it was embodied within the practice and observance
of the Israelites. If we are justified in pressing this feature of the allegory, then
the logoi of time return to their unity in God through their embodiment in the
lives of those who enter into ‘the age to come’. Although Maximus does not
make this point explicitly, it is in keeping with the high role he elsewhere assigns
to human obedience as the means by which God ‘takes shape’ in the world and
‘is called and appears as human’.24 Read in this way, the passage presents
eternity as receptive to, and even shaped by, human free choice.
In a sense this is nothing new. It is basic Christian teaching that some are
received into fellowship with God in eternity in virtue of the choices they have
made, and others are not. Eternity in this sense, however, is to be distinguished
from the eternity that characterizes the life of God, and which Dionysius speaks
of as a divine procession. The two are certainly not unrelated: the eternity of

22
The translation is based on that of Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London and
New York, 1996), 130-1, modified.
23
They are presumably the same as the ‘logoi of providence and judgment’, on which see Lars
Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor
(Lund, 1965), 69-76; Paul M. Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor
(Notre Dame, 1991), 107.
24
Epistle 2 (PG 91, 401B); cf. my discussion of this text in Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics
and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge, 2004), 197-201.
90 d. Bradshaw

the blessed and the angels is, as it were, the mode in which creatures participate
in the eternity of God.25 The logoi of beings and of time, as acts of divine will,
are eternal in the full-blooded divine sense. Read as I have suggested, the pas-
sage tells us that these logoi enter (or better, re-enter) into eternity only insofar
as they are embodied in the lives of the faithful. It thus allows to human free
choice an important role in determining the eternal content of the logoi. More
precisely, it seems to envisage two stages in the existence of the logoi: an
initial stage in which they embody simply the divine intent, and a later stage in
which they ‘re-enter’ into eternity to the extent that they have been embodied
in the lives of the faithful.
Is the distinction of these stages merely an analytic tool, much like that, say,
of the steps in a geometrical construction? Or does it represent some sort of
real progress or alteration – even though, obviously, not a temporal change?
The Christian tradition has not shied away from attributing some sort of non-
temporal ‘becoming’ to the Logos. Most famously, of course, there is the state-
ment in the Prologue of John that the Logos ‘became flesh’ (σὰρξ ἐγένετο)
(Jn. 1:14). The ‘becoming’ spoken of here is not simply temporal, for it is the
entry of the Logos into time, and is thus not itself a temporal process. Further-
more it brought about no change in the eternal being of the Logos. The hymn
O Monogenes traditonally attributed to Justinian, which has figured promi-
nently in the Orthodox liturgy ever since the sixth century, makes this paradox
explicit: the Logos ‘without change became man’ (ἀτρέπτως ἐνανθρωπήσας).26
Somehow in eternity it is possible to ‘become’ without change.
Other biblical texts point to the same conclusion. Most strikingly, there is
the statement in Revelation describing Christ as ‘the Lamb slain from the foun-
dation of the world’ (τοῦ ἀρνίου τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου)
(Rev. 13:8).27 Crucially, here there is not only some sort of non-temporal
becoming, that of being slain, but a specific determination accruing to the
Logos ‘from the foundation of the world’ in light of human free choice. For
if anything was ever a freely chosen human act, it was the betrayal and cruci-
fixion of Christ. Nor is this an isolated passage. In 1Peter 1:19-20, Christ as
the pure and spotless Lamb is ‘foreordained before the foundation of the world’
(προεγνωσμένου μὲν πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου). A slightly different perspec-
tive on the same idea is offered in Hebrews, where Christ’s sacrifice is said to
be offered in ‘the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man’ (8:2),

25
See D. Bradshaw, ‘Time and Eternity’ (2006), especially 335-42.
26
On this hymn and its history see John Breck, ‘The Troparion Monogenes: An Orthodox
Symbol of Faith’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 26 (1982), 203-28.
27
Some translations (such as the RSV and NRSV) take ‘from the foundation of the world’ as
modifying the previous phrase, ‘written in the Book of Life’. Although this is not an impossible
reading, it runs counter to the plain meaning suggested by the word order. The only reason to
adopt it would be to avoid the philosophical conundrum posed by the verse as translated here, but
in light of the parallels offered by 1Peter and Hebrews, this hardly seems admissible.
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 91

and to have purified ‘the heavenly things themselves’ (9:23) (this is on analogy,
of course, with the purification of the tabernacle by the sprinkling of blood).
Christ’s identity as ‘the Lamb that was slain’ is thus an eternal, heavenly real-
ity, even though the need for it arises only in light of human choice.
In light of these precedents, I would venture to suggest that the ‘re-entry’ of
the logoi into eternity in virtue of their embodiment in the lives of the faithful
indicates a real, though non-temporal, process of becoming. Just as with the
slaying of the Lamb, that which occurs in time is capable of reaching back to
‘color’, in a sense, all of eternity. Plainly, in saying this one steps beyond tra-
ditional Platonic and Neoplatonic ways of conceiving the relationship between
time and eternity, into something of a philosophical terra incognita. In closing
I wish to point out the somewhat different directions offered regarding this
question by Maximus and the other great Dionysian commentator, John of
Scythopolis, and briefly suggest a potential reconciliation between them.
We have already observed the passage in Ambiguum 10 where Maximus
offers the cryptic statement: ‘For time is eternity, when it ceases from move-
ment, and eternity is time, whenever, rushing along, it is measured by move-
ment; since by definition eternity is time deprived of movement, and time is
eternity measured by movement’. It is striking that eternity and time are here
seen as reciprocal, and indeed almost interchangeable: time becomes eternity
when it ceases from movement, and eternity becomes time when it is set in
motion (‘become’ here indicates a definitory relationship, as a circle ‘becomes’
a sphere when it is rotated through a third dimension). As indicated earlier in
the same passage, Jesus transcends them both, not only as their source, but as
their ‘successor’ – that is, the one toward whom they are aimed and in whom
they find fulfillment.
Maximus thus remains close to the spirit of Dionysius, for whom time and
eternity seem to be on roughly the same footing as divine processions. John adopts
a different tack. He defines divine eternity (αἰών) as ‘unextended and infinite
life’, or more fully as ‘the life that is unshaken and all together at once, already
infinite and entirely unmoving, standing forth as a unity’.28 He also insists that,
whereas creatures are eternal by partaking of eternity, God is eternal by Himself
being eternity.29 However, he does not overlook the other side of Dionysius’s
teaching, namely that time too is a divine procession. Immediately after the
definition just quoted, he continues:
Thus also time, being once at rest in He Who Always Is, shone forth in its descent
(καθ’ ὑπόβασιν) when later it was necessary for visible nature to come forth. So the

28
Τὴν ἀτρεμῆ ἐκείνην καὶ ὁμοῦ πᾶσαν ζωὴν καὶ ἄπειρον ἤδη καὶ ἀκλινῆ πάντη καὶ
ἐν ἑνὶ καὶ πρὸς ἓν ἑστῶσαν; Scholia on the Divine Names (316A) (and for the shorter definition
see [313D]). The phrase ὁμοῦ πᾶσαν is an echo of Plotinus, Enneads III 7.3.37-9, and ultimately
derives from Parmenides.
29
Scholia on the Divine Names (208B, 229A-B, 313D, 385C-D).
92 d. Bradshaw

procession (πρόοδον) of the goodness of God in creating sensible objects, we call

time.30

The relation between eternity and time is here decidedly asymmetric. Eternity
is the very life of God, whereas time, although it is indeed a divine procession,
comes forth only as God creates the sensible world. Prior to creation, time was
in some sense latent or implicit within eternity, being ‘once at rest in He Who
Always Is’.
Is it possible to reconcile these two accounts? After all, John is correct that
divine eternity really is ontologically and causally prior to time, even if we
conceive of the latter, in Dionysian fashion, as a divine procession. On the other
hand, Maximus’ more symmetrical view leaves the door open for some form
of reciprocal influence between time and eternity, something that John’s view
would seem to rule out. What is needed is a way of understanding how time could
‘come forth’ from eternity even though its own content (and, more specifically,
the free acts of creatures) also helps shape eternity.
Such a hybrid view is indeed possible, but only by adopting a non-standard
understanding of emanation. In traditional Neoplatonism great emphasis is
placed upon the complete determination of the lower by the higher; all that
Intellect is, for example, is determined by its derivation from the One, and the
same is true of Soul in relation to Intellect. Standard ways of describing each
lower hypostasis in relation to the higher – as image, external act, and overflow
– are typically modelled upon deterministic physical processes.31 One analogy
that somewhat stands apart in this respect, however, is that of the lower
hypostasis as ‘expressed thought’ (λόγος ἐν προφορᾷ) in relation to ‘thought
in the soul’ (λόγος ἐν ψυχῇ).32 A moment’s reflection will show that this
analogy allows of a non-deterministic interpretation. Suppose that I wish to say
something of great mutual significance to someone close to me. I may have
worked out in detail precisely what I intend to say; nonetheless, as I speak
while looking at the other person’s expression and body language, I may well
find myself searching (and perhaps even at a loss) for precisely the right words,
pace, and tone of voice. Even if I succeed in saying precisely what I intended,
my ‘expressed thought’ has inevitably taken on greater specificity and deter-
minate content than that which I had prepared beforehand. To some extent this
is true simply because it has now come forth into space and time. In the case I
have envisioned, however, its determinate content is also in part a response to
the reception offered by my interlocutor. It is thus not solely of my own making,
but a product of our dialogical encounter.

30
Ibid. (316A); cf. the fuller translation and discussion of this passage in D. Bradshaw, ‘Time
and Eternity’ (2006), 345-6.
31
See particularly Plotinus, Enneads V 1 and 4, with discussion in D. Bradshaw, Aristotle
East and West (2004), 74-83.
32
Plotinus, Enneads V 1.3.8-9.
 St. Maximus on Time, Eternity, and Divine Knowledge 93

It is not difficult to draw a parallel from this illustration to the case of the
divine logoi. The message as initially conceived is like the logoi of beings in
their initial state; the expression and posture of the interlocutor are like the free
choices made by creatures; and the expressed utterance is like the logoi in their
final state, where they have been given specificity and determinate content
through dialogical interaction with creatures. It is in this state that they ‘re-enter’
into eternity. Of course we must correct the analogy in one crucial respect, for
it includes a temporal sequence that is not present in the case of the logoi. Just
as there has never been a time at which the second Person of the Trinity was
not already ‘the Lamb that was slain’, so there has never been a time at which
the logoi were not already at their latter, determinate stage. Nonetheless –
again, just as with the Lamb – there is a causal sequence, in that the free
responses of creatures are what cause the logoi to take on their final form.
I believe that this account preserves the essence of what Maximus wishes to
say about divine foreknowledge, without sacrificing human freedom. It remains
the case that God knows all things ‘before the ages’ in a single act, in virtue
of their being contained within Him as their cause. This is because the logoi
remain acts of the divine will – just as, in the analogy, the words I utter remain
my own acts. Their being my acts does not prevent their being shaped in part
by dialogical reciprocity. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the logoi.
I would argue, then, that there is room in Maximus for an account of divine
knowledge in which the logoi known eternally by God do not simply determine
human actions, but are formed reciprocally in dialogue with them. Admittedly,
the picture I have offered is in some respects different from Maximus’s own.
Nonetheless, it retains the essentials of his view; and more importantly, it offers
a fair chance of addressing the philosophical difficulties posed by the vexed
question of divine foreknowledge and human freedom.