Author: Anna

In this remarkable section, St. Maximos delves even more deeply into the nature and experience of our relationship with God.

The key presupposition is that our hearts are empty of the thoughts and images that constantly haunt us, overwhelming with constant mental “noise” and feelings of anxiety that silence God’s voice and prevent inner stillness.

Thoughts and opinions are the loudest “noise creators.”

When our intellect has shaken off its many opinions about created things, then the inner principle of truth appears clearly to it, providing it with a foundation of real knowledge and removing its former preconceptions as though removing scales from the eyes, as happened in the case of St Paul (cf. Acts 9:18).

It occurs to me that, for most of my life, the flood of ideas and opinions that I immediately form in my mind through both propensity and academic training, have blocked me from fully even hearing the other person, let alone experience a moment of mental stillness.

For St. Maximos, the opposite of the restless “academic” intellect or of a mindset caught in incessant and anxious thoughts of fantasy, recrimination or self-pity, is what he calls “the visionary intellect.” This visionary intellect abandons this self-made complexity for true “simplicity.”

It has been “stripped of the complex garment of words with which it is physically draped” and gotten “a glimpse of the simplicity that in some measure discloses this principle.”

And the achievement of simplicity and, through it, the true understanding of the principle is not gained by force but “it reveals itself as though in the sound of a delicate breeze.”

To achieve simplicity, we are asked to rid ourselves from entrenched opinions, rambling thoughts and clever comebacks and become writing tablets instead of pen-wielding authors of our stories.

A pure heart,” St. Maximos explains, “is perhaps one which has no natural propulsion towards anything in any manner whatsoever. When in its extreme simplicity such a heart has become like a writing-tablet beautifully smoothed and polished. God comes to dwell in it and writes there His own laws.

Removing the “scales” and entering into increasingly higher levels of knowledge and unity with God is not a one-time achievement but a lifelong process of ascent. St. Maximos is clear about the difficulty of the upward path yet, at the same time, provides comfort and hope. As long as we stay the course and make progress, however small, we become sojourners on the path of salvation.

So long as the soul advances ‘from strength to strength’ (Ps. 84:7) and ‘from glory to glory’ (2 Cor. 3:18), that is, so long as it advances from one degree of virtue to a greater degree and from one level of spiritual knowledge to a higher level, it remains a ‘sojourner’, one who has no permanent home, as in the saying, ‘My soul has long been a sojourner’ (Ps. 120:6. LXX).

The destination of our journey, the “miraculous tabernacle’

…a dispassionate and untroubled state of virtue in which the Logos of God adorns the soul like a tabernacle with the varied beauties of the virtues. ‘The house of God’ is spiritual knowledge compounded of many different forms of contemplation when God dwells in a soul, filling it from the bowl of wisdom. ‘Exultation’ is the soul’s leap of joy at the riches of the virtues. ‘Thanksgiving’ is gratitude for the bountiful outpouring of wisdom. ‘The sound of feasting’ is the unceasing mystical hymn of glory, which exultation and thanksgiving combine to form.

St. Maximos makes another important point about the journey to stillness and union with God. Even though it entails stripping ourselves of worldly pleasures and passions and acquiring Christ’s intellect, “this does not come to us through the loss of our own intellectual power; nor does it come to us as a supplementary part added to our intellect; nor does it pass essentially and hypostatically into our intellect.”

On the contrary, “it illumines the power of our intellect.”

“In my opinion,” St. Maximos continues, “the person who has Christ’s intellect is he whose intellection accords with that of Christ and who apprehends Christ through all things.”

Similarly, even though we are the body of Christ, “we do not become this body through the loss of our own bodies; nor again because Christ’s body passes into us hypostatically or is divided into members; but rather because we conform to the likeness of the Lord’s flesh by shaking off the corruption of sin.”

In the lifelong journey to simplicity and stillness, we shed passions and clothe ourselves in Christ while never losing our personhood. We excise opinions and thoughts, not to become incapable of thinking for ourselves, but to remove the scales that distort our view of the truth and drown the voice of God.

 

St. Maximos has used an array of evocative metaphors to illustrate difference aspects and manifestations of our journey to God, from purification to illumination and theosis, for example, the three levels of one’s experience of the Sabbath; the passage from Chaldea to Mesopotamia and, finally, the holy land; the symbolic meanings of Saul, David and Samuel.

In this passage, he depicts metaphorically the stages in our knowledge of Christ. At first, we are only capable of knowing Christ “in the flesh,” that is, “we come into contact with the letter and not the spirit.” As we progress spiritually, however, we are able to rid ourselves of physical “props”—symbols, words, rituals and “the letter of the law” — and thus “we come to dwell – so far as this is possible for man — purely in the pure Christ.”

“We no longer know Him according to the flesh,” St. Maximos tells us, “because, through the intellect’s naked encounter with the Logos stripped of the veils covering Him.”

In a previous chapter, St. Maximos describes the state if unity with Christ as one in which advance “altogether beyond intellection,’ and beyond duality so that we can dwell in unity.”

Similarly, in this section, we are told that there is a stage of unity beyond simply overcoming the flesh:

“He who is living the life in Christ has gone beyond the righteousness of both the Law and nature. This St Paul indicated when he said, ‘For in Christ Jesus there is neither circumcision nor uncircumcision’ (cf. Gal. 5:6)”

St. Maximos further elaborates on the stage of mystical union with God that transcends any kind of fragmentation.

God manifests this spirit in different forms, depending on our stage of understanding.

“Some are reborn through water and the spirit (cf. John 3:5),” he says. “Others receive baptism in the Holy Spirit and in fire (cf. Matt. 3:11). I take these four things – water, spirit, fire and Holy Spirit – to mean one and the same Spirit of God.”

As long as we understand God in the flesh, through symbols and the letter of the law, we still perceive reality in fragments and be unable to achieve full knowledge of God in His simplicity and unity:

So long as we only see the Logos of God as embodied multifariously in symbols in the letter of Holy Scripture, we have not yet achieved spiritual insight into the incorporeal, simple, single and unique Father as He exists in the incorporeal, simple, single and unique Son, according to the saying, ‘He who has seen Me has seen the Father . . . and I am in the Father and the Father in Me’ (John 14:9-10).

He continues with the metaphor of the ox and the servant and the relationship between them

The Law instituted the Sabbath, says Scripture, so that your ox and your servant might rest (cf. Exod. 20:10).

Both of these are symbols for the body. When practicing the virtues, your body is the ox led by the intellect, undergoing deprivations and discipline to attain virtue. When we advanced spiritually, the duality between body and intellect is erased. Rather than being passively subjugates, the body is now a participant in intellection.

For the contemplative the body is the servant of his intellect, because through contemplation it is now endowed with intelligence and so serves the intellect’s spiritual commands intelligently.

There is harmony in the relationship between the ox and the servant and a shared goal to achieve.

“…the Sabbath signifies the final goal pursued by them throughout the ascetic and the contemplative life, and so it provides for both of them a fitting rest…The Sabbath is a virtuous, dispassionate and peaceful condition of both body and soul. It is an unchanging state.”

While there is flexibility and negotiation in our relationship with God, in that we perceive Him in the form that we are capable of understanding at various stages of our spiritual development, the permanence and unchanging nature of God is the final destination. This is a stark difference between Christian and modernist world views. In the latter, objective, permanent truth does not exist, and our individual perceptions are the only truths that matter.

We are all subject to the great temptation to mistake our own perceptions as the truth or become enamored of the words, themselves, and the means to the end

St. Maximos sums it all up at the last paragraph of this section:

Hence a person who seeks God with true devotion should not be dominated by the literal text, lest he unwittingly receives not God but things appertaining to God; that is, lest he feel a dangerous affection for the words of Scripture instead of for the Logos. For the Logos eludes the intellect which supposes that it has grasped the incorporeal Logos by means of His outer garments, like the Egyptian woman who seized hold of Joseph’s garments instead of Joseph himself (cf. Gen. 39:7-13), or like the ancients who were content merely with the beauty of visible things and mistakenly worshipped the creation instead of the Creator (cf. Rom. 1:25).

 

When Abraham left the land of the Chaldeans on his way to the promised land, he stopped at Haran, which was the midway point. In this section, St. Maximos refers to Haran as the symbolic midway point in our spiritual journey, “the intermediate state between virtue and vice – a state not yet purified from the delusion of the senses.”

How many of us find ourselves in some way or another in that midway state; between and betwixt? Not totally lacking in faith but not totally committed to it either; admiring the principles yet unwilling to practice them; loving yet not giving ourselves fully to love without judgment and control; understanding our blessings but not fully experiencing them in the moment.

At the midway point, we have succeeded in leaving behind the “land of the Chaldeans” and so have made some progress.

“He who still satisfies the impassioned appetites of the flesh dwells in the land of the Chaldeans as a maker and worshipper of idols. But when he has begun to discern what the situation is and has gained some insight into the mode of life which nature demands, he leaves the land of the Chaldeans and comes to Haran in Mesopotamia (cf. Gen. 11:31).

But while stuck at the midway point, our imperfection and ambiguity limits and diminishes our view of Christ

As long as I remain imperfect and refractory, neither obeying God by practicing the commandments nor becoming perfect in spiritual knowledge, Christ from my point of view also appears imperfect and refractory because of me.: For I diminish and cripple Him by not growing in spirit with Him, since I am ‘the body of Christ and one of its members’ (1 Cor. 12:27).

To him who is not satisfied with the midway point; who wants to go “beyond that moderate understanding of goodness which he has attained through the senses” and “hasten towards the blessed land, that is, to the state free from all sin and ignorance…” St. Maximos gives practical advice and holds out hope.

How do we get to the blessed land?

• Not by looking for knowledge or validation outside ourselves but by looking inside.

“Those who seek the Lord should not look for Him outside themselves; on the contrary, they must seek Him within themselves through faith made manifest in action.”

• • By practicing the virtues. And, while sounding simple, this practice is neither as easy as following humdrum routines nor a rush of excitement, such as engaging in stimulating discourses of theology. It involves the difficult, dogged askesis of good; going against the grain of our habits, desires and, often, social norms.

• By following gradual steps, which St. Maximos lays out: “The first by means of practice trains the flesh in virtue, the second illuminates the intellect so that it chooses above all else companionship with wisdom; and through wisdom it destroys the strongholds of evil and pulls down ‘all the self-esteem that exalts itself against the knowledge of God’ (2 Cor. 10:5).”

• By renewing our efforts at spiritual warfare each and every day; and, by “keeping the Sun of righteousness from setting [inside us] throughout the whole day.”

Hope comes in the knowledge that Christ is not static. “The Logos of God adapts Himself according to each person’s strength.” He “appears sometimes as risen and sometimes as set, depending on the manner of life and the spiritual status and essence or quality of those pursuing virtue and searching for divine knowledge.”

Just as we fall, repent and become renewed, Christ was crucified, died and was resurrected, not only in historical time but in the present, appearing to us “according to the state we are in.”

Christ is always crucified and resurrected and appears to us If we are imperfect, he appears to us imperfect as well.

If for our sakes the Logos of God ‘died on the Cross in weakness’ and was raised ‘by the power of God’ (2 Cor.13:4), then in a spiritual sense He is always doing and suffering this on our account, becoming all things to all men so that He might save all men (cf. 1 Cor. 9:22).

The movement from darkness to illumination and union to God is both historic and present; eternal and continuous; ceaselessly manifested by Christ to different individuals and in various circumstances.

…the Logos appears sometimes as risen and sometimes as set, depending on the manner of life and the spiritual status and essence or quality of those pursuing virtue and searching for divine knowledge.

There is no end to the movement of continuous ascension. Even the new testament is not a historical end point but a harbinger of the future, “leading our souls forward:”

Just as the teachings of the Law and the prophets, being harbingers of the coming advent of the Logos in the flesh, guide our souls to Christ (cf. Gal. 3:24), so the glorified incarnate Logos of God is Himself a harbinger of His spiritual advent, leading our souls forward by His own teachings to receive His divine and manifest advent.

And this is the most reassuring manifestation of hope, constantly leaving open the possibility of becoming unstuck from the midway point and heading to the blessed land.

After the first few lines of this treatise, your head might start spinning. No wonder we spent over an hour on just a few paragraphs (#1-11) during our discussion last Friday.

St. Maximos begins by getting to the essence of Trinitarian theology. He takes you through a maze of relationships that capture the nature of the Trinity in rapid parallelisms–each with a different starting point and angle of approach.

The Divinity is both unity and trinity – wholly one and wholly three. It is wholly one in respect of the essence, wholly three in respect of the hypostases or persons. For the Divinity is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and is in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The whole Divinity is in the whole Father and the whole Father is in the whole Divinity. The whole Divinity is in the whole Son and the whole Son is in the whole Divinity. The whole Divinity is in the whole Holy Spirit and the whole Holy Spirit is in the whole Divinity.

After a few paragraphs, you have no idea if you are at the beginning, middle or end of the labyrinth you entered, and how each new sentence differs from the previous one.

Perhaps getting “lost” and recognizing your inability to rely on familiar categories of space and time, beginning and end, is what St. Maximos wants us to experience in order to grasp the nature of oneness.  No matter which category of thought or angle of approach you use, you cannot reduce or take apart the complete unity and absolute simplicity of the Holy Triad. The familiar categories of time, space and the sequential nature of relationships   do not apply to God. As a modern Greek translation of the text says:

Η αρχή, η μεσότητα και το τέλος είναι γνωρίσματα εκείνων που διαιρούνται ως προς τον χρόνο…

The beginning, the middle and the end are characteristics of things that are divisible in time

It is ironic that, for most of my life, I looked down on “simplicity” and yearned for intellectual complexity. “Simple” people had nothing interesting to offer, I decided. Whether it was Nietzsche, modern literary criticism or French films, I loved reading and analyzing complex concepts, secretly congratulating myself for my sophistication.

Now St. Maximos turns these assumptions on their head. The most important characteristic in God’s nature, he tells us, is simplicity. What is the meaning of simplicity for St. Maximos? What did I miss out on when I equated it with boredom, lack of sophistication; the antithesis of excitement and success? And why is it so difficult for us to shed the tools and categories through which we perceive reality to experience God in simplicity and purity of soul?

St. Maximos outlines a process of gradually shedding and emptying ourselves in order to achieve unity with God and experience his world of unity and simplicity.

First, we must give up our dependence on the intellect. God “is neither an apprehending intellect nor an intelligible being: He transcends both. “For if He were an apprehending intellect He would be limited by His need for a relationship with an intelligible being; and if He were an intelligible being He would be limited because naturally subject to an apprehending intellect capable of grasping Him.”

Intellection is dependent on relationships and exists in sequential time while “God is in both respects absolutely simple: in so far as He is being. He is independent of any apprehending subject; in so far as He is intellection. He is independent of any apprehensible object.”

While God is independent of relationships, however, his absolute unity and simplicity enables our relationship with Him through communion and a life in community with others.

Secondly, we must transition from fragmentation and multiplicity to unity.

“When intellection is given form through its apprehension of intelligible objects,” Maximos says, “it ceases to be single and becomes many intellections; for it is marked by the form of each intelligible object that it apprehends.”

This multiplicity, and the resulting fragmentation, prevent us from true union with God. Most of us are unable to discern the essence of things through conflicting allegiances, racing thoughts on past grievances and future uncertainties that rob us of the present, futile efforts to control and script our lives and that of others.

In Maximos, we see the real possibility of transitioning from intellection to inner stillness and a life livedin unity and simplicity. It is a path that “as it passes beyond the multiplicity of the sensible and intelligible things that in this way confer their manifold forms upon it, it becomes altogether free from form.”

Once we enter “the Logos, who is beyond intellection,” Maximos tells us, “then the intellect contemplates only its own immutability, and rejoices with an unspeakable joy because it has received the peace of God which transcends all intellect, and which ceaselessly keeps him who has been granted it from falling (cf. Phil. 4:7).”

In this section St. Maximos uses a sequence of parallel metaphors and biblical allusions to elucidate, from different angles, the journey of ascent from purification to illumination and theosis.

He first establishes the need for purification through allusions to Herod, Pilate and Cesar.

“Herod exemplifies the will of the flesh,” St. Maximos writes; “Pilate, the senses; Caesar, sensible things.” While the Jews represent the soul, they lose their way by subjugating the soul to the flesh.

 When the soul through ignorance associates with sensible things, it betrays the Logos into the hands of the senses to be put to death and proclaims within itself the kingship of perishable things. For the Jews say, ‘We have no king but Caesar’ (John 19:15).

Pilate is an intriguing character. While he refuses to condemn Christ, he misses the opportunity to go beyond this refusal, thus “denying the kingdom of God.” Instead of saving him, he turns him over to those who will condemn him to death. His neutrality–refusal to prosecute Christ—is simply not enough.

“The subjugation of the passions,” St. Maximos tells us, “is not sufficient to ensure spiritual happiness for the soul unless the soul also acquires the virtues by keeping the commandments.”

Resisting “the pleasures of the body” is a first step. To progress beyond it, one must cultivate virtues and acquire spiritual knowledge.

St. Maximos now turns to the parable of the paralytic to elucidate the true meaning of illumination. The paralytic looks with longing and frustration at the healing waters of the Pool of Bethesda, just steps away from him. He watches helplessly as others are helped into the water by their loved ones and are immediately healed. He can almost taste a new life of salvation and illumination but is unable to find somebody to push him into the water.  St. Maximos compares his situation to that of a man looking for salvation without having accumulated a trove of virtue and spiritual knowledge to draw upon.

For this reason, he has no one – that is, no intelligent thought – to put him into the pool when the water is disturbed (cf. John 5:7), that is, into a state of virtue capable of receiving spiritual knowledge and of healing every sickness.

It is far easier to indulge in passions than to exert discipline and resist them. Hence, what keeps us from healing, though like the paralytic we are sick, is laziness.

On the contrary, although sick, he procrastinates because of laziness and is forestalled by someone else, who prevents him from being cured. And so he lies there with his illness for thirty-eight years.

And Maximos shows the consequences of spiritual laziness:

Whoever does not advance towards God by these means remains paralyzed until the Logos comes to teach him how he can obtain prompt healing, saying to him, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’ (John 5:8); that is to say, the Logos commands him to upraise his intellect from the love of pleasure which dominates him, to shoulder the body of the virtues and to go home, that is, to heaven.

Christ provides the model of a life in union with God that contrasts with the above

For when through his ascetic practice he has irreproachably created the world of the virtues as if it were a world of visible nature, not allowing his soul to be diverted from its course by the hostile powers as he passes through time

St. Maximos next uncovers another aspect of illumination. Illumination is still of dual nature, he tells us. We are intellective beings, which means that we have the capacity to understand the created universe. At the same time, we and other beings are also “intelligible,” that is, we possess the intrinsic capacity of being understood by other, intellective beings. Intellective and intelligible capabilities are the two extremes. They lack simplicity because “it is only an intermediate relationship between two extremes” that makes them meaningful. For example, an intellective being must have the willingness, discipline and commitment to cultivate these capabilities and apply them to understand another being.

Hence, “no creature is in itself a simple being or intellection, in such a way as to constitute an indivisible unity.” We perceive the world around us in terms of its differences, conflicts, divergencies and multiplicities of points of view.  Yet “God is beyond being and beyond intellection…He is an indivisible unity, simple and without parts.” And herein lies the seemingly impossible paradox. If we are subjects to a world of multiplicity and bound by our duality of our intellective and intelligible being, how can we understand God through the limitations of our created universe?

In the multiplicity of beings there is diversity, dissimilarity and difference. But in God, who is in an absolute sense one and alone, there is only identity, simplicity and similarity. It is therefore not safe to devote oneself to the contemplation of God before one has advanced beyond the multiplicity of beings.

To progress from illumination to theosis, then, we have to advance “altogether beyond intellection,’ and beyond duality so that we can dwell in unity. 

None of the tools and assumptions of the world as we know it are adequate “to attempt to utter the inexpressible.”

The surest way is to contemplate pure being silently in the soul alone

To “converse with God” we have to let go of the means by which we attempted to exert some degree of control over our universe—the spoken word; the assurance of familiar space and time; the categories in which we grouped things and ideas.

“Moses showed this,” we are told, “when he pitched the tent of his mind outside the camp (cf. Exod. 33:7) and then conversed with God.”   And “the high priest, who was commanded to go into the holy of holies within the veil only once every year (cf. Lev. 16; Heb. 9:7), shows us that only he who has passed through what is immaterial and holy and has entered the holy of holies – that is, who has transcended the whole natural world of sensible and intelligible realities, is free from all that is specific to creatures and whose mind is unclad and naked – is able to attain the vision of God.”

To ascend to theosis we must “have transcended our own being and that of all things sequent to God. …He  who has not  transcended himself and all that is in any way subject to intellection, and has not come to abide in the silence beyond intellection, cannot be entirely free from change. But he who has advanced altogether beyond intellection, and has renounced it because he has transcended it, has come to dwell to some extent in unity