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Fr. Demetrios Harper
University of Winchester
Αὐτεξούσιος Activity as Assent or Co-actuality?: Compatibilism, Natural Law, and the Maximian
Synthesis
In examining the spirit and dynamics of St. Maximus the Confessor’s understanding of
natural law in his Cosmic Liturgy, Hans Urs von Balthasar poignantly observes, “the dominant
mood here is Hellenic—more exactly, a Stoic—confidence in nature.”1 What von Balthasar,
among other things, quite rightly notices is Maximus’s tendency to utilize Stoic language and
terminology as well as their pervasive sense of divine immanence to describe the intimate causal
relationship between the Demiurge and created nature’s destiny.2 Creation and its τέλος are, in a
certain sense, circumscribed by divine will and providence.3 Yet, Maximus is also well-
recognized for his indefatigable insistence that rational beings are αὐτεξούσιος, capable of
unnecessitated acts of self-determination and free will.4 Indeed, his engagement with the topics
of will and self-determination has led Gauthier, rightly or wrongly, to conclude that in Maximus
we have the first description of a truly distinct faculty of free will.5 This connection of natural
law and eschatology to immanent divine determinations, on the one hand, and a rigorous
insistence on humanity’s capacity for free self-determination, on the other, might seem to
suggest that the Confessor subscribed to a form of compatibilism, a view which, not
coincidentally, emerges in the systems of the Stoics themselves and which ultimately limits all
1 Cosmic Liturgy, trans. Brian Daley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 297.
2 Maximus’s corpus quite prominently displays the deployment of a Stoic-style exemplarism and a divine
voluntarism which give voice to his belief that natural law and the eschatological destiny of nature as a whole are
the work of divine determinations, and indeed are pre-represented before time and creation in the benevolent “divine
volitions” θεῖα θελήματα (Amb 7, PG 91 1085A).
3 Cf. his Amb 10, PG 91 1133C-1136A.
4 Cf. especially his ThPol 1, PG 91 9A-37A.
5 As he asserts in Aristote: léthique à Nicomaque. I.1: Introduction, 2nd ed. (Louvain: 1970), 266.
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human determinations to internalized processes, placing all ontological realities beyond the
scope of human influence. Despite Maximus’s abundant use of Stoic concepts, however, I would
argue that he artfully avoids a compatibilistic approach and the consequences thereof, granting
rational beings the capacity to co-actualize nature in conjunction with divine determinations. 6
This is a reality that is demonstrated par excellence in Maximus’s doctrine of the virtues, a
perspective that we should seriously consider integrating into the modern Christian moral
outlook.
Before moving on to Maximus’s views, it is helpful to provide a very cursory overview
of the basic features and consequences of a compatibilist approach, a view which has re-emerged
in various forms in later philosophical systems and, often implicitly, in Christian dogma. As
Jacob Klein explains, the Stoic view of divine interaction with natural laws is essentially
interpreted in two ways, either as a form of divine voluntarism or, conversely, as
intellectualism.7 To very roughly summarize, the voluntarist approach considers natural law to
be the result of the Creator’s volitional determinations, or, as Brad Inwood puts it, “an imperative
expression of what god wants men to do and what he wants to happen in nature.”8 The
intellectualist interpretation suggests that the Stoics believe natural laws exist independently of
the Creator, and it is only due to his superior faculty of right reason (ὀρθὸς λόγος) that he is able
to perceive them and coordinate their enforcement on the natural world.9 This so-called
intellectualist perspective is manifested more explicitly in the deistic and theistic philosophical
6 A full treatment of this topic would clearly require a rather extended discussion, including an examination of the
way in which Maximus re-tools the Stoic exemplars into what Nicholas Loudovikos has termed “loving proposals”
awaiting “discussion.” See his A Eucharistic Ontology (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010.), 66-7, 92.
7 “Stoic Eudaimonism and the Natural Law Tradition,” in Reason, Religion, and Natural Law, ed. Jonathan A.
Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70-1. See J.B Schneewind for a more careful treatment of this
distinction in his The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8-9, 21-3.
8 See, for example, Aëtius, Placita I.7. Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985), 108.
9 Jacob Klein, “Stoic Eudaimonism and the Natural Law Tradition,” 70-1.
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systems of the post-Renaissance Moderns.10 Although there is variance in interpretation with
regards to the origin of natural laws, their deterministic quality and their inexorable facilitation
of μοῖρα, the causal fate of the cosmos, seem axiomatic.11 This deterministic view on the part of
the Stoics gives rise to a world in which there is absolute natural necessitation, brought about by
what Dorothea Frede describes as “an eternal causal nexus” where the fate of all beings is
necessitated by a “network of interacting causes.”12 In addition to their deterministic views of
causality, the Stoics also evaluate morality in light of nature’s principles, whether or not and to
what extent a given human action accords with the inherent goodness of nature and its laws.13 As
such, moral truth receives its legitimacy on the basis of ontological and naturalistic truths, a view
that in this sense is also reflected in Aristotle and his intellectual progeny. Yet, unlike the
Aristotelian view, natural realities are not ἐφ’ ἡμῖν, or up to us, to use the Stoic expression. A
rational agent cannot have any real ontological effect upon the determined natural world or work
towards a higher or more virtuous state of being, inevitably restricting morality to internalized
judgments and mental states. This is particularly evident in Epictetus, who, going a bit further
than his predecessors, asserts there is no external action that is entirely up to us as rational
agents, the act of willing consisting exclusively of an internalized dialectical process.14 Morality
and virtue are defined by the rational agent either assenting or refusing to assent to the proper
mental impression that accords with nature, activities which do not affect the natural state per se
of the agent for either good or ill.15 As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, the Stoics’ intentions
notwithstanding, this morality-as-interior-judgment approach lays the groundwork for the
10 J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, 8-9.
11 Cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum II.58, 71-153, and 154-67, trans. Francis Brooks, (London: Methuen, 1896).
12 Dorothea Frede, “Stoic Determinism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 189.
13 Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 295-6, 305-6.
14 Epictetus, 1.1. See Michael Frede’s discussion in A Free Will (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011),
45.
15 Terence Irwin, The Development of Ethics, vol. 1, 302-3.
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eventual bifurcation of ontology and morality.16 In disconnecting morality from the process of
natural realization, MacIntyre argues, morality is not really concerned with a τέλος but rather is
interiorly focused upon the will “arbitrating” and acknowledging the good.17 Morality is not
concerned, as it would be in Aristotle, with a human being’s natural transition from what he is to
what he could be.18
This disconnection of morality from its ontological grounding would eventually find its
quintessential expression in the deontological morals of Immanuel Kant and his heirs. Although
Kant, who considers himself to be an heir to the Stoic paradigm,19 and adopts aspects of their
interior moral method, he takes what might be argued as a logical step and abandons their
naturalistic language, overturning the Hellenistic tendency to trust nature.20 Regarding nature
and natural law in exclusively Newtonian terms and, ultimately, as that which prevents us from
being moral, Kant attempts to found morality in the autonomy of the noumenal self and the
human beings rational capability to will beyond his or her natural or phenomenal self.21 The
natural is not only absolutely determined but is also the ultimate enemy of a human being’s
moral autonomy, functioning as one of the primary mechanisms for the heteronymous
enslavement of the subject.22 Moreover, since it is only through the unreliable world of
phenomena that we engage other rational creatures, we must also disregard all external
heteronymous moral authority, including God’s, and rely solely on our own capacity to
16 After Virtue, 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 1981), 168-9.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 As MacIntyre asserts, Ibid., 236.
20 To quote J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 515,
“Kantian autonomy presupposes that we are rational agents whose transcendental freedom takes us out of the
domain of natural causation.” This is due to the fact that Kant considered nature to be a “mere phenomenon,” as
R.G. Collingwood argues in his The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 119, and therefore a
functional barrier to aspirations toward autonomous noumenal morality.
21 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 446/97-447/99.
22 Ibid. See Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 117.
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determine an “objective” course of action.23 Given his consignment of other rational agents to
mere phenomena and his reliance on an individualistic and interiorized moral standard, it is not
difficult to see why some philosophers would later regard Kant’s view as tending toward moral
self-directedness.24 The ‘other’ either exists as a phenomenal manifestation whose opinion we
must ignore in order to be autonomous or as another noumenal self, which we cannot access.
Given Kant’s rather tenuous claims about the noumenal or metaphysical self, it is also not
difficult to see why Nietzsche would later dismiss the transcendental idealist’s claims about
unnecessitated interior determination25 and suggest in unequivocal terms that we should embrace
the fact that reality itself resides in the necessitated world of appearances.26
In turning to the views of Maximus the Confessor, we find that throughout his works he
frequently uses both naturalistic and compatibilistic language, a large portion of which is
certainly Stoic in origin, to describe the relationship of divine causality to created nature.
Moreover, Maximus is explicit in articulating the fact that God is not only the Creator and cause
of all being but also the author of its eschatological end,27 or, as he explains in Ambiguum 65, the
divine logos of nature is the “the only source of primary, eternal, and well-being.”28 He restates
this in somewhat more explicit terms in the Gnostic Chapters, describing God as the cause “of
all being, potentiality (δύναμις) and actualization (ἐνέργεια), and of every origin, intermediary
state and consummation.”29 As such, the entirety of human ontology and its activity consists of a
23 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 408/28-409/30.
24 Such as Bernard Williams. See his Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 94-97,
for the self-directed qualities of guilt-based morality.
25 Cf. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 80.
26 Nietzsche’s views of metaphysical realities are well disclosed in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New
York: Random House, 1974), 266.
27 Amb 7, PG 91 1073C.
28 PG 91 1392D.
29 The Philokalia, I.4, trans. and eds. G.E.H Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber
Ltd., 1990), 115.
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participatory reality, including the actualizing of natural potential. Moreover, it cannot be said
that natural δύναμις is absolutely intrinsic to the creature. Natural movement and actuality
require constant contact with the exemplars of being,30 an approach that certainly differs from
Aristotle despite the deployment of the Aristotelian δύναμις/ἐνέργεια dichotomy.
Closely connected to Maximus’s emphasis on the immanence of divine causality is his
expression of the same interrelatedness of ontology and morality manifested in Aristotelians and
the Stoics alike, and the constant tendency to judge human action in light of the standard of
nature itself and its eschatological destiny. Pervading his corpus are references to volitional
movements either according with nature and the natural law or, conversely, moving in opposition
to them.31 Indeed, even a cursory examination of Maximus’s works suggests that his theological
synthesis is presupposed by what we would now refer to as virtue-based or ontological ethics, an
aspect of his thought that has recently attracted the attention of several Maximus Scholars.32
References to natural law are prominent features in his synthesis and are also strongly suggestive
of a univocity of the Creator’s ultimate determinations for nature and humanity’s moral τέλος.
Perhaps the most explicit expression of this relationship can be found in Maximus’s commentary
on the Lord’s Prayer: “Since the principle [λόγος] of nature is a law both natural and divine (ὅς
[λόγος τῆς φύσεως] καὶ νόμος ἐστὶ φυσικός τε καὶ θεῖος) […] there is nothing contrary to it when
a man’s will functions in accordance with this principle and it accords with God in all things.”33
As Maximus explains, any rebellion against God constitutes a violation of the generic logos of
30 Amb 10, PG 10 1133. Cf. Torstein Tollefsen for Maximus’s inheritance of Hellenic exemplarism, The
Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 64-8, 77-82.
31 Though one could cite a host of references, see ThPol 1, PG 91 24B for one of Maximus’s most concise
evaluations of the actualization of human volitional powers in light of the κατὰ φύσιν/παρὰ φύσιν distinction. For a
rather more complex and cosmic approach, see Amb 65, PG 91 1392CD.
32 For example, see Paul Blowers, “Aligning and Reorienting the Passible Self: Maximus the Confessor’s Virtue
Ethics,” SCE 26(3) (2013): 333-50, and Andrew Louth, “Virtue Ethics: St. Maximos the Confessor and Thomas
Aquinas Compared.” SCE 26(3) (2013): 351-63.
33 The Philokalia, vol. 2, 301.
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nature itself, which, as he also confirms in Ambiguum 41, consists of divine intentionality for the
entirety of created nature.34 This, likewise, discloses Maximus’s essentially voluntarist approach
to divine determination, making the divine exemplars and laws the products of divine will and
therefore posterior to the divine essence, a view which distinguishes him from not only many of
the Stoics but also, if J.B. Schneewind is to be believed, from Aquinas who seems to follow
Cicero in taking a more ‘intellectualist’ approach to natural laws.35 On the occasions where
Maximus does use nature or natural law in a negative sense, it seems clear that intends such
expressions to be descriptive of a fallen τρόπος or mode of existence, which, as he consistently
indicates elsewhere, constitutes a παράχρησις or a misuse of nature itself and its potentiality.36
Many of Maximus’s commentators seem to have the impression that he considered
human self-determination to be exclusively the province of an interiorized moral reality. This is a
position which, perhaps quite inadvertently, leads to the imposition of a compatibilist reading on
Maximus’s approach to divino-human relations. For example, Lars Thunburg implicitly endorses
such a notion in his mammoth Microcosm and Mediator when he describes man’s voluntary
realization of καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν, of his likeness unto God, as being “always of a moral and volitional
character.”37 It is certainly true that man’s volitional and moral dimensions are inherent to this
process. However, Thunburg gives no indication that this καθ’ ὁμοίωσιν realization also has an
34 PG 91 1312BC.
35 The Invention of Autonomy, 23.
36 ThPol 1, PG 91 24B. An example of the Confessor’s use of natural law in relation to creation’s fallen mode of
existence appears rather prominently in Amb31, where Maximus seeks to interpret Gregory Nazianzen’s reference to
Christ “loosing the laws of nature.” These laws were brought about by humanity’s lapse into sin and are in fact παρὰ
φύσιν. However, it is essential to note that Maximus juxtaposes the corrupting laws of nature with what he terms the
“spiritual laws of nature,” which are renewed and realized in Christ such that the natural world again aspires to its
proper end or πέρας (PG 91 1276BC). In short, natural law is meant here to suggest the state in which nature exists,
whether or not it is moving towards its divinely ordered end. This use of law (νόμος) in relation to an existential
mode is represented again in ThPol 1 in more positive terms, where Maximus refers to our positive response to the
logos of virtue as the “actualized law of natural powers that accords with nature” (PG 91 24B).
37 Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2nd edition (Peru, Illinois:
Open Court Publishing, 1995), 330.
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ontological dimension, giving the impression that a rational being’s “in the likeness” is
composed exclusively of behavioral patterns. Polycarp Sherwood, in a similar fashion, reads a
rigid distinction between moral and ontological realities into Maximus’s texts. In reviewing the
five modes of contemplation in the tenth Ambiguum, Sherwood asserts that the latter two (κράσις
and θέσις),38 modes that are dependent upon human self-determination, are of an exclusively
moral character, while the first three modes of contemplation are exclusively the province of
divine causation inasmuch as they are ontological categories.39 Sherwood takes this yet a step
further, arguing that one of the key errors of Origen was his tendency to conflate moral and
ontological realities, a distortion, Sherwood tells us, that Maximus corrects.40
Although Maximus certainly utilizes the language of Stoic determinism as one of his
tools of articulation and indeed sees divine providence as being involved in all dimensions of
human ontology, it is certainly inaccurate to characterize his views of human self-determination
as pertaining exclusively to a disconnected ‘moral’ sphere, and therefore limited to an internal
psychological process. The most immediate refutation of such a hermeneutic rather obviously
comes via Maximus’s view of the Fall. In assessing the causal realities associated with post-
lapsarian humanity, Maximus not only assigns volitional culpability to man for his lapsed state
but also causality for the natural fragmentation thereof.41 Despite Maximus’s extensive
corrective of Origen and an extended criticism of his anthropology, he nonetheless chooses to
appropriate Origen’s tendency to cast humanity’s self-determinations in terms of a dialectic
between divinely-authored being and the abyss of non-being. In Question 61 of the Ad
Thalassium, a passage that is infrequently mentioned, Maximus explains that in falling into sin
38 PG 91 1133A.
39 The Earlier Ambigua, (Rome: Orbis Catholicus, 1955), 37.
40 Ibid., 193-4. This is repeated by Adam Cooper in his otherwise excellent book, The Body in Saint Maximus the
Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 86-7.
41 Thal, PG 90 256B.
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(ἁμαρτία) Adam complied and was complicit with the devil’s desire to “dissolve” (διαλύσαι)
creation, and in so doing, “forced the nature of created things (ὡθοῦσα τὴν φύσιν τῶν γεγονότων)
unto death and toward the undoing of creation (πρὸς ἀπογένησιν κατὰ τὸν θάνατον).”42 This
dialectic of being/nonbeing also appears several times in the Ambigua with reference to
humanity’s eschatological end. In Ambiguum 65, speaking of those who reject and violate the
logos of nature, Maximus says that they shall assume a τρόπος of woe-being, receiving “non-
being in place of the containment of well-being because of their opposition to it.”43 In short, a
rejection of God’s determinations for being result in the human agent turning towards the abyss
of nothing from which he or she was taken and, to the extent possible, ‘participating’ in the dark
oblivion of non-being. As Maximus clearly indicates, though created being and its eternal
existence are an irrevocable gift,44 evil constitutes the recalcitrant attempt to undermine created
ontology and achieve its complete dissolution, which, though unsuccessful, nonetheless results in
a real fragmentation of nature, both universally and particularly.
When, therefore, Maximus says that well-being (εὖ εἶναι) and a proper response to the
natural law are up to us, he is not referring to some interiorized moral assent on the part of a
rational agent, but to a concrete and more Aristotelian sense of natural actualization according to
which a human agent co-actualizes with the logoi of nature toward created nature’s τέλος.45
Indeed, this is a progressive realization that constitutes a well-coordinated and cooperative
process between ethical and ontological realities, an approach that is well captured in Maximus’s
doctrine of natural will in his Opusculum 1. As he explains, θέλημα or θέλησις in its natural state
42 PG 90 633B.
43 PG 91 1392D.
44 Char, III.28 and IV.11, PG 90 1025B, 1048C.
45 Amb 7, PG 91 1073C and Amb 65, PG 91 1392.
10
“holds together the essence [of a being],”46 which is suggestive of a participatory cooperation
with the aforementioned “generic” logos of nature.47 This maintenance role on the part of the
will, however, is a more primitive function, inasmuch as its ultimate purpose is to serve as the
natural impetus for the achievement of what he terms in the Opusculum as “complete being”
(πλήρης ὀντότης),48 but which Maximus arguably refers to elsewhere as well-being (εὖ εἶναι).49
In short, the natural will is a rational desire to realize in particular the call to well-being or, to use
Terence Irwin’s term, to “mature nature,”50 a call that is issued by the Logos himself through the
law of nature. This achievement of mature being, though actualized by a particular agent’s
gnomic determinations and connected to his or her moral habituation, is by no means an event
limited to particular significance, but constitutes an active participation in the universal
constitution of human nature itself; it is a diachronic transition from what Nicholas Loudovikos
has described as mere natural “sameness” to a functional “consubstantiality” of created nature.51
This participatory consubstantializing on the part of rational creatures is strongly affirmed by a
passage from Question 39 of Maximus’s Ad Thalassium. Anagogically interpreting the
sojourning multitudes interaction with Christ in Matthew 15:32 as an interaction with the three
laws of the Logos, the Confessor provides the following description: “In lieu of the natural law
(ὑπὲρ δὲ τοῦ φυσικοῦ [νόμου]), the sojourning multitudes receive unfailing actualization of the
passions in a way that accords with nature (τὴν ἄπταιστον τῶν κατὰ φύσιν ἐνέργειαν) by which a
reciprocal relationship between each other is established (καθ’ ἣν ἡ ἀλληλοῦχος σχέσις
συνίσταται), such that every dispersive otherness (ἑτερότητα) and division is removed from
46 PG 91 12C.
47 Amb 41, 1312BC.
48 PG 91 12CD.
49 Amb 7, PG 91 1073C, Amb 65, PG 91 1392AB, and Char, PG 90 1049C.
50 The Development of Ethics, vol. 1, 146.
51 “Possession or Wholeness?: St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will,”
Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Fellowship 4 (2013): 265-6.
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nature.”52 Man’s volitional δύναμις and moral determinations are responsible for the
actualization of a given rational agent’s natural potential, yet also provide the means for a
gradual transition from a being in solipsistic isolation to one that participates in the community
of nature constituted by the oikonomia of the Incarnate Logos. Conversely, involuntarily
actualizing and gnomically constituting oneself in opposition to the natural law of the Logos, a
rational agent turns towards the solipsistic isolation of non-being and, as Maximus affirms
throughout his corpus, divides the divinely-intended unity of created nature.
Mankind, therefore, does not merely possess psychological freedom but also a form of
natural freedom, the ability to answer the logoi of being in ontological terms. However, if God
authors the beginning, end, and middle states of the diachronic flow of being, what is it that a
rational agent constitutes and actualizes? What is within the power of the human subject such
that he or she is able to disrupt participation in the consubstantiality of creation and exist in the
solipsism of bare being? The answer to this query is woven into many of Maximus’s carefully-
crafted theological engagements, but is, perhaps, most explicitly represented in the following
from Opusculum 1 when he affirms that “the logos of virtue is up to us,” which, when utilized, is
“the actualized law of existent natural powers.” 53 In other words, ontological freedom is the
capacity to realize natural destiny and co-actualize with the divine προορισμοί through the
virtues; this means that virtue, in a functional sense, is the maturation and realization of nature
itself, and is indeed what enables a being to be a participant in the aforementioned consubstantial
community of nature.
52 PG 90 393AB.
53 PG 91 24B. The context of the passage is as follows: “If man is the only one amongst all other animals who is by
nature capable of freely electing, and if the ability to freely elect consists in being able to cause things that are within
our power and up to us, those things whose ends are yet uncertain, and the logos of virtue is up to us, that is, the
actualized law of existent natural powers[…].” Maximus is building rhetorically here on what he takes to be
ontological givens.
12
To the modern mind-set—an outlook that involuntarily transmits the criteria of
deontological notions of morals—the idea of virtue being something that defines the difference
between natural freedom and the lack thereof might seem strange or inconsequential. Maximus,
however, regarded the virtues not only as the hallmarks of a transition to complete and natural
functionality but as also disclosing the very existential characteristics of divinity. As he explains
in the Quaestiones et Dubia, we attain a likeness to God by imitating His divine character, by
acquiring, to the extent possible, His virtues.54 This is also affirmed by Ambiguum 7 where
Maximus identifies the acquisition of virtue with participation in the Eucharistic reality
distributed by the Incarnate Logos, which, inter alia, also discloses the close connection between
natural eschatology and grace in Maximus’s thought and, thus, between the laws of grace and
nature.55 Yet, the most powerful testimony of his belief in the inherent ontological significance
of virtue comes via his doctrine of love. Departing from both the Aristotelian ethical tradition
and Evagrian ascetic teaching, Maximus establishes love as not only the primary virtue but the
very mechanism of the human attainment of a consubstantial mode of being. This is daringly
affirmed in the Ad Thalassium when he says, “the most general principle of all the virtues is
love, the logos of the all virtues, the most general and constitutive power of nature.”56 This
approach is clarified and grounded by Maximus in his famous Epistle 2 where he announces that
all forms of the virtues are fulfillments of the “power of love,” actualizing and leading towards
the establishment of nature in a complete and unified mode. 57 Here ontology and ethics
synchronize perfectly in Maximus’s expression. Every authentic virtue is a manifestation or,
54 Cf. Despoina Prassas’s translation, St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts (DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2010), 156-7.
55 PG 91 1081CD. Cf. Paul Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press), 117-18.
56 PG 90 397B.
57 PG 91 400AB.
13
better, a particular actualization of love, which is itself the unitary logos of virtue and
simultaneously the logos of created nature’s well-being. All true manifestations of virtue
constitute an expansion—a διαστολή, if you will—of the monad of love.58 In their contraction,
their συστολή, they aspire to and converge in the logos of love,59 progressively leading toward
humanity’s proper eschatological state: a mode in which nature consists of a functional
community, enabling genuine reciprocity between each rational being and between the Incarnate
Logos and His creatures
In closing, I would draw attention to the significance of Maximus’s approach for current
interconfessional discussions concerning ethics and human self-determination, discussions that
follow in the wake of the impasses created by the epistemological retreat of thinkers like Kant. In
the Confessor’s corpus we have an invaluable resource, namely, a form of natural law and divine
determinism that allows, no, insists on the immanent and personal character of divine oikonomia.
Yet, his theological and philosophical vision also permits rational creatures self-determination
that is not merely limited to the establishment of an internal disposition, but allows for the
exercise of real ontological freedom. Most pertinently, because of his inherently other-directed
approach to both ontology and virtue, Maximus offers us a philosophical vision of real unity and
real engagement with the other upon the field of universal nature. Other rational beings cease to
be abstractions or, worse, obstacles to moral autonomy, becoming instead co-actualizers of the
divine gift that is human nature.
58 Cf. Thal 55, PG 90 541BC for the μονάς/μυριάς of virtue.
59 Cf. Amb 21, PG 91 1249B.
14
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