10.31.07
How Christ healed our nature; passibility and impassibility
“On Jesus Christ, the New Adam Who ‘Became Sin’”
Ad Thalassium 42
Q. How is it that we are said to commit sin and know it (1 Jn 1:8), while the Lord became sin but did not know it? How is it not more serious to become sin and not know it, than to commit sin and know it? For the Scripture says, For our sake God made him become sin who knew no sin (2 Cor 5:21).
R. Having originally been corrupted from its natural design, Adam’s free choice corrupted along with it our human nature, which forfeited the grace of impassibility. Thus came sin into existence. The first sin, culpable indeed, was the fall of free choice from good into evil; the second, following upon the first was the innocent transformation of human nature from incorruption into corruption. For our forefather Adam committed two “sins” by his transgression of God’s commandment: the first “sin” was culpable, when his free choice willfully rejected the good; but the second “sin”, occasioned by the first, was innocent, since human nautre unwillingly put off its incorruption. Therefore our Lord and God, rectifying this reciprocal corruption and alteration of our human nature by taking on the whole of our nature, even had in his assumed nature the liability to passions which, in his own exercise of free choice, he adorned with incorruptibility. And it is by virtue of his assumption of this natural passibility that he became sin for our sake, though he did not know any deliberate sin because of the immutability of his free choice. [notes say that Maximus later in the Opusculum retracted any notion of Christ having a gnomic will that may be read into this passage]
Therefore the Lord id not know “my sin”, that is, the mutability of my free choice. Neither did he assume nor become my sin. Rather, he became the “sin that I caused”; in other words, he assumed the corruption of human nature that was a consequence of the mutability of my free choice. (me: this is opposite what a Protestant, whose name I wont mention, former Maximosophile tried to teach. He said Christ personally committed and was culpable for all the sins in the world.) For our sake he became a human being naturally liable to passions, and used the “sin” that I caused to destroy the “sin” that I commit. Just as in Adam, with his own act of freely choosing evil, the common glory of human nature, incorruption, was robbed-since God judged that it was not right for humanity, having abused free choice, to have an immortal nature-so too in Christ, with his own act of freely choosing the good, the common scourge of our whole nature, corruption, was taken away.
I think Maximus is distinguishing between nature and person here. He assumed fallen, sin-leaning human nature, not personal responsibility, and through hypostatically choosing not to sin in ‘every way that we are tempted’, He conquered it’s power over us.
At the resurrection of Christ, human nature was transformed into incorruption because his free choice was imutable. For God judged that it was right for man, when he did not subvert his free choice, once again to recover an immortal nature. By “man” here I mean the incarnate Logos in virtue of the fact that he united to himself, hypostatically, the flesh animated by a rational soul. For if the deviance of free choice introduced passibility, corruptibility, and mortality in Adam’s nature, it only followed that in Christ, the immutability of free choice, realized through his resurrection, introduced natural impassibility, incorruptibility, and immortality.
…Accordingly he has driven sin, passion, corruption, and death from human nature, and the economy of Christ’s philanthropy on my behalf has become for me, once fallen through disobedience, a new mystery. For the sake of my salvation, Christ, through his own death, voluntarily made my condemnation his own, thereby granting me restoration to immortality. (!!!!!)
In many ways, I think, it has been shown in this brief discussion both how the Lord became sin but did not know it, and how humanity did not become sin (me: pah, total depravity) but did commit and know sin-both the deliberate “sin” which man committed first, and the subsequent natural “sin” to which the Lord submitted himself on humanity’s account, even when he was completely free of the first kind of sin.
The Now and the Not Yet part 2
I found the last St. Maximus passage especially challenging, which is why I didn’t try to put it in my own words. Thankfully I got some help at Energetic Procession in how to view this passage in light of the Saint’s activity or passivity in the eschaton. I’ll post JKC’s comment,
“I think the quote you gave can be understood by other writing found in On the Cosmic Mystery Of Jesus Christ. I don’t have enough time to quote much of anything, but I will give you some pages for what I believe he is not saying in that quote.
Actions proper to our nature are not taken away
Page 91 Deification is not a change in nature, but an innovation which changes the mode and domain of action proper to the nature.
We don’t lose the power of self-determination
Page 92-93 (Ambiguum 42) Basically the power of self-movement and self-determination are inherent in human nature.
We don’t lose the ability to exercise free will
Page 52 (Ambiguum 7) That which is in our power, our free will, will freely surrender to God and in doing so we will have mastery over wills. We freely displace, or we voluntarily, through self determination, hand over our self determination
On page 52 there is another quote of Maximus in note 19: “I do not do away with the natural activity of those who undergo this experience, as though it’s natural activity had ceased…”
We are not inactive
Page 126 (Ad, Thalassium 60) There is authentic knowledge gained by active engagement through experiential perception.
What I do think he is basically saying is that we will be just like Christ when he said not my will, but your will (P. 52) I think it gets difficult to visualize the concepts that Maximus explains, but I believe we can look to Jesus’ actions and see what Maximus is saying in concrete form. Jesus was not standing in a field somewhere unable to move because he was unable to take his eyes off some great big ball of light. That’s the mental picture I get of the eschaton when I read Maximus.”
10.25.07
The Now and the Not Yet
“On Jesus Christ and the End of the Ages”
Ad Thalassium 22
Q. If in the coming ages God will show his riches (Eph 2:7), how is it that the end of the ages has already come upon us (1 Cor 10:11)?
R. He who, by the sheer inclination of his will, established the beginning of all creation, seen and unseen, before all the ages and before that the beginning of created beings, had an ineffably good planfor those creatures. The plan was for him to mingle, without change on his part, with human nature by true hypostatic union, to unite human nature to himself while remaining immutable, so that he might become a man, as he alone knew how, and so that he might deify humanity in union with himself. Also, according to this plan, it is clear that God wisely divided “the ages” between those intended for God to become human, and those intended for humanity to become divine.
Thus the end of those ages predetermined for God to become human has already come upon us, since God’s purpose was fulfilled in the very events of his incarnation. The divine Apostle, having fully examined this fact…and observing that the end of the ages intended for God’s becoming human had already arrived through the very incarnation of the divine Logos, said that the end of the ages has come upon us (1Cor 10:11). Yet by “ages” he meant not ages as we normally conceive them, but clearly the ages intended to bring about the mystery of his embodiment, which have already come to term according to God’s purpose.
Since, therefore, the ages predetermined in God’s purpose for the realization of his becoming human have reached their end for us, and God has undertaken and in fact achieved his own perfect incarnation, the other “ages”-those which are to come about for the realization of the mystical and ineffaable deification of humanity-must follow henceforth. In these new ages God will show the immeasurable riches of his goodness to us (Eph 2:7), having completely realized this deification in those who are worthy. For if he has brought to completion his mystical work of becoming human, having become like us in every way save without sin (Heb 4:15), and even descended into the lower regions of the earth where the tyranny of sin compelled humanity, then God will also completely respect, of course, short of an identity of essence with God; and he will assimilate humanity to himself and elevate us to a position above all the heavens. It is to this exalted position that the natural magnitude of God’s grace summons lowly humanity, out of a goodness that is infinite. The great Apostle is mystically teaching us about this when he says that in the ages to come the immeasurable riches of his goodness will be shown to us (Eph 2:7).
…In short the former (ages which have already reached their proper end) have to do with God’s descent to human beings, while the latter (ages which have not yet arrived) have to do with humanity’s ascent to God.
Or rather, since our Lord Jesus Christ is the beginning, middle, and end of all the ages, past and future, the end of the ages – specifically that end which will actually come about by grace for the deification of those who are worthy-has come uon us in potency through faith [notes: For this "realized" eschatology as expressed in Maximus's baptismal theology, where he suggests that the grace of adoptiona (and so too deification) is already fully present in potency through faith before it is actualized through the knowledge acquired in spiritual experience.]
…there is one principle of activity and another of passivity…in the past and future “ages”. Accordingly the ages of the flesh, in which we now live (for Scripture also knows the ages of time, as when it says that man toiled in this age and shall live until its end [Ps. 48:10]) are characterized by activity, while the future ages of the Spirit, which are to follow the present life, are characterized by the transformation of humanity in passivity. Existing her and now, we arrive at the end of the ages as active agents and reach the end of the exertion of our power and activity. But in the ages to come we shall undergo by grace the transformation unto deification and no longer be active but passive; and for this reason we shall not cease from being deified. At that point our passion will be supernatural, and there will be no principle restrictive of the divine activity in infinitely defying those who are passive to it. For we are active agents insofar as we have operative, by nature, a rational faculty for performing the virtues, and also a spiritual faculty, unlimited in its potential, capable of receiving all knowledge, capable of transcending the nature of all created beings and known things and even of leaving the “ages” of time behind it. But when in the future we are rendered passive (in deification), and have fully transcended the principles of beings created out of nothing, we will unwittingly enter into the true Cause of existent beings and terminate our proper faculties along with everything in our nature that has reached completion. We shall become that which in no way results from our natural ability, since our human nature has no faculty for grasping what transcends nature. For nothing created is by its nature capable of inducing deification, since it is incapable of comprehending God. Intrinsically it is only by the grace of God that deification is bestowed proportionately on created beings. Grace alone illuminates human nature with supernatural light, and, by the superiority of its glory, elevates our nature above its proper limits in excess of glory.
So it does not seem, then, that the end of the ages has come upon us (1Cor 10:11) since we have not yet received, by the grace that is in Christ, the gift of benefits that transcend time and nature. Meanwhile, the modes of the virtues and the principles of those things that can be known by nature have been established as types and foreshadowings of those future benefits. It is through these modes and principles that God, who is ever willing to become human, does so in those who are worthy. And therefore whoever, by the exercise of wisdom, enables God to become incarnate within him or her and, in fulfillment of this mystery, undergoes deification by grace, is truly blessed, because that deification has no end. For he who bestows his grace on those who are worthy of it is himself infinite in essence, and has the infinite and utterly limitless power to deify humanity. Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings created by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those-like us human beings-who have received their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.
10.24.07
Okay, the Unity of the Human Person page is working now
In case you tried earlier and it wasn’t.
Being Spiritual does not mean being immaterial
Bishop Ware draws on St. Maximus’ Ambigua 41 and elsewhere to explain this topic in:
THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON:
THE BODY-SOUL RELATIONSHIP IN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
by
BISHOP KALLISTOS OF DIOKLEIA
You have made me and laid Your hand upon me; Your knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great, and I cannot attain to it.
Psalm 138 [139]: 5-6
Microcosm and mediator
In any dialogue between theology and science, there is one basic truth, which as Christians we must keep continually in view. Spirit and matter are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are interdependent; they interpenetrate and interact. When speaking, therefore, of the human person, we are not to think of the soul and the body as two separable ‘parts’, which together comprise a greater whole. The soul, so far from being a ‘part’ of the person, is an expression and manifestation of the totality of our human personhood, when viewed from a particular point of view. The body is likewise an expression of our total personhood, viewed from another point of view – from a point of view that, although different from the first, is complementary to it and in no respect contrary. ‘Body’ and ‘soul’ are thus two ways of describing the energies of a single and undivided whole. A truly Christian view of human nature needs always to be unitary and holistic.
It is true that, in our daily experience, we often feel within ourselves not undivided unity but fragmentation and conflict, with soul and body in sharp opposition to one another. It is this that St Paul expresses when he exclaims: ‘O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?’ (Romans 7:24). St John Climacus (7th century) voices the same perplexity when he says of his body, ‘He is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent, a protector and a traitor. ….What is this mystery in me? What is the principle of this mixture of body and soul? How can I be both my own friend and my own enemy?’1 But if we feel within ourselves this dividedness and warfare between our soul and our body, that is not because God has made us that way, but because we are living in a fallen world, subject to the consequences of sin. God for His part has created us as an undivided unity; it is we human beings who through our sinfulness have undermined that unity, although it is never altogether destroyed.
Whenever, therefore, we find passages in the Bible or the Fathers which seem to affirm an antagonism and division between body and soul, or which appear to condemn the body as evil, we have to ask ourselves: To what level of human existence does the text in question refer?
(Click this page for the remainder in it’s original pdf file)
10.23.07
More on how Christ conquered sin and healed the human will
Ad Thalassium 21 cont.
“Then, after having overcome and frustrated the forces of evil, the principalities and powers, through his first experience of being tempted with pleasure, the Lord allowed them to attack him a second time and to provoke him, through pain and toil, with the further experience of temptation so that, by completely depleting them, within himself, of the deadly poison of their wickedness, he might utterly consume it as though in a refiner’s fire. For he put off the principalities and powers at the moment of his death on the cross, when he remained impervious to his sufferings and, what is more, manifested the (natural human) fear of death, thereby driving from our nature the passion associated with pain. [notes: The issue of Jesus's natural human fear of death is one which Maximus raises early in his writing, in the Commentary on the Lord's Prayer, where he affirms a "gnomic", or deliberative, will in Jesus but urges that in the face of death, Jesus did not waver but thoroughly stabilized his (Greek word, will?). Yet the issue became acute later on in the heat of the Monothelite controversy, where Maximus ultimately denied a gnomic will in christ, and spelled out more fully the character of Jesus's fear of death in his christological Opuscula on the Agony of Christ in Gethsemane and in his Disputation with Pyrrhus. In the Disputation, he indicates that Christ blamelessly "used" fear for our sake, in effect pioneering a new and edifying mode of that fear as part of the conforming of human volition to the divine will. On this point, see also "The Passion of Jesus Christ in Maximus the Confessor: A Reconsideration".] Man’s will, out of cowardice, tends away from suffering, and man, against his own will remains utterly dominated by the fear of death, and, in his desire to live, clings to his slavery to pleasure.”
His first temptation was to deny pleasure in the wilderness, his second temptation was to deny denying pain. He rebuffed the devil in the first, overcoming slavery to pleasure; and he allowed him to act in the second, but thereby defeated human tendancy to succomb to the fear of death. In both cases Jesus did the uncomfortable, painful thing.
“So the Lord put off the principalities and powers at the time of his first experience of temptation in the desert, thereby healing the whole of human nature of the passion connected with pleasure. Yet he despoiled them again at the time of his death, in that he likewise eliminated from our human nature the passion connected with pain. In his love of humanity, he accomplished this restoration for us though he were himself liable; and what is more, in his goodness, he reckoned to us the glory of what he had restored. So too, since he assumed our nature’s liability to passions, albeit without sin (Heb. 4:10), thereby inciting every evil power and destructive force to go into action, he despoiled them at the moment of his death, right when they came after him to search him out. He triumphed (Col 2:15) over them and made a spectacle of them in his cross, at the departure of his soul, when the evil powers could find nothing at all [culpable] in the passibility proper to his human nature. For they certainly expected to find something utterly human in him, in view of his natural carnal liability to passions. It seems that in his proper power and, as it were, by a certain “first fruits” of his holy and humanly begotten flesh, he completely freed our human nature from evil which had insinuated itself therein through the laibility to passions. For he subjugated-to this very same natural passibility-the evil tyranny which had once ruled within it (within that passibility I mean).
It would be possible to interpret this text differently, in a more mystical and sublime sense. As you know, however, we must not commit the ineffable truths of the divine teachings of Scripture to writing. Let us rest content with what has been said, which should assuage our curiosity about this text. With God’s help, and as long as it will be found worthy in your eyes, we shall still inquire, with a zeal to learn, into the apostolic thinking on this.”
My reaction is that we can handle what he would have said! Who knows. Thinking through passibility. Christ’s humanity was passible – naturally avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. But through not yeilding to this passibility and instead deifying human nature by His divine energies, Christ made His human nature rise above normal impulses, and instead made it participate in the salvation of the universe.
10.22.07
The missing Ambigua 41
Hurray, I found at least part of it on an Anglican site , but it doesn’t go into how the Virgin birth united the division between male and female.
“2 Maximos the Confessor, ambig. (De ambigua) 41 (PG 91, 1305BC): “For this reason (for the union with God) the human being is brought in as the last thing to come to being, a sort of natural summing up of the whole, who by nature mediated between the extremes, uniting what by nature is separated. In this way the human being brings all things to God as their source, in a process of unification, beginning with our own dividedness and through mediation drawing closer to God in a coherent ordering, so that the boundary of our highest ascent in which we are united with all things is to be found there where there is no separation. Thus in a moment of vision of the divine virtue we shake from ourselves the sexual differentiation of our nature– which in no way was part of the original divine intention for humanity-so that, in accordance with God’s intention, we as human beings appear simply as human, not separated by what we call male and female. Corresponding to this original plan we are no longer divided by the parts we now have, and this takes place, as I have already said, through perfect knowledge of the ground of our own being.”"
There’s probably more to this particular Ambigua. My speculation is that Mary, similar to the way we bring and offer up the Eucharistic bread, offered herself up to God and Christ’s conception occurred at the Epiclesis, when the Holy Spirit overshadowed her. She represents all of humanity, male and female, to whom God is joined in the Incarnation. Also, the Fathers frequently juxtapose events of creation and the fall to the Incarnation, like how God took Eve from Adam as Christ is taken from Mary, so just as Adam was before his female side was removed, perhaps in the Incarnation, the female side was returned in Christ. Thus he relates equally to women as to men. Yet he was still male, as Adam was, and as God is referred to. But women are not an aberration of humanity, and maybe it is why it is way less weird for a girl to wear pants, than for a man to wear a dress. We were drawn out of men, men weren’t drawn out of us, and we are both made in God’s image.
10.20.07
Second Hat, I mean Scarf, Tip o’ the day to ya
Word from the Desert
Meditations on the Orthodox Life from the Early Church Fathers, Ascetics, Saints and Righteous
Love which stems from created things…
…is like a small lamp whose light is sustained by being fed with olive-oil. Again, it is like a river fed by rainfall; once the supply that feeds it fails, the surge of its flow abates. But love whose cause is God is like a spring welling up from the depths. Its flow never abates, for God alone is that spring of love whose supply never fails.
St. Isaac the Syrian (Isaac of Nineveh), 7th century
How Christ freed us from sin
Ad Thalassium 21
…In his love of humanity, the only begotten Son and Logos of God became perfect man, with a view to redeeming human nature from this helplessness in evil. Taking on the original condition of Adam as he was in teh very beginning, he was sinless but not incorruptible, and he assumed, from the procreative process introduced into human nature as a consequence of sin, only the liability to passions, not the sin itself [very frustrating note: Elsewhere Maximus explicitly describes the virginal conception and birth of Christ (the New Adam) as the very means by which he inaugurates the new tropos of human existence (Ambigua 31 {which is not in this book!}). Indeed precisely in his becoming incarnate through the virginal birth he overcomes the division between male and female altogether (Abigua 41 {which is also not in this book!!!*})]
*How can they leave this out. Overcoming the division between male and female is one of the 5 Recapititulated divisions in St. Maximus’ whole cosmology. That stinks.
Since, then, through the liability to passions that resulted from Adam’s sin, the evil powers, as I already said, have hidden their activities clandestinely under the law of human nature in its current circumstance, it merely follows that these wicked powers-seeing in God our Savior the same natural liability to passions as in Adam, since he was in the flesh, and thinking that he was necessarily and circumstantially a mere man, that the Lord himself had to submit to the law of nature, that he acted by deliberation rather than true volition-assailed him. These evil powers hoped to use natural passibility to induce even the Lord himself to fantasize unnatural passion and to do what suited them. They tried to do this to him who, in his first experience of temptation by pleasure, subjected himself to being deluded by these evil powers’ deceits, only to put off those powers by eliminating them from human nature, remaining unapproachable and untouchable for them. Clearly he won the victory over them for our sake, not for his own; and it was for us that he became a man and, in his goodness, inaugurated a complete restoration. For he himself did not need the experience, since he is God and Sovereign and by nature free from all passion. He submitted to it so that, by experiencing our temptations, he might provoke the evil power and thwart its attack, putting to death the very power that expected to seduce him just as it had Adam in the beginning.
This, then, is how, in his initial experience of temptation, he put off the principalities and powers, removing them from human nature and healing the liability to hedonistic passions, and in himself canceled the bond (Co. 2:14) of Adam’s deliberate acquiescence in those hedonistic passions. For it is by this bond that man’s will inclines toward wicked pleasure against his own best interest, and that man declares, in the very silence of his works his enslavement, being unable, in his fear of death, to free himself from his slavery to pleasure.
tbc
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