Five Distinctions of Maximus’ Cosmology – what Christ Recapitulates

by Newnameelizabeth

“1. The distinction between Uncreate and create being.

2. The distinction between intelligible and sensible.

3. The distinction within the sensible creation, between heaven and earth. (how diff from #2?)

4. The distinction on earth between paradise and the world of men. (again seems the same)

5. The distinction in humanity between man and woman, the masculine and the feminine.

These distinctions are in and of themselves good, but become dialectically opposed by man’s fall.

(later Dr. Farrell restates them thus)

By His seedless generation from the Mother of God He overcomes the opposition not only of Uncreate and created natures, but of male and female as well. When He says in St. Luke 23:43 to the penitent thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise,” he overcomes the opposition between earth and Paradise. By His bodily Ascension into heaven He overcomes the opposition between earth and heaven, “thereby manifesting the essential unity of sensible nature beyond any separation.” By His continued bodily Ascension beyond the angelic orders of the intelligible world, He overcomes the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible, and reconstitutes human nature in Himself to be the microcosm once again. Finaly, by virtue of the Incarnation itself, He effects the complete interpenetration of divine and human natures, being the Logos of all logoi proper to deity and to humanity.”

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Me: So this is how each stage of Christ’s life was necessary to repetitiously and in different manners and applications, to comprehensibly deify our whole existence, “God became Man so that man can become god” – St. Athanasius requoting St. Irenaeus.