1:13:25
DAVID: So zeroing in, then, on the way that the event of Jesus or the event of the incarnation (and really, as John Behr would tell us, for the incarnation we need to look to the passion, and we need to look to Pascha not to Christmas), but looking at the passion and the way the passion reveals reality (so I’m gonna botch this and I know you’ll correct me on it), but Maximus says something to the effect of the crucifixion revealing the logos of judgment and the resurrection revealing the logos of the purpose of the world’s creation, right? Or do I have that reversed?
1:14:08
So no, actually, you have it right. There’s just another piece to it. …You’re rightly bringing together two things. One, so for example, in Centuries in Theology 166, it says, “He who knows the principles of the cross and the empty tomb, knows the principles of the world and all of its creatures.” Principles is logoi. And he also, by the way, says they also know the principles to unlocking the mysteries of scripture. …Well, …that little paragraph ends by, what you just said, which is, “He who knows the principles of the resurrection knows the purpose for which creation came to be.” So there’s that. There’s also another thing he says which is importantly related which is that, he says that the passion is the judgment of God, and the actual conception in Mary, the incarnation itself, is divine providence.
1:19:36
…For Maximus’s metaphysics—for a lot of reasons I won’t get into—what we experience, we also give existence to because you are a hypóstasis which is for him the fundamentals or element of being. What you can do (which is kind of at once an amazing but also a sort of harrowing idea) is that you can, for example, fundamentally imagine something and try to bring it into being by lending your very life or existence or self to it which is what makes sin so difficult and what makes, say, Evagrius’ instructions about the thoughts so essential (which is why he keeps all that). Because you need to know what sort of fantasy you might, what sort of a nightmare you might be laboring consciously or not to bring into being so that it’s not just a problem in your mind but it’s really a part of the world. But quote, as he says (and Origen and Gregory of Nyssa and all of them say), that’s why not everything that appears is a work of God. So you can experience something, right, that is actually a figment of your own imagination, but because you try to bring into being it doesn’t rest a mere figment it becomes even if incompletely or inadequately—usually that right—it becomes in some sense a phenomena, an illicit one that God never wills. So, by the way, his theory of evil is going to be a little more complicated than just privation, although that’s part of it. But I’m not going to do that right now. So all that to say, there’s something about experiencing which is also fundamentally active. In an almost metaphysical or ontological sense, you’re never simply experiencing something utterly external to you because you’re also always interpreting it and reacting to it simultaneously, right, and your very interpretation and then what you do in some sense contributes to the phenomenon being constructed. Go back to Christ in the passion. What is it that he experiences? Well, the full range of human emotion: grief in the garden, sadness, terror, fear. …But where do these come from, in some sense, is the question. Well one one of the things that this comes from is, actually, our sin. When he says Adam’s sin, I argue in the book, he means the sum total of all humanity’s sin—all individuals collectively and individually.
DAVID: To quickly pause, he says, as you’ve pointed out, that Adam falls from the first moment of his coming to be. …The way to understand that in what I am calling orthodox gnosticism is not that there’s a historical personage Adam who’s created fallen. It’s that there’s a spiritual humanity whose fall is it’s coming to be in time with the whole sarkic history that we could scientifically fill in with evolution, right, and in some sense that’s actually, we could also say, that is the orthodox gnostic or maximian or whatever explanation for all of cosmic history in so far as humans are microcosmic. We are radically connected to and contain everything else that exists and like so in some sense the whole evolutionary history of the universe with all of its death, suffering and horror is our fault even though we come to be at a particular moment through a particular set of processes within that story. There is a legitimate theological path to saying, “No, we caused this. We are responsible for this nightmare world.”
JORDAN: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. I mean, if salvation is the result of some event that happened in the middle of history so that I can say that what happened to him somehow saves me and deals with my sin, well, then obviously we’re already sort of—because, also, I would assume people would say it deals with the sin of those that came prior in history—so we’re already kind of abandoning in soteriology, or in our ideas of salvation from this one man Jesus Christ, we’re already abandoning, whether we know it or not, the idea of simple cause and effect through a series. Again, Melchizedek’s deification of salvation comes from the man Jesus on Golgotha. It doesn’t have any other source. There is only one grace which pours forth to the universe, and it’s that one, right. So it doesn’t respect time. It doesn’t need to. So we already kind of like concede that. I like to point that out to people. We already kind of conceived that, I mean just in the way we normally say, “Yeah, Christ save the world. His act, his work saves the whole world, even those that came prior.” So, yeah, exactly what you said. I like what you’re saying about the sort of orthodox gnosticism. Maximus says three different times that Adam fell, quote, “at the very instant he came to be” which is to say there has never been a true Adam, a true human, [a] fully perfected human being. I try to get into that in the chapter in the details about how that comes about in Maximus’s thought and why it’s more radical even than Irenaeus’s view, and how actually he combines Irenaeus’s view, Gregory of Nazianzus’s view and Evagrius’s view into one, and he does it christologically so it’s an incredible thing.
That goes back to the idea, again, [that] the passion is the judgment of God. What is the judgment of God? Well it’s a response to sin, but it’s also the beginning of providence, restoration. It comes about by the Word of God experiencing, on the one hand, the full range of the emotions which are themselves results of a sinful fallen world like fear, grief, sorrow, right all of this, desperation, hey, let’s go to the dereliction—abandonment, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken”—right, forsakenness, God forsakenness. These are a result of our collective Adam’s sin, and yet at the same time—what you alluded to with your remarks about evolutionary history—they are also, in some sense, the condition. Because in fact you, David Armstrong, weren’t born 2000 years ago, or 2 million, or 200. So you are born into a world in which Adam has already fallen. This is bizarre, now, because it means that the whole range of passions (which Maximus the monk is also very concerned to talk about passions and the dialectic of pain and pleasure which he does quite a lot), the passions themselves are—as they present, as we act, as we are experiencing them—both the condition and the consequence of Adam’s sin.
1:27:01
So when the true Adam, Christ, experiences them, in His passion, not only does he experience them as a result, a reaction (like, say, in the Origenist myth where God’s judgment is just a reaction to the falling intellects), but he actually in his very experience of them he gives himself, his hypóstasis, to them to be the condition for our own free development which can waver into sin. So this is a deep thing. It takes quite a lot more to unpack, but I’m just trying to give a taste here: where it says his act of being passive of suffering is simultaneously the creation of the possibility for our whole range of emotion and passions which are themselves the conditions of sin and the consequences of sin. So there’s a lot of simultaneities going on here. He’s simultaneously suffering so that he might actively transfigure our suffering into salvation and ultimately death, right, it’s trampled by death. Simultaneously he suffers passions which are themselves the simultaneous condition and cause of our, of all Adam’s, sin, the whole fallen world. But all of this he’s doing simultaneously by being, while being, the Word of God, divine, so that he himself the the Principle with a capital “p,” the Logos, is infusing in even the principles of our passions, the very power of his divinity, you might say the power of resurrection.
So the very passions by which we fall and create worse passions are still themselves imbued—imminently, deeply, buried, like in a tomb—they are buried with the principle of divinity itself, the Word of God himself, always there like a seed, he’ll say elsewhere, always there like the seed of the good to bud forth. So he’s infused [divine life within suffering and death].
By the way, this has crazy consequences, like, lots of them. But here’s just two. One of them is that it’s a simultaneity. (I’ll say it’s a Caledonian symmetry, simultaneity, or reciprocity.) …But let’s say it’s a simultaneity where it’s not only that he receives the results of all of our own sufferings and sin and wages of sin which is death, but also reciprocally, he suffers in all of us. In Maximus, by the way I’m not just saying that, it’s not interpretive, he explicitly says that in Mystagogy, I think, 24. And he definitely says it in the exposition on the Lord’s prayer. Actually, I think that’s where it is. No, I’m sorry, he says he mystically suffers in all of our suffering, that’s in the Mystagogy. In the exposition of the Lord’s prayer, when he’s talking about how the Lord became poor, he says that we are to (he became poor, like these statements about he’s the least of these, what you did to them he did to me, all that) Maximus says at one point, “God himself in the flesh says this to you. He’s saying to you that he actually receives whatever you do to others.” Ao there’s a fundamental personal reciprocity. It’s not just that the Aon takes on as a consequence of our sin. Right, he became sin and a curse for us according to Paul. It’s not just that he takes on all of our sin, but he inserts himself into our the very conditions for our sinning, and that is actually the seed which from within will destruct all of the all of the bs phenomenon that we create through our passions and we try to live into in the false world and the false selves we try to actualize and lend ourselves parasitically our own life for these fantasies to take on a life of their own. All of that will be destroyed and that destruction will actually be our salvation and resurrection.
1:31:12
DAVID: So I’m thinking of, too, I’m thinking of Paul talking about how I’m filling up the sufferings of Christ, or we are one with the sufferings of Christ. Then I’m also thinking of Origen, and I can’t think of where he says this, but he says at one point that (and I think it’s a commentary on maybe the last supper scene in Luke), but he says something to the effect of Christ will not taste the wine of the kingdom until I have been fully healed. He continues to suffer because I am still sinning, effectively, which goes hand in hand with what you’re saying, right?
1:31:50
JORDAN: Yes, strands in Origen absolutely hint at this. Gregory of Nyssa’s In Illud, I think, fundamentally offers the structure. Because what’s the issue there? It’s an exegetical one—1 Corinthians 15:28, the subjection of the Son of the father. What does that mean right? (And of course, Eunomius, they think they have [it.] Like, “look, how can you say that the Father and the Son are equal when the whole ending of the thing is the Son’s subjection to the Father?” So that’s a good passage for them.) So when Gregory of Nyssa, when he turns to it, he does a remarkable thing that not a lot of people comment on. He basically has to say: the Son’s subjection is ours. But the only way you can say that is if the Son is fundamentally identical to me and what happens to me happens to the Son. What an incredible thing. So, in order to protect the pro-nicene position, in order to protect the absolute divinity of the Son, you have to make him absolutely identical with us—because he is subject.
Origen already made the great point about [how] our submission has to be like because, of course, his shouldn’t be like, it’s not like he’s enslaved or subjugated. So he makes that point in the book one of On First Principles. But here Gregory goes a little further and says, actually, he also is submitting in us to the Father, and so that’s why it’s an incredibly universalistic text because it’s not until the whole of humanity is subject to the Father that the Son is subject to the Father. But the assumption operative throughout is: what happens to us happens to him. He explicitly says that.
So it’s the same kind of, that reciprocity, which comes from a fundamental identity or what I like to call in the book “the hypostatic identity” which generates the difference and therefore makes them reciprocal because it happens within one identity, the person of the Word. So the Word can be the subject of both sides, and as the subject he is the is—the identity of both, even though naturally they’re utterly opposed.
1:34:06
So all that to say, this is being actually worked out in the middle of history in the passion culminating in the crucifixion because he doesn’t just become sin for us as a reaction. (Like in the Origenist tradition, God judges the world as a reaction to the falling intellect’s sin, as it were, even if you say simultaneous or whatever.) It is in fact that he also becomes the fundamental condition, he gives himself to become the fundamental condition of his own rejection so that he might overcome that rejection by being within it, personally, always offering the divinity, the power of resurrection, the Holy Spirit, the graces which come through the sacraments, all of that stuff is always directly and immediately offered because he alone is the mediator between God and man as 1 Timothy says. …So when Maximus says the passion is the judgment, that’s a little glimpse of what he means. It is a lot going on.
So to back that up a little bit (and this will be a little easier to say). So when he then says that divine providence is the incarnation itself—from the conception, the annunciation to Mary, all the way through the ascension and ever and always in all things—what he is saying is that the term or the end (terminus) of providence is the hypostatic union. So that also has this sort of weird reciprocal causality there because, then, what he’s saying, you could say, the hypostatic identity which is effected in the annunciation through Mary’s consent (which is a whole other reciprocity between creature and creator), but let’s just say that’s a condition for the passion. He has to be the god-man who dies on the cross, but at the same time it’s also the goal of the passion. So the providence is at once the condition, right, and consequence of the passion, the judgment. And judgment is always infolded in province, and that idea was formally there in Evagrius already that these two, yes we’re saying they’re pairs, but they really are mutually implicating.
So what I what I argue at length (and I’ll close this portion with this), what I argue at length in the book in much more detail is that Maximus takes the the pairing, judgment and providence, mainly over from Evagrius and Didymus, and he fuses that together with Gregory of Nyssa’s idea of reciprocal causality (they were created, in a sense, already anticipating the fall) and he puts this together christologically and identifies them specifically within the work and quintessentially with the passion of Christ. That is what I mean when I say that the world came into being through Christ. With Maximus, I mean I’m interpreting and thinking through and with him, what I think that means is Christ became the ground for the true world which is always a cooperative synergistic effort between creator and creature (which is to say free), but he also then, at the same time becomes, the condition for the possibility of the false world we generate also because we’re free.
1:37:47
DAVID: And so let’s then go from protology to eschatology. So you’ve written elsewhere, and we’ve talked about this before, two points in eschatology that I think are really interesting and that I suspect you’re getting from maximus either directly or indirectly. One is that what one is that you’ve argued before the parousia logically has to heal all of time—that the final, the truly created world, is not a world where we have this dark history or something but it’s overcome and: “Yay! It’ll be good forever now, but we all kind of remember how bad it was.” It’s not like that. It’s like the parousia is literally from beginning to end, all of the suffering, all the evil, all of the death is consumed and it’s gone. With that, kind of a nice symbol of that that you’ve stressed is this idea (and I don’t know if this comes directly from Maximus or not) but the idea that the wounds of Christ themselves, [that] they are still there as a symbol of kind of the current coexistence of the real world and the false world and that when the false world disappears so too do the wounds. Do I have that right?
1:39:11
JORDAN: Yes, that’s what I think. I sadly can’t claim that Maximus said that so that I would have the authority to back up my view on that. I do think it’s an extrapolation, but, no, he never says that. He actually never comments on the wounds of Christ, interestingly, nor much on the resurrected body in, say, the account with Thomas in the Gospel of John. So it’s something I think, from all of this. I guess I could say this, if I wanted to root it in Maximus, I could say, fundamentally, this is how he understands Paul’s remark about “we are the body of Christ.” I mean explicitly in Ambiguum 7 which is otherwise a high-flying metaphysical treatise or reorienting of the whole Origenist view in this christological way, he will side by side quote Gregory of Nazianzus—“we are portions of God flown down from above”—right alongside his logoi doctrine: the logos becomes the logoi and the reverse. Then, right away, he will sight Ephesians: “You are members of Christ’s body.” So for him it’s like, “Look, see, that’s what he meant.” I mean the whole thing is like, look, what it means to be a member of the body of Christ isn’t like you’re a member of some cool club and your name’s on a list or something. It’s you, actually, functionally, you are a part of the body of Christ, and the body of Christ has at least this difference from our body—or the way we typically know bodies now—that is that his body is made up of spirits, a spiritual body.
There’s a whole (and you’ve already talked quite a bit to other people about all that) but make it cosmic, right, so not just a question about the consistency or the sort of nature of the bodies that are raised but the even bigger question about the one body. I mean, in Ambiguum 41 Maximus describes the cosmos again not, otherwise this wouldn’t be remarkable, but he says the cosmos comes together like the knitting of the parts of a body as if it were a single human being.
1:41:22
DAVID: A very Origen thing to do because that’s how Origen describes the world.
JORDAN: Exactly, and you could go all the way back to Plato’s Timaeus. …Look, I mean he calls the generation of this world a “second god” which is generated (using ganal), right, so generated from the first god who can also by the way be called the Father. Yeah, so this world is a living organism, right, all that. So that’s great. So you can go other places for the world as God’s body, but what I, again, and this is often the method I do in the book where it’s like: “Look I’m not saying he didn’t get things from other places. It’s totally fine, but let’s look at it in the matrix of his thought here.” And the determinate content takes on some really different or at least additional implications here.
What he’s saying is that, not just like the world is sort of manifesting God or even (and I know this is like a popular way of talking, it’s totally fine in itself), but it’s not even just theophanic, like the world’s diaphanous to the glory of the light coming pouring forth. It’s that the world doesn’t just reveal his glory, but that he personally is in the world: “what you do to the least of these, you do to me.” Or on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Or as you said earlier Colossians 1: “I fill up in myself the sufferings that are still lack to Christ.” Or Maximus says, “Jesus Christ,” this is a quote, “Jesus Christ, who is completed by me.” What? God the Word through whom all things were made is not “yet” entirely the Word (and I say “yet” in quotations because, again, it’s not temporal like that) is not fully who the Word is apart from the entirety of his body. “Always and in all things. Always and in all things.” The mystery of his incarnation, right?
So that’s the foundation, his theology of the body of Christ is cosmic of course and christological because all of it is Christ. He has one text where he’s commented—the question is “what is the body of Christ?” like, that’s the question put forth—he gives seven or eight different things. He’s like: the world itself, of course, the eucharist, right, each and every individual body is the body of Christ, each of us, and then he goes through all this stuff. And at the end, he says, “Really, to speak most truly, all of it collectively and all of it individually is the body of Christ.”
1:44:01
So that’s the basis. …So I’m thinking beyond that, and I want to say something that Maximus doesn’t say or doesn’t address, and I want to say: Okay, if that’s true, surely that means everything that’s ever existed in the moment, in an event within which it came to be. Let’s take the holocaust, let’s take, you know, whatever, there’s a million tragedies you can choose from. What am I to make of the claim, that’s the body of Christ too? If it’s the case that the body of Christ is itself the basis, the fundamental subsistence of anything that is. Now, you might say: “Well, privation theory of evil. It’s sort of a failure to be and all that.” That works kind of, but you know, also, it really is there. People remember it. People know it.
So what I want to say then (it might sound cute or sort of clever at first, but I think there’s something deeper that could be probed) is: the tragedies sit upon the timeline of history like the wounds on the body of Christ. They are still his body, but they are not yet fully perfected and healed as his body. In fact, his body isn’t fully perfect until those are healed and so whatever we… (I don’t really care at that point about our presumptions about history and the way time flows and what is fixed by the logic sequence and all that.) I’m sorry, I think theologically, and really even morally, there’s a sort of a revolution here, a rebellion, a moral rebellion, an existential rebellion, that says: God himself can fix the event qua event. It is not as if it’s past to God anyway. There’s that part. But it’s exactly because it’s not past to God that it remains a problem if it stands before God as tragedy, as unfulfilled event, as failure, as (what I think I call in that piece) like “misbegotten existence,” a miscarriage, right?
1:46:05
DAVID: Which is why, this is sort of why people, so as far as I understand the field of Maximus scholarship, there’s sort of an older view which chooses not to see universalism in Maximus, right, and then there’s sort of a growing view that says Maximus is almost certainly a universalists. I know where you fall. …Really, I mean, Origen already has this right, Gregory already has this right, David Bentley Hart has this right, that, if you read Paul, and when Paul says that “God becomes all in all,” right, you’re left with basically two bad options other than the universalist one. Either God becomes all in all by destroying some of the all that he can’t fill, in which case he doesn’t really become all in all, right? Or God becomes all in all, sort of coexisting with the experience of suffering and evil. And the evil and suffering of those creatures is never actually healed, in which case God is partly evil, like, is the only way that this is metaphysically possible, right? If let’s say, you know, I die, I’m suffering in hell fire because I’m so evil and I’m the only person there, you know, and God fills all things in the pleromic end of all creation but nothing changes for me fundamentally, it’s still, my experience, is still evil and suffering—that must fundamentally mean, metaphysically at the end of the day, that God is part evil and I’m simply the manifestation of that part of God that is evil, right?
It’s like universalism is really the only way that we get a God who can fill all things and be all things in all things, right, is through that like final healing of the entire created order which again if the created order is absolutely, quantitatively infinite. …Then it’s a God who (and I’m turning back to the Vedic language because I love the way they put this) you know, Brahman is like constantly engaging in this Lila of realizing all the different forms that God can be, right, and the experience of evil that those different manifestations of Brahman fall into, they are partly real in the sense that they influence—like they’re experientially real right and they determine the kind of orientation of those beings and everything—but they are finally illusory, and they have to be, because there’s nothing other than Brahman, there’s nothing other than God.
1:48:49
JORDAN: Which is to say, the only thing that’s real is what God wills. I don’t mean that in a volunteeristic sense, but it means that everything, insofar as you’re going to give—let’s say you’re going to valorize something with the term real—then you are also making the further claim, consciously or not, that that manifests the divine will which then manifests the divine character, who God is really. So when you’re faced with tragedy, what are you going to say? You either say that’s real and then you have this …you know there are trends in theology and stuff that …the death of God sort of thing that in some versions of processed theism, this is kind of the idea is that the tragedy itself is so real and we we dare not sort of denigrate that, that God himself sort of cowers before it. I actually don’t think it’s so different than a lot of the classical theists who hate the process stuff to simply say, like with Boethius or something, well in a sense God, you know, everything that is present to God [is] in an infinite indeterminate flash of an instant—the eternal now. Okay, well, what is present to God when, when… Is the holocaust present to God, then? Does it ever leave or go? …Okay, you might say it doesn’t emerge, it’s not subject to generation and corruption, the way a lot of phenomena are that we see now. But it did occur. It happened in some sense. Either God is confronted with it precisely because it’s not subject to generation and corruption, it’s always there, or else God sees nothing at all and isn’t aware of it. Right, so which is it? It’s another way of saying what you’ve already articulated in a metaphysical way, which is like either, right, either it stands there as a part of God like it’s evil, or it’s like God failed to be all God, all in all.
What I want to say then, in the perspective we’re talking about, is two things. …Well, actually, like three things. Let’s put some pieces together.
If the eschaton is God being all in all, then, almost by definition, it’s not like it’s just the last episode in a series of episodes, the denouement, the sort of …untying it. It has to be, if it really is all in all, that would include all moments qua moments, so it has to be the perfection not only at the end of a series but the perfection of all parts of the series. Okay, so there’s that part and then, as you say, it has to be God all in all, which is to say the full expression, theophanic glory manifest in all things. I don’t think tragedies manifest that. Therefore there’s something there which has not yet come to be. It’s not yet manifest, and so that still awaits perfection even though, from our perspective, it’s done and gone.
So there’s that right, that’s the general thing. Now, the other part of this, though, that’s harrowing really, is the universalist aspect. Actually, what universalism says is that tragedies are not yet done, not because …you want to respect the sort of ontic integrity of a tragedy as such and let’s not tinker with it (it happened and it’s gone but it’s still kind of always there in the past, however that works with God in time), but universalism says that we must right the wrongs no matter when they happened to occur in the seriality of time as we know it, as we experience it. So it’s a promise of the destruction of destruction, which is to say the salvation of all events, not just people who endure events, which is to say the perfect eventuation of every event. So tragedies are only half events—that’s privation, but they’re actually worse than that. They are events which have taken a false perfection. They are deformations, not in simply a privative sense, but more like when your body is deformed as Gregory of Nyssa says, right, like a wart is still a part of the body but it also disfigures it. It takes a false end and grows into it, and so it mars the body. So the only way you can deal with those tragedies and respect both the reality of it and the unreality of it, is to destroy it and in its destruction is actually its true perfection.
1:54:03
DAVID: And so I’m thinking of the crucifixion itself. I’m thinking of the crucifixion, and I’m thinking of the Johannine conflation of the crucifixion with the enthronement of the Son of Man, glorification. And I’m thinking to myself, like, the way that, on this reading of things, the way I’m thinking of that is that, in the true world, what we experienced as the crucifixion is actually Jesus’s enthronement as messiah and lord, right? It’s actually that moment in which Christ reigns on Zion over all of creation and leading all of creation, leading Israel, the nations, all all created worlds in worship of the one God. And in the fallen world, that becomes his abject vulnerability and suffering and death, and I feel like the evangelist, the Johannine evangelist, is actually gazing on the crucifixion with bifurcated vision. He is seeing the historical event, but he is seeing, shining through, the exact opposite. The darkness of the historical event is paradoxically manifesting the glory of what is supposed to be happening, right?
1:55:20
JORDAN: Yes. You might put it this way. The perfection of all tragedies, which I have said here, I’ve spoken in this way, has yet to occur. It, actually, has always occurred. So what could have been, hypothetically, is actually what is only, always, (again to use the term a little bit misappropriating it). So what John sees isn’t even just what’s supposed to happen (although that’s not wrong to say it that way) but is what is the only happening. The only actual happening of that moment is what he actually sees, even though he also still sees. So the “already not yet” isn’t just a linear thing nor is it simply a spatial thing like a higher [or] lower thing. It’s a meeting of the two.
DAVID: As manifested by the resurrection. Because, had there been no resurrection, right, Jesus is just another dead first century potential messianic claimant. It’s because of the glorification of Jesus after death that we now look back on the whole, really, like forwards and backwards on all of universal history. This, I think, also answers one of the questions I’d written and that you and I have talked about before. You know, if the cosmos is the body of Christ, how does that guarantee the uniqueness of Jesus? What I’ve come to see is that question is exactly the wrong way around because the cosmology and the protology and the eschatology that Maximus is articulating is a response to the whole of the paschal mystery, right? You start with the experience of the event of Christ as mediated to us, and then you try to construct our understanding of the world around that. It’s not a let me start from absolute first principles and work my way down. It’s, and in that sense it’s actually, I feel, like Maximus and Origen and Gregory and all of these people, they actually offer a theology that’s very credible, I think, in like a postmodern context. Because we’re not trying to do like God’s eye view of things, right? We’re starting from what we actually experience, this mystery of Christ crucified and risen, and we’re trying to extrapolate from that what has to be true for our experience of this to be valid.
1:57:49
JORDAN: Yes, exactly. …I hope everyone could, I think, if everyone’s honest with themselves, there is a fundamental judgment of faith, and what you take to be the canon of the real. Just because I experienced something doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s real. It’s real as a phenomenon. It doesn’t mean it’s real as the phenomenon, the one that it’s supposed to be, as it were, or always is in the one true world. So yes, you’re exactly right to say they begin there, and they have decided, in faith, and Maximus makes a huge deal of faith for this reason, I think. He calls it …he plays on, by the way, the idea in Hebrews 11 that faith is the, we usually translate it “substance of things hoped for,” well, it’s “hypostasis.” So that takes on a new resonance. Faith is the “person” of things hoped for. Well who’s that? Well, Christ in you, that’s who it is. Faith is, as it were, the first sort of pangs of the birth of Christ in your soul is another theme. But so Christ himself is faith really, and it’s Christ in you which is faithful. So that’s interesting.
…So it’s that. It’s exactly what you just said. I don’t presume that just because, you know, the world seems to me and to all of us to work this way that that is in fact the final limits. In fact, I make the argument in one of the chapters that for Maximus the fall can just as readily happen if you take, quote, natural limits as final actual existential limits: the limitations of what is real. So the limits of nature (nature is something you can conceive as an idea in your mind, you can know a definition, so how to differentiate this or that or you know how like this belongs in this genus therefore it doesn’t belong in this one) and so nature allows you to make these sort of abstract and not unreal but abstract divisions, but of course if you believe in the God-human, what is actually real needs to be chastened by the fact of the God-human rather than the limitations perceived by your abstractions. Which of course should show you, they should, that God and human beings can’t be the same thing, the same real, the same reality, the same hypostasis.
So this is where, I think, when you look at Christ and you say that is true hypostasis (and very often Maximus likes to speak in terms of creation as “giving hypostasis to”), if you think that that is real, that man, he is the (as Maximus also says, “he himself is not subject to any natural law but is in fact the telos of all law”), if you think that’s true, thenyou’re gonna turn to everything else, even things that seem to you immediately obvious and clear and real and substantial and you’re going to start, if you really, if you believe what you said about Christ, you’re going to start saying well, it seems like it’s impossible that… hey, but go back to something we said earlier: that two places could in some sense, right, be in fact interpenetrating and that Mr. Raven over here (in Lilith, the George McDonald book) can say, “Oh, actually you are standing in your study even though you’re standing here in the woods.”
2:01:18
That seems like naturally wrong, abstractly it seems just a kind of confusion, a category error. But if you take Christ as the measure of reality itself, then you need to just go ahead and start doubting reality as it presents itself to you, and he thinks that we when we don’t do that, that’s the source of the fall because we cling to the finite, the limited naturally conceived, as if it were actually the limits of reality itself which then makes us afraid because death is my end. And I want to avoid it, and I need to survive so how could I love my enemy, right? So it becomes ethical as well as spiritual.
That’s all a long way of, I think, agreeing with you. It’s very much that procedure, what you said. …I try to end the book this way. In the conclusion, I try to do this (it’s a little abstract and I know that but sometimes that does get to the point quicker), but what I try to claim there (and I do find some help in Hegel, but, honestly, I found it in Maximus first) [is] if we speak in terms of universal versus particular, we are simply speaking in terms of what I would call, in the book, “the logic of essence or nature” or what you might just call “abstract logic” which is to say these two co-determine each other. What do I mean? Well something is universal exactly because it isn’t particular. Thus I find humanness in you, in your particular, and in me and in people in the past and in people in the future. So obviously, it’s universal. That’s what a universal is, it shows up in many different particulars. Which is to say, it can’t be particular in order to be universal. That’s how you even discern what a universal is and how you define it for your middle schoolers. …You got to start there. You’re like, well, look, here’s a water bottle. Do you have a water bottle? Okay, why do you use the same name? This is just Socrates, right, back, all the way back, Euthyphro, right? (I mean not the water bottle, but, you know….)
But that’s how you even come to apprehend what a universal means, signifies. It is exactly that it shows up in many particulars. So the first lesson it tells you about itself is that it’s not particular. What it means to be universal, necessarily, is determined by the fact that it is not particular, and the reverse. Where do I find David or where do I find this particular water bottle here, not this brand, not this style, this one, only right here, so it’s utterly confined to this time, this place. So that means it’s not universal which is what it means to be particular. I bring all that up because what it means is, thinking in terms of universal or particular, automatically means thinking in terms of mutual dialectical determination where you’re really speaking about just two poles which form one continuum of a dialectic. If we frame the question about Christ’s primacy and uniqueness as if what it means to be prime is just to be particular, such that Christ can’t be universally, say, present always and in all things accomplishing the mystery of his incarnation, if he has to be not universal in order to be particular, then actually we haven’t thought very much about what we mean by primacy or exceptionality of Christ or the primacy or the uniqueness of Christ because we haven’t made him unique at all. He’s just another particular.
So what I try to argue or close in the book, and Maximus has some really helpful material getting exactly at some of this, which is, where I try to say, it’s exactly Christ’s uniqueness is actually most manifest in the fact that he is both particular and universal as one person, as himself. He is, in fact, the condition of the very dialectic that we were framing the question with, to begin with. He’s that much above it, that he can be all of it. And isn’t that just the logic of incarnation anyway. He is so much, he is not simply divine abstractly (like a list of attributes of mortal, impassable and others), nor is he simply human, as we know it (a list of attributes, mortal, right, central, sinful). He is both at once, which is to say his person isn’t reducible to either abstractly. And that’s why Maximus can make the incredible claim that in Christ, quote, “God has shown himself to be beyond humanity and divinity.” What it means to be beyond divinity is to be able to be both divine and human or, as he puts it elsewhere, the God beyond God.
So all that to say, exactly, agreeing with you. We frame, and it’s actually fine. You’ve got to start somewhere. So it’s okay. I’m not mad about it, but it’s just the framing of the question (“So is he unique if he’s everywhere and always in all things?”) actually already hasn’t yet allowed the logic of Christ or, what I call in the book, “christologic” to chasten the very definition or logic of the terms because there is something more than universal and particular. It’s Jesus.
DAVID: That’s a great mic drop. I’m conscious of time. Obviously, we’re going to do this again. So, Jordan, thanks so much for doing this, and, yeah, like I said, we’ll do this again.
Copious Flowers 