the divine Word whose agency is entirely response to the gift

“The Word is that which the Father generates, yet this is not a static mirroring of ‘one’ to ‘another’, as the Father is always already the one who ‘breathes’ Spirit, the Spirit that eternally holds open the space in which the Word lives, and will also, in the finite world, realize the life of the Word within history.” —Rowan Williams (Looking East in Winter)

More context:

Another and equally important element in this Maximian reading is the ultimate grounding of what is said about human subjectivity in trinitarian theology. All sorts of themes converge on the focal reality of logos: in eternity, divine logos is the identity-in-difference of the divine as the limitless source of all. The next few chapters of the book trace these themes in a little more depth. Beyond finite reality, we recognize an infinite returning-to-itself of this limitless source—a limitless returning that does not and cannot exhaust the limitless source’s action in generating/‘breathing out’ divine life into an other. In the vocabulary of the tradition, the Word is that which the Father generates, yet this is not a static mirroring of ‘one’ to ‘another’, as the Father is always already the one who ‘breathes’ Spirit, the Spirit that eternally holds open the space in which the Word lives, and will also, in the finite world, realize the life of the Word within history. This is what infinite being simply is; and finite being is thus sustained by an eternal act that has this shape and no other. Hence we can say that resting upon, and being animated and directed by, Word and Spirit are the most important truths about all finite being and in a very distinctive sense the most important truths about human existence. To mature as a human is to grow more fully into this foundational reality. So our theological discussion of knowing, praying, acting, whatever else, is shaped by this; and what it means to become fully a created person is shaped by the eternal ‘filial’ reality of the divine Word whose agency is entirely response to the gift from the divine Source.

the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation

In the ancient or mediaeval worlds, the idea of the evolution of species would not necessarily have posed a very great intellectual challenge for the educated classes, at least ot on religious grounds. Aristotelian orthodoxy maintained the fixity of species, true, but one often finds a remarkably undogmatical approach to the questions of natural history in classical, patristic, and mediaeval sources, and (as I have noted) no dominantly great interest in a literalist reading of the creation narratives of scripture. It would not have been drastically difficult for philosophers or theologians to come to see such evolution as the natural unfolding of the rational principles of creation into forms primordially enfolded within the indwelling rational order of things.

The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart

the Logos becomes thick

Maximus walks the ancient path first tread by Irenaeus: Christ reveals the truth of creation. The truth he sees in the historical Incarnation is that everything, all of creation, the entire world, is that Word’s Incarnation. Maximus never qualifies his conviction that the Logos’s self-distribution as the logoi is an Incarnation of this Word. We might expect such qualification since he seems intent upon nestling them into the same category. In his famous and curt explanation of Gregory Nazianzen’s remark that “The Logos becomes thick,” Maximus proffers three instances where this is so: the Word’s historical Incarnation as Jesus Christ, his ineffable self-encryption as the logoi of all creatures, and his consent to be “embodied and expressed” in language.

Jordan Wood (“Creation is Incarnation: the Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logi in Maximus the Confessor” from the 2017 issue of Modern Theology)

the goal of the cosmos

As the goal of the cosmos, the Logos represented the hope that even the devil could finally be restored to wholeness in the restitution of all things—apokatastasis ton panton. And with the reformation of the world, humanity also shall be changed from the transient and the earthly to the incorruptible and the eternal. …All of these metaphysical constructs of fourth century Christian philosophers about the preexistent Word and Logos were supposed to find their religious and moral focus and even their intellectual justification in the historical figure of Jesus in the Gospels, in the humble word—sermo humilis—and in the glory of his passion on the cross.

From Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (chapter 5) by Jaroslav Pelikan (distinguished Yale historian and convert to Orthodoxy).

where you want your slave to go

Good stuff from an honest man. These are the lyrics to another Leonard Cohen song from his album Old Ideas.

“Show Me The Place”
by Leonard Cohen

Show me the place
Where you want your slave to go

Show me the place
I’ve forgotten I don’t know

Show me the place
For my head is bending low

Show me the place
Where you want your slave to go

Show me the place
Help me roll away the stone

Show me the place
I can’t move this thing alone

Show me the place
Where the Word became a man

Show me the place
Where the suffering began

The troubles came
I saved what I could save
A thread of light
A particle a wave
But there were chains
So I hastened to behave
There were chains
So I loved you like a slave

Show me the place
Where you want your slave to go

Show me the place
I’ve forgotten I don’t know

Show me the place
For my head is bending low

Show me the place
Where you want your slave to go
The troubles came
I saved what I could save
A thread of light
A particle a wave
But there were chains
So I hastened to behave
There were chains
So I loved you like a slave

Show me the place
Show me the place
Show me the place

Show me the place
Help me roll away the stone

Show me the place
I can’t move this thing alone

Show me the place
Where the Word became a man

Show me the place
Where the suffering began

crystallization in an earthly element

In principle, all languages are sacred because their constituent element, speech, or the word, is but an attenuated form of Primordial Speech, the Divine Word, which is the direct source of the creative act, as is shown by the following two quotations from Scripture: ‘God said: Let there be light!’ (Gen. 1:3). As it is written, because of language’s fundamental sanctity we shall have to account for ‘every idle word’; to utter an idle word is, in fact, somewhat equivalent to ‘taking the Name of God [as essential Word] in vain’. The sacredness of speech naturally extends to writing, which is the fixation of Sound–aerial by nature–and as if its crystallization in an earthly element. …This is why the handling of letters, or the art of writing, like the function of teaching, constitutes a skill directly related to the sacred, especially as literature itself is always originally sacred. The scribe, like the cleric, therefore belong by right to the priestly order, which directly represents the divine order on earth.

From Divine Craftsmanship by Jean Hani (5-6).

occupations and skills of God

A study of the ‘occupations and skills of God’ should normally begin with the two highest: the priesthood and kingship, except that these are no longer occupations properly so-called, but rather functions. These two functions are those of teacher and sacrificer, governor and judge, spiritual authority and temporal power, and are the immediate and most elevated reflections of the divine activity ad extra, and in particular of the Divine Word. As these functions go beyond the very notion of occupation, we shall postpone speaking of them until we come to explain the foundations of a sacred politics and sociology. We shall therefore concentrate in divinis on three occupation attached to and, to an extent, specifications of these two functions: the scribe, the physician and the warrior.

From Divine Craftsmanship by Jean Hani (5).