The Five Divisions of Being

In Ambiguum 41 St. Maximus the Confessor sets out five great divisions (diaireseis) that structure the whole of reality, and assigns to the human person the vocation of mediating and uniting them — the role of cosmic mediator. This file presents the five divisions, the human task of binding creation together and offering it to God, the failure of fallen humanity to accomplish this, and the way Christ achieves all five mediations in his own person. The theme has given Maximus’ theology its enduring title, the “cosmic liturgy.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Five Divisions (Ambiguum 41)

Ambiguum 41 is the great text of Maximus’ cosmic anthropology. He describes the whole of reality as articulated by five divisions, arranged from the most fundamental to the most particular (Constas, ed. and trans., On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol. 2, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 29, Harvard University Press, 2014; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2nd ed., Open Court, 1995, ch. 5):

Uncreated and created — the division between God and everything that is not God; the most basic ontological distinction of all.
Intelligible and sensible — within the created order, the distinction between the noetic/spiritual realm and the perceptible/material realm.
Heaven and earth — within the sensible world, the distinction between the heavenly and the earthly.
Paradise and the inhabited world (oikoumenē) — within the earth, the distinction between paradise and the wider habitable world.
Male and female — within humanity, the distinction between man and woman.

These five divisions describe a cosmos that is differentiated but not thereby fractured: the divisions are good, the natural articulations of a richly ordered creation. The danger is that, under the conditions of the Fall, difference hardens into separation and opposition.

The ordering of the list is itself theologically loaded. It descends from the absolute (the gulf between Creator and creature) through successively narrower distinctions to the most intimate (the difference of the sexes within the single human nature). This is the order of contemplation — the way the mind analyzes reality from the top down. But, as Maximus stresses, the order of unification runs the other way: the mediator begins with the nearest division and works upward toward the most fundamental. The last division to be made — male and female — is the first to be healed; the first division named — uncreated and created — is the last and highest to be bridged, and that final bridging is deification itself. The structure thus contains a whole spiritual itinerary in compressed form.

The Human Vocation as Mediator

The human person stands at the meeting-point of these divisions. Composed of body (sensible) and soul (intelligible), and made male and female, the human being is a microcosm that gathers the whole of reality into itself — and is thereby uniquely fitted to be its mediator (mesitēs). Maximus’ anthropology is a theology of vocation: humanity was created precisely in order to unite what is divided, binding the five divisions together through love and right use of nature, and so to offer the whole reconciled cosmos back to God (Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, Routledge, 1996, ch. 4).

The mediations are accomplished in the reverse order of the divisions — from the most particular upward to the most fundamental. Humanity was to:

transcend the division of male and female, overcoming it not by abolishing the sexes but by realizing the one undivided humanity according to the logos of human nature;
reunite paradise and the inhabited world, making the whole earth a paradise through holy life;
reunite heaven and earth, joining the earthly and heavenly realms of the sensible creation;
reunite the intelligible and the sensible, drawing the whole created order into a single harmony;
and finally unite the created with the Uncreated — offering the unified cosmos to God and receiving, through grace and deification, the union of creation with its Creator.

This ascending series is at once a cosmology and a program of theosis: the mediator does not erase the natural distinctions but heals their fallen opposition, binding all things in love and presenting them to God.

A crucial nuance, much discussed in modern scholarship, concerns the first mediation. Maximus’ language about transcending “male and female” has been read by some as implying the abolition of sexual difference in the eschaton and by others as the healing of its fallen use rather than the erasure of the distinction itself; the interpretation bears on how literally his protology and eschatology of the body are to be taken (see the debate surveyed in connection with Ambiguum 41 in recent literature, e.g., the studies in Analogia and the Oxford Handbook). What is not in doubt is the principle: the mediator overcomes division by living according to the logos of human nature, in which the deeper unity of humanity is more fundamental than its differentiation. The mediation is achieved by virtue and grace, not by the destruction of nature — a point that distinguishes Maximus’ vision sharply from the Origenist dream of a return to bodiless, undifferentiated unity (see Logoi of Creation).

This is why Maximus calls the human being a bond (syndesmos) of the cosmos. Uniquely poised between intelligible and sensible, between heaven and earth, the human person is the one creature whose nature touches every level of the five divisions, and therefore the one creature capable of drawing them together. The vocation is not a task added onto human nature from outside; it is the meaning of human nature itself. To be human is to be the priest of creation.

The Failure of Adam and the Work of Christ

Adam failed at the very first mediation. Instead of transcending the division of male and female in accordance with the logos of nature, fallen humanity fell deeper into division, surrendering to the passions and fragmenting rather than uniting the cosmos. The whole chain of mediations was thereby broken; humanity, called to be the cosmos’ priest, became instead the agent of its further dividedness (Ambiguum 41; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995).

What Adam failed to do, Christ accomplishes. The incarnate Word takes up the human vocation of mediation and carries it through all five divisions in his own person and saving work:

in his birth he transcends and heals the division of male and female;
by his way of life and his cross he reunites paradise and the inhabited world (the promise to the thief, “today you shall be with me in paradise”);
by his ascension he joins earth to heaven;
passing with his assumed humanity through the angelic, intelligible orders, he unites the sensible and the intelligible;
and finally, presenting the whole united creation to the Father, he unites the created with the Uncreated — accomplishing in himself the cosmic reconciliation for which humanity was made (Ambiguum 41; Constas, DOML 29; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World, Oxford University Press, 2016).

Christ is thus the true mediator who fulfills the human vocation from within, and in whom humanity is restored to its priestly office over creation. The five mediations are, in effect, a map of the economy of salvation read cosmologically: incarnation, life and cross, resurrection and ascension, the heavenly entry, and the final offering to the Father correspond, stage by stage, to the binding of the five divisions. Maximus’ Christology and his cosmology are therefore a single doctrine. The two wills he would defend at the cost of his life (see Orthodoxy: Christology) are what make the mediation real: Christ heals the human will from within precisely because he possesses a complete, genuinely human will that he conforms perfectly to the divine — and it is by that healed human willing that the cosmic mediation is accomplished. The cosmic priest must be true man as well as true God.

The Cosmic Liturgy

This vision — the human person and, supremely, Christ as the priest who gathers the divided cosmos and offers it to God — is the heart of what Hans Urs von Balthasar named the “cosmic liturgy” (Kosmische Liturgie, the title of his classic 1941 study of Maximus). The phrase captures the liturgical shape of Maximus’ whole cosmology: creation is an offering, the human person is its priest, and history moves toward the gathering of all things into God. The theme is developed in explicitly liturgical and ecclesial terms in Maximus’ Mystagogia, where the church building and the Divine Liturgy become an icon of the cosmos and of the soul, and the same movement of unification is enacted sacramentally (see The Mystagogia). The cosmic mediation of Ambiguum 41 and the liturgical symbolism of the Mystagogia are two presentations of one vision.

The phrase “cosmic liturgy” has come to stand for Maximus’ theology as a whole, and rightly so. It names the conviction that the universe is not a machine but an offering, that history is a movement of return, and that the destiny of all things is to be gathered into God through the priestly act of the God-man and, in him, of redeemed humanity. Von Balthasar’s study (1941, revised 1961), translated into English by Brian Daley, did much to recover Maximus for twentieth-century theology by foregrounding exactly this synthesis of cosmology, anthropology, and Christology under a liturgical sign. Whatever the debates over particular points of his interpretation, the title captured something true: in Maximus, to speak of the cosmos is already to speak of worship, and to speak of worship is to speak of the cosmos drawn home.

The Microcosm and the Whole

Maximus’ designation of the human person as a microcosm — a “little world” containing in itself the elements of the whole — is ancient, but he gives it a distinctive turn. The point is not merely that the human being mirrors the cosmos but that, by mirroring it, the human being is responsible for it. Because all the divisions meet in human nature, the healing or the fracturing of those divisions is enacted, first of all, in human persons. Maximus even reverses the usual emphasis: the human person is less a microcosm (a small image of the great world) than the great world is a macroanthropos — the cosmos finds its meaning and its unity in the human vocation, rather than the human being being merely a specimen of cosmic forces. This is why the Fall of one creature could wound the whole, and why the obedience of one Man could heal it. The anthropology and the cosmology are inseparable, and both are taken up into Christology (Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995; cf. Orthodoxy: Theological Anthropology).

References

Maximus the Confessor. Ambiguum 41. In On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, edited and translated by Nicholas Constas, vol. 2. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
Blowers, Paul M. Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Translated by Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003 (German original Kosmische Liturgie, 1941; rev. 1961).