Centuries on Love

St. Maximus the Confessor’s Four Hundred Texts on Love (the Centuries on Love, Greek Kephalaia peri agapes) is his most widely read ascetical work: four hundred brief chapters, gathered into four “centuries,” on love as the goal of the whole spiritual life. Written in the 620s and addressed to a certain Elpidios, it transforms the inherited Evagrian scheme by placing love – not knowledge – at the summit of the ascetical ascent.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Prologue to Elpidios

The work opens with a short prologue addressed to a monk named Elpidios, which also names its companion piece, the Liber Asceticus. Maximus writes: “In addition to my treatise on the ascetic life I am also sending you, Father Elpidios, this treatise on love divided, on the analogy of the four Gospels, into four centuries of chapters” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, Prologue; trans. Philokalia vol. 2, p. 53).

Two things are established at once. First, the structural conceit: the four centuries are arranged “on the analogy of the four Gospels” – four hundred chapters in four groups of one hundred, a deliberately scriptural architecture. Second, Maximus’ characteristic humility about his sources: “I have gone through the writings of the holy fathers and collected from them passages relevant to my subject, condensing much material into short paragraphs” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, Prologue; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). He presents himself not as an originator but as a compiler of the Fathers – a modesty that conceals the considerable originality of his synthesis.

The kephalaia form itself is significant. The “century” of short, gnomic chapters was a monastic genre inherited above all from Evagrius of Pontus, designed for slow, meditative reading and memorization. Each chapter stands on its own, yet the centuries build cumulatively: from the definition of love, through the diagnosis of the passions, to the contemplation of God. The form is ascetical as well as literary – it resists the cursory reading of continuous prose and demands that the reader pause over each sentence, returning to it in prayer. Maximus expects the work to be used, not merely read: the chapters are exercises in the reordering of the mind. His closing words to Elpidios ask the reader to receive the texts with charity and to pray for him, and not to look at them “for the sake of mere words” but to put them into practice – the Centuries are a manual for the active life, not a treatise to be admired (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, Prologue; trans. Philokalia vol. 2).

Love as the Goal of All Ascesis

The very first chapter gives the keynote: “Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love I.1; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). Love is not a feeling but a hexis – a stable disposition, a “holy state of the soul.” It is the soul rightly ordered toward God.

Maximus then sets out the ascending chain that structures the whole work: “Dispassion engenders love, hope in God engenders dispassion, and patience and forbearance engender hope in God” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love I.2; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). The order is precise and ascending: patience and forbearance produce hope; hope produces dispassion (apatheia); dispassion produces love. Apatheia is therefore not the goal but the threshold – the condition of soul out of which love is born. This is the inversion that defines Maximus’ achievement: the passionless state, which for the Stoics and even for Evagrius could appear as an end in itself, is here only the soil in which charity grows.

The love that crowns the ascent is double: love of God and love of neighbor, and Maximus insists they are inseparable. The one who loves God necessarily loves his neighbor, because he loves what God loves; and this love must be impartial, extended to all human beings alike, in imitation of God who “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good” (cf. Four Hundred Texts on Love I.61, I.71; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). The perfection of love is to love even those who hate us, and to grieve at their sin as at one’s own.

Maximus presses the demand of impartiality with characteristic rigor. He observes that there are four general ways in which we love human beings – some for God’s sake, like the saints; some by nature, like our kin; some from vainglory, like one honored by us; and some from self-love, like one who gives us pleasure – and that only the first is truly secure, because the others depend on circumstance and so dissolve when their occasion is removed (cf. Four Hundred Texts on Love II.9-10; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). The love that ascesis aims at is the first kind: a love grounded not in advantage, kinship, or pleasure but in God, and therefore extended without distinction even to the enemy. Such love is the surest mark that the passions have been healed and the soul restored to its natural condition. It is, for Maximus, the very content of likeness to God, who loves all his creatures equally and provides for the just and the unjust alike.

The Three Powers of the Soul

Maximus inherits from the Platonic-Evagrian tradition a tripartite psychology, which he uses as the practical map of the ascetical life. He distinguishes the powers of the soul: “The soul has three powers: first, the power of nourishment and growth; second, that of imagination and instinct; third, that of intelligence and intellect” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love III.32; trans. Philokalia vol. 2).

For the ascetical struggle, the decisive distinction is between the rational power (logistikon) and the two “passible” or affective powers – the incensive power (thymos, the seat of anger and aggression) and the desiring power (epithymia, the seat of desire and appetite). The soul is healthy when these passible powers are rightly ordered: “The soul functions in accordance with nature when its passible aspects – that is, its incensive power and its desire – remain dispassionate” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love III.35; trans. Philokalia vol. 2).

Crucially, the incensive and desiring powers are not evil; they are natural faculties to be redirected, not destroyed. Desire is to be turned from the pleasures of the senses toward longing for God; the incensive power is to be turned from anger against one’s neighbor toward warfare against the demons and the passions. Love operates on each: charity governs the incensive power, and self-mastery (enkrateia) governs desire.

The Treatment of the Passions

Maximus’ analysis of the passions is precise and clinical. He sorts them according to the power of the soul they corrupt: “Some passions pertain to the soul’s incensive power, and others to its desiring aspect” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love I.64; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). And he ranks their difficulty: “The passions of the soul’s incensive power are more difficult to combat than those of its desiring aspect” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love I.65; trans. Philokalia vol. 2) – anger, resentment, and hatred are harder to heal than the appetites of the flesh, because they directly oppose love of neighbor.

The passions are not, for Maximus, substances or natural realities. They are the misuse of natural powers – desire and aversion wrongly directed. A thing in itself is neutral; the passion lies in the soul’s disordered relation to it. The remedy is therefore not flight from things but the reordering of the soul’s movement: self-mastery against the appetites, love against anger, prayer to unite the mind to God. The whole therapeutic vocabulary – the passions as illness, the virtues as health, ascesis as healing – runs through the centuries and is the inheritance of the entire later Orthodox neptic tradition.

The Image and the Likeness (III.25)

One of the most theologically dense chapters articulates the patristic distinction between the image (eikon) of God in which humanity is created and the likeness (homoiosis) toward which it must grow. Maximus maps the two onto distinct attributes:

“He is made in the image of God, since his being is in the image of God’s being, and his eternal being is in the image of God’s eternal being. He is also made in the likeness of God, since he is good in the likeness of God’s goodness, and wise in the likeness of God’s wisdom.” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love III.25; trans. Philokalia vol. 2)

The mapping is exact. The image corresponds to what is given by nature and is not lost: being and eternal being (existence and immortal existence). The likeness corresponds to what must be acquired by free cooperation with grace: goodness and wisdom. Being and eternal being are gifts of creation; goodness and wisdom are the goal of the ascetical and deifying life. This is why ascesis matters: the image is given, but the likeness – goodness and wisdom in the likeness of God’s own – is the work of a lifetime, the very content of theosis. The whole moral and contemplative program of the Centuries serves the realization of the likeness latent in the image.

The Evagrian Inheritance Transformed

The deepest scholarly point about the Centuries on Love concerns its relation to Evagrius of Pontus. Maximus draws heavily on Evagrian psychology – the tripartite soul, the analysis of the logismoi (tempting thoughts), the ideal of apatheia, the threefold scheme of praktike, physike, and theologia. The vocabulary is unmistakably Evagrian.

But Maximus performs a decisive revision. For Evagrius, the summit of the spiritual life is gnosis – the bare, imageless knowledge of God by a purified intellect, the goal toward which apatheia is the means. Maximus retains apatheia but subordinates knowledge to love: at the summit of the ascent he sets not gnosis but agape. As Andrew Louth puts it, Maximus “corrects” Evagrius by making love, rather than knowledge, the goal and crown of the contemplative life, so that apatheia issues not in solitary illumination but in love of God and neighbor (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 35-37). Lars Thunberg likewise stresses that Maximus’ use of the affective powers in the service of love marks a deliberate departure from the more intellectualist Evagrian framework (Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, ch. on the passions and apatheia). Hans Urs von Balthasar saw in this the heart of Maximus’ purification of Origenist-Evagrian spirituality, restoring love to its scriptural primacy (von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, on the Centuries).

The result is a spirituality that is unmistakably Christian and ecclesial: the lone gnostikos of Evagrius gives way to a person whose perfection is measured by an impartial, self-emptying love poured out upon all – the love that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7), which Maximus places at the end of the whole ascetical road.

References

Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2, pp. 48-113. Trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Maximus the Confessor. The Ascetic Life; The Four Centuries on Charity. Trans. Polycarp Sherwood, OSB. Ancient Christian Writers 21. New York: Newman Press, 1955.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003.