Liturgy as Cosmic Symbol

St. Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia grounds a distinctive theology of the liturgical symbol: the symbol not as a mere sign pointing to an absent reality but as a real participation that makes the signified present. From this flows the theme of the “cosmic liturgy” – all creation drawn into worship and toward union with God – and the eschatological orientation of the Liturgy toward the Kingdom. Through Hans Urs von Balthasar and the 20th-century Orthodox theologians, this vision has shaped modern Orthodox liturgical theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Symbol Versus Sign

The pivot of Maximus’ liturgical theology is his understanding of the symbol (symbolon). In the modern sense a symbol is a conventional sign: it stands for something else, which remains absent. For Maximus – and for the patristic tradition he distills – the symbol is something far stronger. The symbol participates in the reality it signifies and renders that reality genuinely present. The liturgical sign is not an illustration of a distant truth but a real manifestation of a present one; in the rite, what is signified is at work and communicated.

This is why Maximus can say that the church building “is” an image of God and the cosmos, and that the movements of the synaxis “are” the realities of salvation: he does not mean a pictorial resemblance but a participatory identity. The deifying union that communion signifies is the union it effects. This realist understanding of the symbol distinguishes Maximus sharply from the later Byzantine allegorism, which tended to read the rites as representations of the historical events of Christ’s life. Maximus’ symbolism is not chiefly historical-allegorical but anagogical and participatory: the rite lifts the worshipper into the reality it bears (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 73-75).

The distinction matters because it determines what the Liturgy does. If the rite were a sign of an absent reality, worship would be a kind of pious memory-work, a calling-to-mind of things past or distant. For Maximus it is the opposite: the realities of salvation and deification are operative in the rite, communicated through it to those who participate. The symbol is the mode in which the invisible becomes accessible to embodied creatures who must ascend to the intelligible through the sensible. This is rooted in Maximus’ metaphysics of the logoi – the divine principles according to which each created thing exists and toward which it tends. Every creature is already a “word” of the Logos, a symbol bearing its divine meaning; the Liturgy gathers these scattered symbols into a single act of worship in which the sensible world is consciously referred back to its source. Liturgical symbolism is therefore continuous with the symbolism of creation itself: the Church does in concentrated form what the whole cosmos is made to do, namely to manifest and return to God.

The Cosmic Liturgy

From the nested images of the Mystagogia – church as image of God, cosmos, man, and soul – emerges the theme for which Maximus is most celebrated in modern theology: the cosmic liturgy. Because the human person is a microcosm and mediator, called to gather the divided poles of creation (intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, male and female, paradise and inhabited world, created and uncreated) and to offer them to God, the worship of the Church is ultimately the worship of the whole cosmos. All creation is drawn, through humanity and supremely through Christ, into the movement of return to God (Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator; Maximus, Ambigua 41).

It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who gave this theme its enduring name in his study Kosmische Liturgie (Cosmic Liturgy, 1941; revised 1961; English trans. Brian E. Daley, 2003). For von Balthasar, the liturgy in Maximus is “always cosmic liturgy”: the drawing of the entire world into the hypostatic union, because world and liturgy share a single christological foundation. The created order finds its meaning and consummation in being offered up and united to God in Christ, and the Eucharistic Liturgy is the concentrated enactment of this universal movement. Von Balthasar’s book was decisive both for modern Maximus scholarship and for his own theological aesthetics (von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy; Daley, Translator’s Foreword).

Von Balthasar’s critics. The reading has been challenged. Critics have argued that von Balthasar reads Maximus through a German-idealist and Christocentric lens that can flatten the apophatic and ascetical dimensions of the texts, and that his synthesis sometimes systematizes Maximus more tightly than the sources warrant. Later scholars – among them Lars Thunberg, whose Microcosm and Mediator offered a more philologically grounded account, and Polycarp Sherwood, who corrected von Balthasar’s early dating and his estimate of Maximus’ relation to Origenism – refined and at points dissented from his picture, while acknowledging its catalytic importance (these qualifications are attributed to the subsequent scholarship of Sherwood and Thunberg; Cosmic Liturgy, Daley’s Foreword, surveys the reception). The phrase “cosmic liturgy” has nonetheless entered the permanent vocabulary of Maximus studies.

The Eschatological Vector

A further feature of Maximus’ liturgical theology, against which both Dionysian hierarchy and Byzantine allegory are measured, is its eschatological orientation. The Liturgy is not merely an ascent up a fixed hierarchy nor a backward-looking commemoration of past events; it is the breaking-in of the age to come. The dismissal of the catechumens and the closing of the doors signify the last judgment; the entry into communion signifies the entry of the worthy into the Kingdom (Maximus, Mystagogia 14-15, 21; trans. Berthold, CWS). The whole movement of the rite is oriented forward, toward the consummation of all things in God, when God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The Liturgy is the anticipation, in symbol-as-participation, of the eschaton.

This eschatological vector is what saves Maximus’ symbolism from mere correspondence. The relations he draws between liturgical action and cosmic or anthropological reality are not static parallels but dynamic movements: every image is in motion toward its fulfillment. The anaphora – the “uplifting” of all things to God – is not only the prayer over the gifts but the structuring principle of the whole rite and of the whole cosmos. Creation is in via; the Liturgy is the point at which its return to God is concentrated and made visible. The sensible is not abolished but transfigured, taken up into the intelligible and finally into God, so that the eschaton is not the destruction of the world but its deification. This is why, for Maximus, the closing of the doors upon the world of sense is not a rejection of the material creation but its passage into a higher mode of being – the same creation, now wholly referred to God.

Maximus and Modern Orthodox Liturgical Theology

Through the 20th-century recovery of the Fathers, Maximus’ liturgical vision became one of the deep sources of contemporary Orthodox theology.

Schmemann’s debt. Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s program of a “liturgical theology” centered on the Liturgy as passage into the Kingdom – the eschatological breaking-in of the world to come – is profoundly consonant with Maximus, even where Schmemann criticized the later mystagogical allegorism that he distinguished from this deeper participatory and eschatological symbolism. Schmemann’s insistence that the symbol manifests a present reality rather than merely representing an absent one, and his vision of the world itself as sacrament to be offered to God, draw on the same patristic stream that Maximus articulates (see Orthodoxy Guide: Liturgy as Theology, on Schmemann’s distinction between illustrative allegory and symbolic realism). Schmemann’s debt to Maximus is mediated and selective – he was wary of medieval allegory – but the eschatological and sacramental-cosmic structure of his thought is unmistakably Maximian (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology; For the Life of the World).

Zizioulas. Metropolitan John Zizioulas drew on Maximus more directly and explicitly, especially in his eucharistic ecclesiology and his theology of the person. Zizioulas appeals to Maximus for the understanding of the human being as the microcosm and mediator who unites creation and offers it to God, and for the eschatological constitution of the Church in the Eucharist, where the community is gathered into the one Body and the Kingdom is made present (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, and his essays on Maximus and on the eschatological character of the Eucharist; this attribution is to Zizioulas’ own appropriation of Maximus). For Zizioulas, Maximus supplies the patristic grounding for an ecclesiology in which the Liturgy is the event in which the Church becomes what she is – the gathering of the many into the one, the cosmos offered and deified.

The convergence of these two thinkers on Maximus is itself telling. Schmemann came to Maximus chiefly through the eschatological and sacramental structure of worship; Zizioulas through the ontology of person and communion and the eucharistic constitution of the Church. That two of the most influential Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, working from different starting points, should both find in the Mystagogia and the wider Maximian corpus the resources for renewing liturgical theology is a measure of the work’s fertility. Both recover, against a long history of allegorical and individualistic piety, the original sense of the Liturgy as the corporate ascent of the Church and the cosmos into the Kingdom – precisely the vision Maximus had articulated. Their reception is selective and creative rather than slavish, but its deep grammar is Maximian.

Through these channels, the Mystagogia – a short seventh-century contemplation of the Liturgy – has become one of the living roots of modern Orthodox thought, the classic statement that the worship of the Church is the worship of the cosmos and the anticipation of the Kingdom.

References

Maximus the Confessor. The Church’s Mystagogy. In Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings. Trans. George C. Berthold. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003.
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.
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966.
Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.