The Mystagogia

St. Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia (c. 628-630) is a contemplation of the Divine Liturgy in twenty-four chapters. It reads the church building and the movements of the synaxis as images of God, the cosmos, the human person, and the soul, and interprets the whole rite as an ascent toward deification. Standing in explicit deference to Dionysius the Areopagite, it nonetheless reorients liturgical commentary toward the eschatological Kingdom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Date and Setting

The Mystagogia (“initiation into the mysteries”) was composed in the late 620s – conventionally dated around 628-630 – most likely during Maximus’ time in North Africa, after the early ascetical works and before the monothelite controversy consumed his final decades (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, ch. 2; Berthold, CWS, Introduction). The standard modern Greek text is the critical edition of Christian Boudignon, Maximi Confessoris Mystagogia (Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca 69, Brepols, 2011), based on some forty manuscripts ranging from the tenth to the sixteenth century; the most widely used English translation is that of George C. Berthold in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Berthold, CWS, 1985).

Relation to Dionysius: Deference and Difference

Maximus opens by deferring explicitly to Dionysius the Areopagite. He declares that he will not repeat what “the blessed Dionysius” has already expounded in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, both out of reverence and because it is not lawful to trespass on what that great man has treated; he writes only to supply what Dionysius, by an economy of brevity, left for others to develop (Maximus, Mystagogia, Prologue; trans. Berthold, CWS). The deference is genuine: the very genre of symbolic liturgical interpretation, and much of the hierarchical vocabulary, comes from the Areopagite.

Yet the differences are decisive, and scholars have stressed them. Where Dionysius reads the liturgy chiefly in terms of a static hierarchy of mediation – the ordered descent of divine illumination through ranks – Maximus introduces a dynamic, eschatological movement. He employs his characteristic notion of anaphora (the “uplifting” or referral of all things to God) so that the liturgical spaces and motions are oriented not merely upward through a hierarchy but forward toward the consummation of all things (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 73-74; cf. the Adoremus and Church Life Journal treatments). Maximus also gives far greater weight than Dionysius to the cosmos and to the human person as images of the Church, integrating his liturgical vision with the cosmology and anthropology of the Ambigua.

The Church as Image

The heart of the Mystagogia is a sequence of analogies in which the church (both the building and the worshipping community) is shown to be an image (eikon) of successively wider and narrower realities. Maximus develops at least five such images in the opening chapters (Maximus, Mystagogia 1-5; trans. Berthold, CWS):

Image of God (ch. 1): The holy Church bears the imprint and image of God, for it effects the same union among the faithful that God effects among beings – gathering a great diversity of people into one through faith, yet without confusing them. As God holds all things together, so the Church unites all in herself.
Image of the cosmos (ch. 2-3): The church building, consisting of sanctuary and nave, is an image of the whole created order, which consists of the intelligible (invisible) and sensible (visible) worlds. The sanctuary corresponds to the intelligible realm, the nave to the sensible; yet the two are one church, just as the two worlds are one cosmos. Maximus adds the striking reciprocity that “the nave is the sanctuary in potential… and the sanctuary is the nave in actuality” – the visible and invisible interpenetrate.
Image of man (ch. 4): The same building images the human person, the sanctuary representing the soul, the nave the body – the human being who is himself a microcosm binding intelligible and sensible together.
Image of the soul (ch. 5): Finally the church images the soul considered in itself, the sanctuary corresponding to its contemplative (nous) faculty and the nave to its active, reasoning faculty.

These nested analogies are not decorative. They express Maximus’ conviction that the human person is a microcosm and mediator (the phrase that gives Thunberg’s classic study its title), called to unite the divided orders of being – and that the Liturgy is the place where this unifying mediation is enacted and consummated (Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator).

The logic that binds the analogies together is the principle of unity-in-distinction. In each image, two parts (sanctuary and nave; intelligible and sensible; soul and body; nous and reason) remain distinct yet form one whole, just as in the Church the many faithful, without losing their personal identities, are gathered into one Body. Maximus repeatedly stresses that the Church effects union “without confusion” – the diverse are made one, but the one does not dissolve the diverse. This is the same pattern he finds at every level of reality, from the union of natures in Christ to the harmony of the cosmos, and it is why the church building can be at once an image of God, of the world, of man, and of the soul: all are structured by the same divine logic of differentiated unity. The Liturgy is the place where this logic is not merely contemplated but performed, as the assembly enacts the gathering of the many into the one (Maximus, Mystagogia 1; trans. Berthold, CWS; cf. Louth, Maximus the Confessor, pp. 73-75).

The Movements of the Liturgy Interpreted

In the central chapters Maximus interprets the successive moments of the synaxis as stages in the soul’s and the world’s ascent (Maximus, Mystagogia 8-21; trans. Berthold, CWS):

The first entrance of the bishop into the church signifies the first coming of Christ in the flesh, and the entrance of the people with him their conversion from unbelief to faith and from vice to virtue.
The readings of Scripture signify the divine desires and intentions, and the descent of God’s instruction; the divine chants express the soul’s delight in the divine beauty.
The dismissal of the catechumens and the closing of the doors (ch. 14-15) carry a strongly eschatological sense: they signify the passing away of material things, the last judgment after which the worthy enter the bridal chamber of Christ, and the entry of the soul into the intelligible world – the door closed upon the world of sense.
The kiss of peace, the recitation of the Creed, the Sanctus (“Holy, Holy, Holy”) by which the faithful join the angelic powers, and the Our Father all mark the soul’s progressive union and adoption.
The final communion and the cry “One is Holy” signify the deifying union and the gathering of all into God, the goal toward which the whole movement has tended.

Throughout, Maximus offers a double reading: the rites signify at once the great drama of salvation history (the comings of Christ, the judgment, the consummation) and the interior ascent of the individual soul toward deification. The visible movement of the assembly is the icon of an invisible movement toward God.

This double register – the cosmic-historical and the personal-interior – is deliberate and is one of the most distinctive features of the work. The same liturgical action is read simultaneously as an event in the economy of salvation and as a moment in the life of the praying soul, because for Maximus the two are not separate realities but the same divine movement at different scales. What happens to the cosmos in Christ happens to the soul in the Liturgy; the macrocosm of salvation history and the microcosm of the individual are gathered into one rhythm of descent and ascent, judgment and deification. In a notable later chapter Maximus turns explicitly to this interior dimension, retracing the whole synaxis as the stages of the soul’s own progress – faith, virtue, knowledge, and finally the deifying union – so that the reader is invited to find in the rite a map of his own ascent (Maximus, Mystagogia 23-24; trans. Berthold, CWS). The Liturgy is thus at once an act of the whole Church, a recapitulation of the cosmos, and a personal mystagogy.

What It Shows About Seventh-Century Liturgy – and Taft’s Caution

Because the Mystagogia describes a recognizable sequence of liturgical actions, it has long been mined as evidence for the shape of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in the early seventh century – the entrance of the bishop, the readings, the dismissal of the catechumens, the closing of the doors, the kiss of peace, the Creed, the Sanctus, the Lord’s Prayer, and communion. It is indeed valuable testimony, confirming, for example, that the dismissal of catechumens and the closing of the doors were still living elements of the rite in Maximus’ day.

But the great liturgical historian Robert F. Taft cautioned repeatedly against reading such mystagogical commentaries as rubrical descriptions. Their genre and purpose are interpretive and contemplative, not documentary: Maximus selects, omits, and arranges the liturgical data to serve his spiritual exposition, and silence about an element is not evidence of its absence, nor is his ordering necessarily the ritual order. The commentator’s aim is to disclose the meaning of the rite, not to record its choreography; the historian must therefore use the Mystagogia as a witness only with care, cross-checking it against the actual liturgical sources (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, and Taft’s studies of the liturgical commentaries). The text is primary evidence for what the Liturgy meant to a seventh-century contemplative far more than a rubric for how it was performed.

This caution does not diminish the Mystagogia‘s value; it clarifies it. The work is a witness of the first rank to the theology of the Byzantine Liturgy at a formative moment – to the conviction that the rite is a real participation in the divine mysteries and an ascent toward deification, not a sacred drama to be watched. Where it touches the shape of the rite, it confirms in passing that elements such as the catechumens’ dismissal, the closing of the doors, the kiss of peace, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer were in place in Maximus’ milieu; but its enduring importance lies in the interpretive vision it gives those elements. Read for what it is – a contemplative mystagogia rather than a typikon – it remains one of the most influential commentaries on the Liturgy ever written, the fountainhead of a distinctively Maximian liturgical theology that later Orthodox thought would draw upon again and again.

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.
Boudignon, Christian, ed. Maximi Confessoris Mystagogia. Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca 69. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.
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.
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003.