Questions to Thalassius
The Questions to Thalassius (Quaestiones ad Thalassium, c. 630–634) is the largest sustained work of biblical interpretation St. Maximus the Confessor produced: sixty-five responses to scriptural difficulties posed by Thalassius, a Libyan abbot and Maximus’s friend. This section treats the work itself — its form, its great themes (the pleasure-pain dialectic, the two senses of sin, providence and judgment) — and the distinctive exegetical method that governs it.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
The Quaestiones ad Thalassium is not a verse-by-verse commentary but a chain of aporiai — knotty passages of Scripture submitted by one ascetic to another for solution. The form is occasional, the content anything but slight: in answering Thalassius, Maximus produced what Paul Blowers calls a work of “spiritual pedagogy,” in which the labor of untying a scriptural knot is itself an exercise in the soul’s ascent to God (Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor, 1991). The work belongs to Maximus’s North African years and stands beside the Ambigua as one of the two pillars of his exegetical corpus.
Two files develop this. The first treats the work itself: its date and occasion, its sixty-five questions, and its governing themes — the analysis of the origin of the passions in Question 61 (the pleasure-pain dialectic that propagates the fallen condition), the two senses of “sin” distinguished in Question 42 (culpable choice versus blameless natural corruption), and the meditation on providence and judgment. The second treats Maximus the exegete: anagogy and the pedagogy of difficulty, the logoi of Scripture set in parallel to the logoi of creation, his debt to and correction of Origen, and how his method differs from both Antiochene literalism and unchecked allegory.
The critical edition is the two-volume CCSG (Laga and Steel, CCSG 7 and 22, 1980–1990). The standard English translations are Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (PPS 25, 2003, partial), and Fr. Maximos Constas, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (FOTC 136, 2018, complete).
Navigation
| File | Subject |
|---|---|
| The Questions to Thalassius | Form, date, the sixty-five questions; pleasure-pain (Q. 61), two senses of sin (Q. 42), providence and judgment |
| Exegetical Method | Anagogy, the pedagogy of difficulty, the logoi of Scripture and creation, Origen inherited and corrected |
See Also
- Ancestral Sin — the will distinction that the analysis of the Fall in Thalassius prepares
- Antiochene Exegesis — the contrasting school against which Maximus’s method is best measured
- Holy Scripture — the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture his exegesis serves
- Theological Anthropology — the two senses of sin in Q. 42 within the wider doctrine of ancestral sin
References
- Blowers, Paul M. Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor: An Investigation of the Quaestiones ad Thalassium. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
- Blowers, Paul M., and Robert Louis Wilken, trans. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor. Popular Patristics Series 25. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
- Constas, Fr. Maximos, trans. St. Maximos the Confessor: On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios. Fathers of the Church 136. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018.
- Laga, Carl, and Carlos Steel, eds. Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium. CCSG 7, 22. Turnhout: Brepols, 1980, 1990.
- Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.