Exegetical Method

St. Maximus the Confessor reads Scripture as ascent: the difficulty (aporia) of the text is a pedagogy, and the labor of interpretation is itself a spiritual exercise that lifts the soul toward God (anagogy). This file treats his method — the parallel of the logoi of Scripture with the logoi of creation, his inheritance and correction of Origen, worked examples (the Jonah question, the Transfiguration), and how his exegesis differs from both Antiochene literalism and unchecked Alexandrian allegory.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Anagogy: Reading as Ascent

For Maximus the goal of all interpretation is anagogy (anagōgē) — the “leading up” of the soul to God in response to God’s own “coming down” (synkatabasis) in giving the Scriptures (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996, ch. 2). Scripture has a “body” (the letter, the historical sense) and a “soul” (the spiritual sense), and the contemplative reader passes through the one to the other, not by abolishing the letter but by being raised through it (Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy in Maximus the Confessor, 1991). The aim is never information but transformation: a rightly read passage of Scripture deposits the reader a little higher up the ascent to God than it found him.

This is why the obscurity of the texts Thalassius submits is integral, not incidental, to the work. The difficulty is a pedagogy of difficulty: the aporia arrests the reader at the surface, refuses him an easy meaning, and so compels the upward movement that is the whole point. Blowers’ governing thesis is that for Maximus the resolution of scriptural difficulties is a form of spiritual pedagogy — the exercise (askēsis) of the contemplative nous, the same faculty that, purified, perceives God (Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy, 1991). The exegete is not a technician but an ascetic; reading is a discipline of the purified mind.

The Logoi of Scripture and the Logoi of Creation

Underlying the method is Maximus’s great doctrine of the logoi — the divine “words” or principles according to which God creates and providentially orders each thing, all of them grounded in and gathered up by the one Logos, the eternal Word (Maximus, Ambiguum 7 [PG 91:1077–1085]; trans. Constas, DOML 28). The structure of reality is logos-structured: every creature has its logos, and to contemplate a thing rightly is to perceive in it the Word who is its principle.

Maximus draws Scripture and creation into a single frame as two “embodiments” of the one Word. The Word is “embodied” (incarnate, in an extended sense) in three ways: in the flesh of Christ, in the logoi of created beings, and in the words and figures of Scripture. Reading the Bible and contemplating the cosmos are therefore parallel and convergent exercises — both are the discernment of the Word veiled in a material text, the one in letters, the other in things (Maximus, Ambiguum 10 and 33; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995). At the Transfiguration the two garments of the radiant Christ — his shining face and his white raiment — are read by Maximus precisely as figures of these two: the words of Scripture and the works of creation, both made luminous when the Word who underlies them is unveiled (Maximus, Ambiguum 10 [PG 91:1125–1128]; trans. Constas, DOML 28). To contemplate either rightly is to be brought to the same Logos; this is the deep unity of physikē theōria (natural contemplation) and scriptural theōria.

Origen Inherited and Corrected

Maximus is the great Chalcedonian heir of the Alexandrian contemplative tradition, and his debt to Origen is real and unembarrassed: the threefold sense of Scripture, the conviction that the letter is the vehicle of a spiritual meaning, the very vocabulary of theōria and anagogy descend to him through Origen and Evagrius (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996, ch. 3; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995). But the inheritance is also a correction. Against the Origenist cosmology — the myth of a primal henad of pre-existent minds that fell into bodies, with motion (kinēsis) as the mark of the Fall and the cosmos to be dissolved in a final restoration (apokatastasis) — Maximus mounts in Ambiguum 7 a decisive refutation. He reorders the Origenist triad: not rest–motion–becoming (stasis, kinēsis, genesis) but becoming–motion–rest (genesis, kinēsis, stasis). Creatures begin in genesis, are meant to move toward God, and find rest only at their end in him. Motion is therefore not the disaster of a fall but the God-given dynamism of created nature toward its goal (Maximus, Ambiguum 7 [PG 91:1069–1073]; trans. Constas, DOML 28; see Theosis in Maximus).

The exegetical consequence is that Maximus retains Origen’s anagogical impulse while severing it from Origen’s defective metaphysics. The spiritual sense is real and is the goal — but it does not, as in the worst Origenist practice, dissolve the historical letter into a cipher for a mythology the Church has condemned. Maximus is an Alexandrian disciplined by Chalcedon: the letter and the body are honored as the indispensable vehicle, even as the nous is led beyond them.

Worked Examples

The Jonah question (Ad Thalassium 64). Asked about the prophet Jonah, Maximus does not pause over the historicity of the great fish but reads the whole narrative anagogically as a layered figure: Jonah signifies Adam and fallen humanity in flight from God; the storm and the sea-monster are the passions and mortality that swallow the race; and the three days in the belly prefigure Christ’s own descent and resurrection — Jonah cast up alive a type of the human nature raised in Christ (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 64; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). One narrative is made to yield, at successive levels, a doctrine of the Fall, of Christ, and of the soul’s return — the characteristic Maximian move of finding the whole economy figured in a single difficult text.

The Transfiguration (across the corpus). Maximus returns to the Transfiguration repeatedly, and its treatment shows the unity of his method. In Ambiguum 10 the shining garments are Scripture and creation, made transparent to the Word; the radiant face is the Word’s own divinity, glimpsed in the measure of the beholder’s purity. In the Questions and Doubts and elsewhere the same scene yields the doctrine of the uncreated light and the graded ascent of the contemplative (Maximus, Ambiguum 10; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995). The Transfiguration is for Maximus the paradigmatic exegetical event: the moment when the veils of letter and world become luminous and the Word who underlies both is seen — which is exactly what right reading is meant to accomplish.

Between Antioch and Alexandria

Maximus’s method is best located against the two great schools. Over against Antiochene literalism — the insistence of Diodore, Theodore, and Chrysostom on the historical sense (historia) as the foundation, with the spiritual sense (theōria) tightly bound to it and never cancelling it (see Antiochene Exegesis) — Maximus is far more freely contemplative. He moves into the anagogical register with an abandon no Antiochene would permit, finding in the numbers, measures, and figures of the text whole theologies of the soul’s ascent. His sympathies are Alexandrian.

Yet over against unchecked Alexandrian allegory — the runaway allegoria that, in the Antiochene polemic, cut the spiritual meaning loose from any historical anchor — Maximus is disciplined by two controls the worst allegorists lacked. The first is Christ: the spiritual sense is governed by the rule of faith and converges always on the mystery of the incarnate Word, not on a private or speculative meaning. The second is the letter as vehicle: the body of Scripture is the necessary garment of its soul, honored even as it is passed through, just as creation is honored as the garment of the Word. Maximus thus occupies neither pole. He keeps the Alexandrian height of contemplation while refusing its tendency to dissolve the text, and he honors the Antiochene seriousness about the letter while declining its restraint upon the spiritual sense — a synthesis the Orthodox tradition received as the mature pattern of patristic exegesis (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Blowers, Exegesis and Spiritual Pedagogy, 1991; and see Holy Scripture).

See Also

• The Questions to Thalassius — the work this method governs throughout
• Theosis in Maximus — the logoi, motion-and-rest, and the goal of the ascent
• Antiochene Exegesis — historia and theōria in the contrasting school
• Holy Scripture — the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture and patristic exegesis

References

• Maximus the Confessor. Quaestiones ad Thalassium. c. 630–634. PG 90; CCSG 7, 22 (Laga and Steel).
• Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua. PG 91:1031–1417. Trans. Nicholas Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols., Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 28–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• 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. Popular Patristics Series 25. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
• Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.