Theosis in Maximus

Deification (theosis) is the crown of St. Maximus the Confessor’s theology: the creature, without ceasing to be creature, is brought to participate wholly in God. This file treats his characteristic doctrines — the “ever-moving rest” (stasis aeikinētos) in which the soul’s motion comes to rest in God without ceasing to live; the tantum-quantum principle of reciprocal exchange between God’s incarnation and humanity’s deification (citing Ambiguum 7 and Various Texts 1.62); and his insistence that deification is always grace and never the creature’s natural achievement — the conviction, and the energies-language, that he bequeaths to St. Gregory Palamas.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Ever-Moving Rest (Stasis Aeikinētos)

Maximus’s most original contribution to the doctrine of theosis is his account of the soul’s final state as ever-moving rest (stasis aeikinētos) — or, equivalently, an “ever-moving repose.” The paradox is deliberate and is forged in the refutation of Origenism. Against the Origenist scheme, in which created minds began in a static rest with God, fell into motion, and are destined to return to immobile rest, Maximus reorders the sequence to genesis–kinēsis–stasis: creatures come into being, move toward God as their natural dynamism intends, and come to rest only at the end, in him (Maximus, Ambiguum 7 [PG 91:1069–1073, 1077]; trans. Constas, DOML 28). Motion is not the mark of the Fall but the God-given impulse of created nature toward its goal.

The rest that crowns this motion, however, is not the cessation of life. Everything that has received being ex nihilo is in motion, Maximus argues, and its “appetitive movement” comes to repose only when it reaches what it ultimately desires — God, who is infinite (Maximus, Ambiguum 7; trans. Constas, DOML 28). Because the object of desire is inexhaustible, the rest in him is not stasis in the sense of stoppage but an unending, satisfied movement within God — a repose that is forever active, an enjoyment that never exhausts its object and so never ceases. The deified soul rests as one wholly at home and yet forever moving deeper into the infinite life it has reached. This “ever-moving rest” is Maximus’s answer both to the Origenist fear that motion is failure and to any account of heaven as static contemplation: the end is dynamic, living, inexhaustible communion (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995).

The Tantum-Quantum Exchange

The logic by which deification is possible at all Maximus expresses in the tantum-quantum (“to the degree that… to that same degree”) principle — the reciprocal exchange between the incarnation of God and the deification of the human being. Its classic statement is the deification passage of Various Texts 1.62: “A sure warrant for looking forward with hope to the deification of human nature is provided by the incarnation of God, which makes man god to the same degree as God Himself became man” (Maximus, Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice 1.62; trans. Philokalia, vol. 2, Palmer–Sherrard–Ware).

This text is worth citing precisely, because it is frequently mislabeled. The reciprocal “God became man that man might become god” formula in Maximus is often attributed to Ambiguum 7; in fact the crisp epigram belongs to Various Texts 1.62 (the “First Century” of the Various Texts), and the present compendium follows that correct location. The same principle is unfolded at length, but not in that epigrammatic form, in Ambiguum 7, where Maximus develops the doctrine of deification as the enhypostasized union of the saints with Christ — they become members of his body and so, by grace, participate in the entire divine activity that pervades his humanity (Maximus, Ambiguum 7 [PG 91:1084–1088]; trans. Constas, DOML 28).

The exchange is real but asymmetrical, and Maximus guards the asymmetry rigorously. Man becomes god by grace (kata charin) to the very degree that God became man by nature (kata physin) — but the “to the same degree” measures the completeness of the participation, not an equality of mode. The deified human being receives the whole of the divine life and yet remains creature; the union is unconfused, the natures undiminished, the distinction between Creator and creature absolute. Maximus’s favorite image (received into the wider tradition) is iron in fire: the iron placed in the fire becomes incandescent, fire-like through and through, and yet remains iron (cf. Theosis). So the deified person is wholly permeated by divine grace and yet is never God by nature.

Grace and Nature: Deification Always Gift

For Maximus deification is, from first to last, grace — never the natural achievement or the necessary unfolding of created nature. Here he draws on his own distinction between logos and tropos: the logos of human nature (what it is) is fixed and given, but deification is a new tropos (mode) of existence bestowed by grace, exceeding everything nature can reach by its own power (Maximus, Ambiguum 7 and 42; Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, 1995; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). Nature has a real capacity for God — the natural longing of the nous — but it cannot of itself cross the infinite distance to participation in the divine; that crossing is gift. Deification is therefore “above nature” (hyper physin): the creature is raised by grace to what no creature can become by nature, and precisely for this reason theosis preserves rather than abolishes the creature.

This insistence requires that the grace which deifies be God himself, not a created intermediary — for a created grace could not effect a real union with the uncreated. Maximus accordingly speaks of the divine energies and operations (energeiai) in which the saints participate: the deified receive “the entirety of the divine activity” that pervades Christ’s deified humanity, a participation in God’s own outgoing life rather than in his incommunicable essence (Maximus, Ambiguum 7; Various Texts; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). Maximus does not yet possess the fully articulated essence/energies distinction that St. Gregory Palamas will hammer out in the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy; but the substance is here — the conviction that we are truly united to God through his uncreated activity while his essence remains beyond participation. It is from Maximus, more than from any other Father, that Palamas inherits both the language and the logic: deification as real participation in the uncreated, grace as God himself, the creature distinction never collapsed (cf. Theosis, on the Palamite distinction Maximus prepares). [Cross-reference: St. Gregory Palamas, Essence and Energies: Patristic Pedigree — file forthcoming.]

See Also

References

  • 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. (Esp. Ambiguum 7.)
  • Maximus the Confessor. Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice (1.62). In The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  • 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.
  • Mitralexis, Sotiris. Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor’s Theory of Time. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017.