The Modern Revival of St. Maximus the Confessor

For most of a millennium St. Maximus was read chiefly through the Philokalia and a few specialists; in the twentieth century he became one of the most studied of all the Greek Fathers and the favorite father of the Orthodox neo-patristic synthesis. This file traces that renaissance — Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy as its spark, Polycarp Sherwood’s chronology, the monographs of Thunberg, Louth, Blowers, and Törönen, the Orthodox retrievals, the critical editions, the Philokalia‘s quiet role, and Maximus’s contested place in contemporary theology, including the live debate over Jordan Daniel Wood’s recent reading.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A father rediscovered

Maximus was never forgotten. The Sixth Ecumenical Council had made his Christology the faith of the Church; John of Damascus drew on him; he was excerpted in the Philokalia and read in the monasteries; the Latin West knew him through John Scotus Eriugena, who translated the Ambigua and the Questions to Thalassius in the ninth century. But for centuries he was treated more as a transmitter — a compiler of the Greek patristic and ascetical inheritance, a difficult stylist whose long sentences deterred readers — than as a creative theologian in his own right. The twentieth century reversed that judgment decisively. The figure who emerged from the modern scholarship is a synthetic genius of the first rank, the father who drew Christology, cosmology, ascetical theology, and liturgy into a single vision; and he became, for Orthodox theology especially, the indispensable patristic reference point.

The spark: Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy (1941 / 1961)

The catalyst was a book by a young Swiss Jesuit. Hans Urs von Balthasar published Kosmische Liturgie: Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbilds bei Maximus dem Bekenner in 1941 (Freiburg: Herder), and a substantially rewritten second edition, Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners, in 1961 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag). The English translation by Brian E. Daley, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, appeared from Ignatius Press in 2003, made from the 1961 revision (Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, trans. Daley, Ignatius, 2003).

Balthasar’s achievement was to present Maximus not as a scholiast but as a thinker who extended the Chalcedonian logic of “union without confusion” across the whole order of being — uniting the Greek cosmological inheritance and Christology into a coherent vision in which the cosmos is ordered as a liturgy toward God in Christ. The book made Maximus interesting to a generation of theologians and set the agenda for the field.

It also set the field’s first controversy. Balthasar’s early reading stressed an Origenist strain in Maximus — Maximus as one who had absorbed and digested Origen and Evagrius. That thesis was directly challenged by Polycarp Sherwood, whose work showed that Maximus had in fact refuted the Origenist system; Balthasar revised his position considerably between the 1941 and 1961 editions in response. The precise nature of Maximus’s relation to Origenism thus became the founding scholarly debate of the revival, and it remains a live question.

Sherwood’s chronology and the philological foundation

If Balthasar supplied the vision, Polycarp Sherwood, O.S.B., supplied the philological floor on which everything since has been built. His An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor (Rome: Herder, 1952; Studia Anselmiana 30) established the relative chronology of Maximus’s writings — which works came when, and in what controversial context — and it remains the indispensable starting point for any study of the corpus. His companion monograph, The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenism (Rome: Herder, 1955; Studia Anselmiana 36), demonstrated that the early Ambigua (especially Ambiguum 7) is a deliberate dismantling of the Origenist myth of the pre-existent henad and the fall of minds — the demonstration that forced the revision of Balthasar’s reading. Sherwood also gave English readers an early translation in The Ascetic Life; The Four Centuries on Charity (Ancient Christian Writers 21, 1955).

The monographs: Thunberg, Louth, Blowers, Törönen

The first full-scale English monograph was Lars Thunberg’s Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund: Gleerup, 1965; 2nd revised ed., Chicago: Open Court, 1995). Thunberg made Maximus’s anthropology the center: the human person as microcosm, gathering the created order in itself, and as mediator, called in Christ to reconcile the five great divisions of being (see five-divisions-of-being.md). His shorter Man and the Cosmos (SVS Press, 1985) carried the themes to a wider readership.

Andrew Louth’s Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), in the “Early Church Fathers” series, became the standard student entry point: an accessible study of the life and theological vision together with the first English translations of key texts, including Ambiguum 10, Ambiguum 41, the Letter on Love, and several Opuscula. Paul M. Blowers produced both the major recent synthetic study — Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), in the Oxford Early Christian Studies series — and, with Robert Louis Wilken, the widely used classroom translation On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Popular Patristics Series 25, 2003), with selections from the Ambigua, the Questions to Thalassios, and a christological opusculum. Melchisedec Törönen’s Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) argued that the structuring principle of all of Maximus’s thought is simultaneous union and distinction — the Chalcedonian “united yet distinct, without confusion, in inseparable union” generalized across his theology, anthropology, and cosmology. Demetrios Bathrellos’s The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford, 2004) became the key monograph on the dyothelite material itself.

The Orthodox retrievals

The recovery was not only Western and academic; it was also, and centrally, an Orthodox theological retrieval. Georges Florovsky, who called in his 1936 Athens address for a “neo-patristic synthesis” — a return to “the mind of the Fathers” — pointed to Maximus as a high point of that mind: not for novelty but for his capacity to hear and unify the whole patristic inheritance (Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century, in his Collected Works). Vladimir Lossky drew on Maximus for apophaticism, deification, and the cosmic vocation of the human person in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (French 1944; English 1957). John Zizioulas built his relational ontology of personhood, in Being as Communion (SVS Press, 1985), substantially on Maximus’s person/nature distinction and logoi theology. Andrew Louth and Jean-Claude Larchet — the latter in La divinisation de l’homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur (Cerf, 1996) and a series of further studies — became leading Orthodox interpreters, Larchet especially insisting on fidelity to Maximus’s actual categories against looser appropriations. Through these figures Maximus became, in effect, the favorite father of twentieth-century Orthodox theology: the patristic linchpin uniting its Christology, anthropology, and cosmology.

The critical editions

The scholarship was made possible, and is steadily being deepened, by the work of putting Maximus’s Greek in reliable critical form. The Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca (CCSG, Turnhout: Brepols) carries the modern critical editions, beginning with the Quaestiones ad Thalassium edited by Carl Laga and Carlos Steel — with the facing ninth-century Latin of Eriugena — in two volumes (CCSG 7, 1980, for questions 1–55; CCSG 22, 1990, for questions 56–65), and continuing across further volumes for the Ambigua, the Opuscula, and other works. The single most consequential recent edition for English readers is Nicholas (Maximos) Constas’s On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, two volumes in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (DOML 28–29; Harvard University Press, 2014) — the first complete critically based Greek text and facing English translation of the Ambigua, the work that put Maximus’s most demanding and most important text fully within reach. Constas also translated the complete Questions to Thalassios in the Fathers of the Church series (FOTC 136, 2018).

The Philokalia: keeping Maximus read

While the academy rediscovered Maximus, the Philokalia had never let the Church stop reading him. Compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth (Venice, 1782) and rendered into English by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber; volume 2, 1981), the anthology devotes the bulk of its second volume to Maximus: the Four Hundred Texts on Love (the Centuries on Love), the Two Hundred Texts on Theology and the Incarnate Dispensation of the Son of God, the Various Texts on Theology, the Divine Economy, and Virtue and Vice, and the commentary On the Lord’s Prayer (The Philokalia, vol. 2, Faber, 1981). Because the Philokalia is the most widely read Orthodox spiritual anthology — a book of monasteries, parishes, and lay devotion, not only of scholars — it kept Maximus in living circulation among non-specialists throughout the centuries when the academy ignored him, and continues to do so alongside the critical editions. For most Orthodox readers, Maximus is first of all the author of the Centuries on Love (see centuries-on-love.md).

Maximus in contemporary theology

Maximus is now drawn upon well beyond historical patristics, and two areas of contemporary use stand out.

Ecology and the theology of creation. Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi — the divine “words” or principles of all created things, grounded in and unified by the one divine Logos (see logoi-of-creation.md) — has been repeatedly invoked as a basis for the sacramental value and integrity of the created order. Andrew Louth and Paul Blowers (in Transfiguration of the World, 2016) develop Maximus’s cosmic Christology toward a theology of creation, and the logoi doctrine has become a staple of Orthodox ecological theology, drawn upon in the environmental writings associated with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and John Chryssavgis. These are attributed examples of a wider tendency, not a claim that Maximus was himself an “environmental” thinker.

Personhood and the will. Maximus’s distinction between the natural will (thelema physikon), the God-given appetite of human nature for the good, and the gnomic will (gnome), the deliberative, fallible mode of willing proper to fallen persons (see natural-and-gnomic-will.md), stands at the center of modern debates over personhood. Orthodox personalists in the line of Lossky and Zizioulas press the person/nature distinction hard; Larchet and Bathrellos, working from the texts, have pushed back against over-personalist readings, insisting that Maximus’s own scheme be respected. The argument is genuinely unsettled, and it is one of the places where a seventh-century monk has become a participant in twenty-first-century systematic theology.

A live controversy. The most debated recent reading is Jordan Daniel Wood’s The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022). Wood argues, taking Maximus’s strongest statements at full strength, that for Maximus creation simply is incarnation — that the act of creation and the Word’s Incarnation are one identity, and that the logoi are the Word “enhypostasizing” the world, so that creatio ex nihilo approaches creatio ex Deo. The book positions itself as both heir to and corrective of Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy. It has been sharply contested. Critics — among them Torstein Tollefsen (review, 2023), who argues that for Maximus the mystery of Christ is precisely not identical with the mystery of creation, and others drawing on Bathrellos’s person/nature framework — have charged that the reading tends toward pantheism or monism and over-literalizes language Maximus meant in a qualified, often ascetical sense; Wood has replied to his critics in print and online. The dispute is flagged here as an active, unresolved scholarly debate, reported with both sides attributed rather than adjudicated — exactly the live edge of a renaissance that, eighty years after Cosmic Liturgy, shows no sign of closing.

References

von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Brian E. Daley. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003. (German: Kosmische Liturgie, Herder 1941; rev. Johannes Verlag 1961.)
Sherwood, Polycarp. An Annotated Date-List of the Works of Maximus the Confessor. Studia Anselmiana 30. Rome: Herder, 1952; The Earlier Ambigua of Saint Maximus the Confessor and His Refutation of Origenism. Studia Anselmiana 36. Rome: Herder, 1955.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. Lund: Gleerup, 1965; 2nd ed., Chicago: Open Court, 1995.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
Blowers, Paul M. Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; and 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.
Törönen, Melchisedec. Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. — Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St Maximus the Confessor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Laga, Carl, and Carlos Steel, eds. Maximi Confessoris Quaestiones ad Thalassium. CCSG 7 (1980) and 22 (1990). Turnhout: Brepols. — Constas, Nicholas, ed. and trans. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. 2 vols. DOML 28–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Florovsky, Georges. The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century (Collected Works); Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (1944; Eng. 1957); Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion (SVS Press, 1985); Larchet, Jean-Claude. La divinisation de l’homme selon saint Maxime le Confesseur. Paris: Cerf, 1996.
Wood, Jordan Daniel. The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022; with reviews and replies, incl. Torstein Tollefsen’s 2023 review. (Flagged as a live debate.)