I’m speechless.

Remember I wrote Andrew Louth (Patristics giant at Oxford U) about Thunberg’s comment re: Maximus, remember? Yeah. He and Tollefsen both agreed that Moore was misinterpreting Maximus in saying that human individuality disappeared in the eschaton. Thunberg had to have meant some different when he said Maximus believed the human being “received God as a replacement for the human ego.”

So I wrote Louth back about something else. My own personal pet peeve (D will recognize)!

Here’s my note to Louth just today:

If human persons in the eschaton are not to be reduced to being a mere ‘function’ of the divine will (as Edward Moore argues is Maximus’s view) so that they cease being unique persons, might we ground/locate the different between a person’s logos (determined by God) and her tropoi (determined by the person) as the place where personal uniqueness continues to characterize each human being? I’m suggesting that tropoi describe the “scope of possibilities” for the concrete fulfilment of a person’s logos. Hence, the logoi of created beings do not themselves prescribe or determine every movement of creaturely existence (which would reduce creatures to being a function of the divine will), but rather only delimit/determine a range of beautiful expression. Each of us will continue, then, to exercise a measure of freedom in the determining which of any number of equally possible forms of creative expression (offered by our logoi) becomes our actual concrete expressive form. Basically I’m suggesting an indeterminist model of theosis where creatures continue forever to share in determining the shape of their creative expression (and so remain personally distinct) and yet God is “all in all” by virtue of the all-embracing logoi.

Can Maximus’s Logos/logoi/tropoi distinction accommodate something like this?

Louth’s answer…

Yes, with the clarification that one can only talk about the difference between logos of being and tropos of existence in the case of rational beings (who therefore have free will).

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FRICKING AWESOME! I’m NOT crazy.

Tom

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/17/2009 3:31:31 PM (GMT-6)

From Louth’s Maximus the Confessor, p. 27 (the Introduction):

Amb. 2 [Ambiuum, or “Difficulty”] is concerned with a passage from Gregory’s [Naziansus] Third Theological Oration in which he counters the Arian argument that one who is God cannot be said to hunger, sleep or fear, all of which are attributed to Christ, by saying: “And, in a word, what is exalted is to be ascribed to the Godhead, to that nature which is superior to sufferings and the body, what is lowly is to be ascribed to the composite that for your sake emptied himself and took flesh and—it is no worse to say—became a man.” The reason why this poses a difficulty for Maximus is the way in which it seems to keep suffering away from the Godhead and thus possibly compromise the unity of Christ’s perons (though Gregory’s language here is in fact very careful). Maximus’ response is a paraphrase of Gregory that emphasizes the unity of the subject in Christ and, in particular, expressly justifies theopaschite language by using, and repeating, an expression from Gregory’s Fourth Theological Oration—“God passible.” The same concern is a found in Amb. 4 where he says, “therefore he was also truly a suffering God, and the very same was truly a wonder-working man….

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D, I hope Greg doesn't reach too far in criticizing the effects of Neoplatonism upon the Fathers. There are things to criticize, no doubt. But there are some important things to keep too, and I hope he doesn't shoot himself in the foot. ;o)

Tom 

Post Edited (Tom) : 12/18/2009 10:41:13 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Tom) : 12/18/2009 11:09:04 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Tom) : 12/18/2009 1:40:28 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (One Love) : 12/19/2009 1:43:25 AM (GMT-6)