Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 106 - Double or Nothing - Maximus the Confessor.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Double or Nothing? Maximus the Confessor. It's amazing what other people care about. We've all raised an eyebrow at the spectacle of sports fans weeping in despair or screaming with joy over a game we find utterly tedious, or smiled secretly at a friend's deep emotional attachment to some ridiculous enthusiasm like model trains, stamp collecting, or giraffes. In such cases, we should no doubt celebrate the variety and richness of people's values, only to be expected, we might think, in a rich and varied world. But in other cases, the incomprehensible passions of other people can be deeply depressing. Think of the many violent conflicts that pit ethnic or religious groups against one another. The animosity between the two groups means everything to the participants. They are willing to die and kill for their tribe. To outsiders, this can only seem futile and irrational. Indeed, nearly all such conflicts seem pointless with the benefit of enough distance and perspective. A good example would be the late ancient dispute over the metaphysical relationship between the divine and human aspects of Jesus Christ. Nowadays I suspect even most devout Christians have given this question no thought whatsoever. From a non-Christian perspective, the debate seems even more bewildering. Yet some of the most intelligent citizens of the early Byzantine Empire devoted whole careers to disputing the issue. Over the question of Christ's humanity and divinity, and whether these were two different natures or just one nature, councils were convened, political institutions were endangered, and blood was spelt. Some of the blood belonged to the man we'll be discussing in this episode, the seventh-century thinker Maximus the Confessor. His honorific title Confessor refers to his staunch defense of a view that eventually became orthodox in the Byzantine tradition—Christ had two natures, united in a single person. But in his own life, Maximus was not celebrated for his orthodoxy. Instead, his enemies literally cut off the hand with which he had written of Christ's two natures and tore out the tongue with which he had so articulately defended his theology. He died soon after in the year 662, having joined Socrates in the select group of philosophers who have been violently persecuted for their beliefs. To understand why anyone would have thought it necessary to mutilate Maximus in this way, and why Maximus would run the risk of being so mutilated, we need to go back a few hundred years, to the fourth century. This was the age of the Cappadocian Fathers, who took part in politicized disputes over fine points of Christian theology. When I looked at them, I concentrated on the question of how the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. We saw that they wanted to steer a course between Arianism, which went too far in the direction of separating the persons of the Trinity, and Sibelianism, which simply identified the persons and held that they are distinct only from our limited human viewpoint. The Cappadocians presented themselves as steering another middle course in another controversy, which I did not have time to explore in that episode. In this case, debate raged over the fundamental Christian belief that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, the Son of God become flesh, in order that through his sacrifice humanity could be redeemed from sin. This belief brings with it a dilemma, much like the one we saw in the case of the Trinity. Just as theologians didn't want to say with the Aryans that the Father is utterly distinct from the Son, lest we wind up with two gods, so they didn't want to compromise the unity of Christ. He was one person, even if he was both man and God. On the other hand, just as they rejected the Sibelian error of erasing all difference between the persons, so it seemed unacceptable simply to identify Christ's unity with his divinity. After all, the divine is radically different from the human, so if there is no distinction here, then either Christ's humanity is swallowed up in his divinity or his divinity is entirely humbled and brought down to the level of the human. Neither option looks acceptable. If Christ was only divine, then God did not really take on human nature in order to redeem him. Whereas if he was only human, then his sacrifice was merely the death of some particularly virtuous man and not the Son of God. Besides, Christ was acknowledged as having been immune to sin. How was this possible unless his fallible human nature had somehow been perfected through his divinity? All parties to the dispute understood that the correct metaphysical understanding would recognize both the divinity and the humanity of Christ. Agreement remained elusive though when it came to the details. Often, those details were worked out using philosophical distinctions and assumptions. Consider, for instance, the 4th century theologian Apollinarius. He was especially concerned to safeguard the unity of Christ. Towards this end, he invoked the strikingly Platonist rationale that human nature is subject to change, whereas divine nature is unchanging and eternal. But whatever can change can diverge into imperfection. This means that if Christ had human thoughts and a human will, he was inevitably subject to sin. One way of taking this would be that if Christ was genuinely human, then it was possible for him to sin, which would be bad enough. But Apollinarius seems to have gone further and said that if Christ had a human will, he would actually have sinned, perhaps because he assumed that any genuine capacity must be realized at some point. Looking ahead, we can credit Maximus with being unusually clearheaded on this point. As we'll see, he will distinguish more rigorously between the capacity for thinking or willing something and the actual thinking or willing. Apollinarius was condemned in the late 4th century when his attempts to ensure Christ's unity were judged to violate the rule that Christ must be fully human. In sharp contrast was the view of a man named Nestorius, who brings us up to the 5th century. For Nestorius and his followers, Christ not only has two natures, but also two hypostases. What is a hypostasis? Historians of philosophy are most likely to encounter the word in Neoplatonic contexts as a technical term used for the levels of the Platonist hierarchy like soul and intellect. In this theological context though, hypostasis means something less elaborate, just an entity that is distinct from other entities. Thus, Nestorius' view amounts to splitting Christ into two entities with two natures, one human and one divine. Nestorius received full marks for avoiding the problems of Apollinarianism, but earned only a must-try harder when it came to the goal of upholding Christ's unity. He and his followers, the Nestorians, did assert that Christ was a single person, in Greek prosopon, but this was seen by critics as a superficial maneuver, a mask of unity concealing a real underlying duality. Indeed, the word prosopon means face or visage, and was used to describe the mask-wearing of characters in the Greek theater. When the Cappadocians took central stage, they also claimed the middle ground, insisting that Christ has two natures but is only one hypostasis, a single unified entity which is nonetheless both divine and human. In explaining this, Gregory of Nyssa drew on the Stoic theory of physical mixture to envisage a situation in which divinity and humanity were blended together while retaining their natures, just as in a red-hot sword the metal of the blade is suffused with fire, even as the nature of the metal remains distinct from the nature of the fire. A similar view was upheld by the influential theologian Cyril of Alexandria. It was incidentally on Cyril's watch as lead cleric in Alexandria that the Platonist Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob. Cyril's theology prevailed at the Council of Ephesus in the year 431, which rejected the teachings of Nestorius. But neither this nor a further council at Chalcedon in 451 could unite the church. Some communities continued to uphold Apollinarius's Monophysite theory — the word comes from the Greek for one nature — while others preferred the two-nature and two-hypostasis view of Nestorius. Still others adhered to Cyril's understanding of Christ as a single person and hypostasis that comes out of two natures. This fracture had deep social and political consequences, and was a potential source of weakness within the Byzantine Empire — that is, the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which survived after the fall of the West. In the first half of the seventh century, it seemed especially pressing to resolve the controversy. Following a victorious, but draining, conflict with the Persians, the Byzantines were suddenly assaulted by a new and unexpected threat, the armies of Islam. After the death of the prophet Muhammad in the year 632, Muslim forces achieved an astonishingly rapid series of military conquests. In earlier antiquity, Christianity had chased paganism out of the Roman Empire by means of war, coercion, economic incentives, and plain old persuasion. Now Christianity faced the threat of a similar fate at the hands of Islam. That meant it was urgent to eliminate division within the Greek Christian sphere. This made it more appealing than ever to accept compromise positions that had been put forward. Perhaps, for instance, both sides might agree to disagree about the number of natures in Christ, and focus on agreeing that Christ is unified by having a single will. But theologians had, for many generations now, shown that they were too stubborn, or perhaps too conscientious, to be satisfied by verbal formulas that masked genuine differences of doctrine. In other words, they were going to keep causing trouble, Muslim invasions or no. Which finally brings us to our man Maximus. Following his teacher Sophronius, who was both stubborn and conscientious, Maximus wanted to uphold the two-nature theory. Sophronius and Maximus stridently rejected the new one-will idea as a compromise too far. It made no sense to ascribe only one will to a person who has two natures. Maximus carried on the fight after Sophronius died, continuing to insist that having a human nature and a divine nature means having two wills. His opponents fought back, appealing not just to political expediency, but also to the point made long ago by Apollinarius. If Christ has two wills, the wills can come into conflict. This means that Christ will inevitably sin, or at least that He inevitably could sin. Maximus replied with the point I mentioned above. We shouldn't confuse will as a capacity with will in the sense of a decision made by that capacity. Christ's divine will was a separate capacity from His human will, but these two wills always came together to issue a single joint decision, just as Christ's two natures cohered in a single hypostasis. And just as the Cappadocians had taught that the divine and human natures are fused without being confused, that is, both natures are preserved within a single entity, so Maximus now teaches that the human will of Jesus is preserved even though it is perfected by the presence of divinity. He reacted similarly to another compromise proposal, namely that Christ has a single activity. Here, the Greek word I'm translating as activity is energia, the source of the English word energy, which is frequently used as a rather awkward translation for energia in discussions of this debate. As with the will, the question is whether Christ's activities or energies are of two kinds or only one. Here, the single activity camp could draw on the authority of the pseudo-Dionysius, who had spoken of Christ possessing a theandric activity that is an activity characterized by both divinity and humanity. Maximus greatly admired Dionysius, but nonetheless rejected the single activity theory just as firmly as he did the single will theory. His point was much the same as it was in the will case. Christ retained a human capacity for activity which was perfected by the fusion of his human nature with divine nature. He gave the example of Christ's walking on water. Walking is a natural human act, but Christ's divinity made it possible for him to walk in a supernatural way. Walking on water is a single activity alright, but it must be understood as the simultaneous use of two distinct capacities to act. If you remember your Aristotle, you'll realize that Maximus is echoing the distinction between first and second actuality. Traditionally, this distinction is illustrated with the example of learning mathematics, but let's instead think about a coffee shop loyalty card. Initially, it is blank, a state of first potentiality. Then it fills up with stamps, one for each coffee you buy. When the card is full of stamps, it is in a state of first actuality, an actuality that is also a second potentiality or capacity, in this case, the all-important capacity to claim a free cup of coffee. When you redeem the card, that is second actuality. Applying this distinction to Maximus' Christology, we find him saying that Christ has two first actualities, a divine will and a human will. These are capacities to produce a concrete act of willing, which will be a second actuality. Even though the two wills are distinct capacities, or first actualities, they always agree, so they coincide at the level of second actuality. This happens when Christ actually wills something, when he, for instance, chooses to turn water into wine instead of coffee. But of course, Maximus does not have beverages percolating through his mind when he discusses all this. Rather, he wants to explain the metaphysical underpinnings of Christ's perfection, his freedom from sin. After this survey of late ancient Christology and Maximus' metaphysics, you might still be feeling that the entire debate was like whole coffee beans, groundless. Their rarified reflections may seem about as substantial as the froth on a cappuccino. By the way, the word cappuccino derives, appropriately enough, from the resemblance between the drink and the clothing worn by a certain order of Christian friars. This makes the coffee theme appropriate for discussing Maximus, but perhaps I'll use it again when I get to John Stuart Mill. And yet, for the participants in this debate, the issue was anything but trivial. Explaining what Christ was meant explaining how the entire human race had been saved from sin. For us philosophers, the debate is no less important, obviously for its historical importance, but also because it is at root a debate over metaphysics. If you are trying to figure out whether two things are in fact identical, for instance whether the mind is the same thing as the brain, or whether Christ's humanity is the same thing as His divinity, there's a test you can do. Try to find a statement that holds true of one of the two things, but not the other. If you manage this then you've proven that you are indeed dealing with two separate things, and not just one. This is how philosophers like Plato and Descartes have argued for mind-body dualism. They claim to discover a feature that the mind has, and the body lacks. For instance, Plato argued that the mind is simple and indestructible, a statement that could not be applied to the body. Exactly this strategy was used in the ancient Christological debate. One thing that seemed certain about the second person of the Trinity, the divine Logos, was that it could not suffer or be affected. And yet, if there's anything we know about Jesus is that He did suffer, He was crucified, and died in agony. Here Nestorius and his followers pounced, like the good metaphysicians they were. If God cannot suffer, then there must have been something in Christ other than God, which allowed Him to suffer. Cyril of Alexandria wrote a letter of refutation to Nestorius where he grappled with this difficulty directly. He turned the tables on his opponents by insisting that the whole point of the Incarnation is that God willingly submits His Son to the sufferings of the flesh. The letter concludes with a list of 12 doctrines destructive of the faith. The last item on the list says that if anyone refuses to admit that the Word of God, the second person of the Trinity, suffered by being crucified, then he is to be considered anathema. That means you, Nestorius. Another example is the apparently bizarre debate over whether the Virgin Mary is to be honored with the phrase theotokos, a Greek word meaning one who gives birth to God. Nestorius disliked this expression because it, again, seemed indirectly to apply a property to God that God simply cannot have. God is eternal and prior to all things, so how can Mary give birth to Him? Instead, Nestorius proposed that Mary gave birth to Christ insofar as Christ was human. Cyril's response was that Mary did give birth to a man made of flesh like us, but in so doing she gave birth to God. This is no absurdity as Nestorius claimed but rather the whole point. She gave birth to the Word of God made flesh, this being the very meaning of the word Incarnation. On all these points, Maximus agreed with Cyril against Nestorius. He recognized that Christ had two natures but added that we should resist the Nestorian temptation to divide everything we say about Christ into two types, one set of statements that are true because He was God, the other set of statements true because He was a man. The unification of the two natures makes it possible for both God and man to suffer or to be born of a virgin. Maximus developed these points beyond metaphysics into the realm of ethics. Our understanding of the human good is radically transformed by learning that human nature was divinized in the person of Christ. Of course, normal humans are not free from sin, and they are not the incarnation of the Word of God, as Christ was. Nonetheless, we must work towards our own perfection, which means working towards our own more modest sort of divinity. Maximus was just the latest in a long line of ancient philosophers to explain how humans can, as Plato put it, achieve likeness to God insofar as is possible. But he was also influenced by more recent figures, the Cappadocians and the Pseudo-Dionysius. From them, he has taken the conviction that God is unknowable in His essence. He can be grasped only through His activities. So, even souls who achieve salvation in the afterlife will be allowed to participate in God's activity, rather than unifying with the divine essence itself. What about our life in this world? Here, Maximus again responded to earlier Christian thinkers. Some of them, especially Origen, had defended an intellectualist vision of the human good and emphasized the contemplation of God. Maximus agreed that we should try to contemplate God, albeit that we must do so by means of grasping his activities, since God Himself transcends the grasp of our limited minds. Indeed, he suggested that the knowledge of God is what distinguishes Christians from the Jews, whom he criticized for contenting themselves with the avoidance of sin. But Maximus recognized too that avoiding sin is no easy feat. We are drawn by the nature of our bodily existence towards pleasure and the passions, and it requires strength of will and not just a clever mind to subdue these desires to the law of reason and divinity. Echoing an exegetical tradition that goes back as far as Philo, Maximus read biblical passages as urging us to fight against the passions. For instance, the flight of Moses and the Jewish people from Egypt symbolizes, for Maximus, the need to turn away from the realm of sensation and towards the things of the mind. He referred to this as a kind of emptying of ourselves, removing all bodily attachments so that nothing but openness to virtue and God remain. This aspect of Maximus' ethical teaching can be understood only in light of another development within the early Greek-Christian tradition. His philosophy responds not only to the metaphysics of Cyril and the Cappadocians and the negative theology of Dionysius, but also to the ascetic teachings of figures like the desert father Evagrius. And if we want to understand the ethical significance of ancient Christian philosophy, we too must look back to the radical practices and psychological theories of men like Evagrius. I know you would love for me to go on to discuss this immediately, but I'm afraid you'll have to exercise some self-restraint and wait for one more week for the philosophy of Christian asceticism, here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.