The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified
Overview
Contemporary scholarship recognizes in Maximus the Confessor a theologian of towering intellectual importance. In this book Adam G. Cooper asks a question which from the origins of Christian thought has constituted an interpretative crux for catholic Christianity: what is the place of the material order and, specifically, of the human body, in God’s creative, redemptive, and perfective economies? While the study builds upon the insights of other efforts in Maximian scholarship, it primarily presents an engagement with the full vista of Maximus’ own writings, providing a unique contribution towards an intelligent apprehension of this erudite but often impenetrable theological mind.
Top Highlights
“ mutual perichoresis—a reciprocal interpenetration” (Page 39)
“The sensible realm must be transcended. Maximus repeats this with relentless resolve throughout his ascetic writings. In itself it is not evil, for everything God has created is good. But to stop short with it is idolatry: it is to ‘worship and serve created things rather than the creator’ (Rom. 1:25).” (Pages 19–20)
“As one ascends the progressive steps of the spiritual life one moves from dependence upon material symbols to a more direct apprehension of the subject they disclose. Indeed, ‘the saints’ represent the highest way of apprehending divine knowledge when it is said of them that ‘they do not acquire the blessed knowledge of God only by sense and appearances and forms, using letters and syllables, which lead to mistakes and bafflement over the discernment of the truth, but solely by the mind, rendered most pure and released from all material mists’” (Page 57)
“If the soul uses the senses properly, discerning by means of its own faculties the manifold inner principles (λόγους) of created beings, and if it succeeds in wisely transmitting to itself the whole visible universe in which God is hidden and proclaimed in silence, then by use of its own free choice it creates a world of spiritual beauty within the understanding.” (Page 59)
“God’s own theophanic embodiment in Christ, creation, deification, and Church. The metaphysical structure—determined by the union of uncreated and created in the one person who is the incarnate Word—is the same in each case.” (Page 111)
- Title: The Body in St Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified
- Author: Adam G. Cooper
- Series: Oxford Early Christian Studies
- Publisher: Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date: 2005
- Logos Release Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Maximus, Confessor, Saint, approximately 580-662; Human body › Religious aspects
- ISBNs: 9780199275700, 9780191534645, 019927570X, 0191534641
- Resource ID: LLS:BDYSTMXMSCNFSSR
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T19:12:12Z