After Darwin (part 4)

Maximus the Confessor on the cosmic story

The previous installment dealt with the subjective reason for the modern rejection of the medieval reading of nature: a growing self-awareness of human potential that made the confines of an inherited order seem small and constraining. Today we will consider one of the empirical reasons, specifically, the discovery that biological species evolve dramatically over the course of geological time, in direct contrast to the cyclic Aristotelian universe that the medieval model had embraced.

Both of these difficulties stem from an aspect of the medieval spirit that is also one of its greatest strengths. As C.S. Lewis notes in his magisterial survey of the medieval worldview, their intellectual attitude was characterized by a profoundly ecumenical receptivity: anything said anywhere by any genuine sage must somehow be true. The effort to harmonize everything into a comprehensive system was an immense spur to intellectual creativity, and helped generate astonishingly rapid social and cultural growth. But this same attitude made it more difficult to ingest radically new phenomena — both social and scientific — that were totally unknown to the authors of the past and that demanded a substantial revision of their theories.

The immediate result of the tension between the medieval system and the new discoveries (which that very system helped produce) was a radical epistemological shift, as articulated most clearly by Descartes, replacing methodical trust with methodical doubt. Rationalism and empiricism culminated in the Enlightenment’s deliberate effort to discard the entire medieval paradigm, including the insights about mutual service as the basic logic of nature.

In the present era of recovery from this excessive reaction, it is useful to trace the most important medieval ideas further back in time. During the first six centuries, Christian thinkers faced the task of distinguishing themselves from competing philosophies, and therefore read the great pagan authors with a much more critical mindset. In these debates, the problem of evolution (in a broad sense) was already present, as something latent in the basic outlook of the Bible that clashed with the cosmological hypotheses of the philosophers. The Biblical idea of the cosmos as a story, with human beings as protagonists, could not be easily reconciled with the Aristotelian vision of a world ruled by the circling spheres trying to imitate the sublimely indifferent unmoved mover. While the medieval thinkers would later go to great lengths to accomplish this harmonization, the patristic authors were ready to simply reject this aspect and substitute it with something more consistent with the Biblical gestalt.

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Maximus the Confessor was one of the last great theologians in this initial phase of Christian thought. His writings represent a remarkable synthesis of the most important developments of the preceding centuries, from Origen of Alexandria to the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine of Hippo. He received a solid education in classical philosophy, demonstrating a firm command of Aristotelian terminology, which allowed him to carefully identify exactly when and how Christian revelation necessitates an innovation on that tradition.

Today’s text comes from a book-length letter of Maximus to his friend Thalassios, responding to a set of 65 questions about difficult biblical passages. The second question on the list directly addresses the limitations of philosophical cosmology, drawing out the radical implications of a line from Jesus’ dispute with the religious authorities in Jerusalem as presented in the Gospel of John.

Defending himself against the accusation of breaking the Sabbath rest through his healing activity, Jesus says “my Father is at work until now, and I am at work” (Jn 5:17, “ὁ πατήρ μου ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι”). In the original context, Jesus is asking the authorities to remember that their whole religious history is characterized by the continuous and often surprising action of God, gradually leading his people towards a destination they have not yet reached. Therefore, they should be open to the possibility of something as surprising as his own claims about his mission and identity, and not blind themselves through a static adherence to their own interpretation of the sacred texts.

Even Jesus’ most determined enemies presumably agreed with this premise, but simply rejected its application to his person. In the new context of dialogue with Greek philosophy, the premise itself is now in question:

If the demiurge made all the forms that fill the cosmos in the six days, why does the Father work afterwards? For the Savior says, “My Father is at work until now, and I am at work.” Unless he is perhaps speaking of the conservation of the forms that had already come into being?¹

In the Platonic view, God is not directly involved in creation, since that would involve lowering himself to the fragile realm of generation and corruption. The origin of the material world is explained through the myth of the “demiurge,” a superhuman “craftsman” who contemplates the eternal and immaterial forms that flow from God and shapes matter in their image. The saying of Jesus implies first of all that God is the demiurge, that he himself is involved in the material world. And this involvement does not end with the initial realization of the forms in matter — this is only the beginning of an ongoing divine project.

Maximus explains this summary of the Biblical worldview using the same vocabulary as Thalassios’ question, employing the inherited philosophical categories to express a totally different vision. He starts by acknowledges that there is a certain stable structure to the universe, fixed from the beginning, within which everything else unfolds:

After completing the first logoi of contingent things and the universal essences of beings once and for all, in a way that he alone knows,…

Maximus is willing to grant the existence of a fixed set of “essences,” covering all the possible ways of being within the stable cosmic frame. But this is only the first step. Maximus now turns to the work of God as “demiurge,” concretely realizing the possibilities latent in this background structure:

God is still at work, not only conserving these things in being, but also creating, developing and consolidating by the actualization of the concrete particulars potentially in them, as well as assimilating the particular to the universal through his providential guidance.

For Maximus, the work of the demiurge is still ongoing, both in the initial instantiation of universals that have not yet been seen in history, and in the progressive growth and development of individual things towards their perfection. But the very potentiality that makes material things capable of novelty and growth also makes them susceptible to defection from the universal, resulting in individual characteristics and tendencies out of harmony with the whole. The completion of the cosmic project therefore requires another step: the arrival of a being who can unify the cosmos from within. This is Maximus’ metaphysical justification for the centrality of human beings to the cosmic story:

This goes on until, having unified the autonomous urges of individual beings by means of the naturally most universal logos of the rational essence (i.e., human nature) through its movement towards well-being,…

Human nature is characterized as logikos, open to the logoi of all things, capable of perceiving the material world as a “word” from the divine Speaker, and of deliberately bringing it towards the intended goal. This happens through the “movement towards well-being,” which does not mean bourgeois comfort, but “being well” in the highest sense of the term — which for Maximus is the elevation of the human will to union with the will of God. This interior movement is what unlocks the logic of the whole plan, producing the definitive epiphany of the order of mutual service:

he renders them harmonious and cooperative with one another and with the whole, the singular no longer having any diverging tendency against the universal,…

This epiphany manifests the Word of God as the foundation and explanation of the whole project, whose ultimate aim is the elevation of the created order into God’s eternity:

but one and the same Logos will be seen in them all, no longer divided by the tropoi of the things according to which it is equally predicated, and will thereby make manifest the grace that accomplishes the divinization of all things.²

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This condensed version of the cosmic story opens many huge questions, and to even begin to touch on them all requires the whole rest of the book. For Maximus, a complete account of this process requires all of Christian doctrine and practice, including the results of the first five ecumenical councils, as well as the liturgy and the whole theology of the sacraments. But this introduction already opens up the basic contours of a reading of nature that overcomes both modern atomism and medieval stasis. While there is one logos that ultimately unites all things into a single web of mutual service, this only becomes fully visible at the end of history. In the meantime, the fact that concrete particulars really possess their own identity and relative autonomy means that the harmony can apparently be broken. This rupture becomes the occasion for new growth that is not simply a mechanical unfolding, but genuine novelty, opening up new ways of being and of serving that could never have been predicted.

1. Responses to Thalassios, Q2: “Εἰ πάντα τὰ εἴδη τὰ συμπληροῦντα τὸν κόσμον ἐν ταῖς ἓξ ἡμέραις ὁ δημιουργὸς ἐποίησεν, τί μετὰ ταῦτα ὁ Πατὴρ ἐργάζεται; Λέγει γὰρ ὁ Σωτὴρ ὁ Πατήρ μου ἕως ἄρτι ἐργάζεται, κἀγὼ ἐργάζομαι. Μή τι ἆρα τὴν τῶν ἅπαξ γεγονότων εἰδῶν συντήρησιν λέγει;”

2. Responses to Thalassios, Q2: “Τοὺς μὲν πρώτους τῶν γεγονότων λόγους ὁ Θεὸς καὶ τὰς καθόλου τῶν ὄντων οὐσίας ἅπαξ, ὡς οἶδεν αὐτός, συμπληρώσας, ἔτι ἐργάζεται οὐ μόνον τὴν τούτων αὐτῶν πρὸς τὸ εἶναι συντήρησιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὴν κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν τῶν ἐν αὐτοῖς δυνάμει μερῶν δημιουργίαν πρόοδόν τε καὶ σύστασιν, ἔτι μὴν καὶ τὴν διὰ τῆς προνοίας πρὸς τὰ καθόλου τῶν μερικῶν ἐξομοίωσιν, ἕως ἄν, τῷ κατὰ φύσιν γενικωτέρῳ λόγῳ τῆς λογικῆς οὐσίας διὰ τῆς πρὸς τὸ εὖ εἶναι κινήσεως τῶν μερικῶν τὴν αὐθαίρετον ἑνώσας ὁρμήν, ποιήσειεν ἀλλήλοις τε καὶ τῷ ὅλῳ σύμφωνα καὶ ταὐτοκίνητα, μὴ ἐχόντων τὴν γνωμικὴν πρὸς τὰ καθόλου τῶν ἐπὶ μέρους διαφοράν, ἀλλ᾽ εἷς καὶ ὁ αὐτὸς ἐφ᾽ ὅλων θεωρηθήσεται λόγος, μὴ διαιρούμενος τοῖς τῶν καθ᾽ ὧν ἴσως κατηγορεῖται τρόποις, καὶ οὕτως ἐνεργουμένην τὴν ἐκθεωτικὴν τῶν ὅλων ἐπιδείξηται χάριν·”