On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press "Popular Patristics" Series)

Rating:
Summary: Maximize Your Maximus Studies!
Review: St. Vladimir's "Popular Patristics Series" gives "popular" a whole new meaning. It includes to date twenty-six small books with newly translated, or translated for the first time, writings of Christian fathers such as Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Irenaeus, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa. The present volume includes fourteen relatively brief theological reflections and biblical commentaries by Maximus (c. 580-662), translated by Paul Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken, who also supply a splendid thirty-two-page introduction to Maximus' life and thought. Maximus was something of a "bridge" theologian between East and West and, having been exiled from Constantinople, played an important part in trying to revive the Church in North Africa which was under attack from, among other hostile forces, Arab armies. Again imprisoned and horribly mutilated by the authorities in Constantinople, he died a heroic death, earning the title of "Confessor." With great intellectual sophistication, he de-fended the hypostatic union of the two natures, human and divine, in Christ-or, more precisely, the union that is Jesus Christ. Responding to questions posed by a fellow monk, Thalassius, he refuted Origen's theory regarding preexistent souls and opposed the Monothelite heresy that Christ had but one will. Maximus tirelessly returns to the story line of God's purpose in terms of human being, well-being, and eternal well-being, the last understood as the "deification" already accomplished in Christ. This book, like the series of which it is part, is not likely to make Maximus or the other Fathers popular in any current sense of the term, but it does make a crucially important part of the Christian intellectual tradition accessible to theologically literate readers, and provides critical notes and bibliography of interest also to patristic scholars. This is a First Things review I found useful.