On Patristic Hermeneutics
Notes on Maximus the Confessor's Responses to Thalassius
In the introduction to Maximus the Confessor’s Responses to Thalassius, Maximus gives a concise summary of what one might call “patristic hermeneutics”, that is, how early Christian writers approached and read the text of Scripture:
I beseech you, who are most holy—along with all those who, as is likely, will read what I have written—not to take what I say as a definitve spiritual interpretation of the passages in question, for I am very far from the mind and meaning of the divine words, with respect to which I need to be taught by others. If it should happen that you—on your own or with others—are able to provide a better interpretation or perchance to learn something from the following, this is for you to determine and produce a more elevated and true understanding, the fruit of which is the heart’s fulfillment for those who long for spiritual insight into the things that puzzle and perplex them.
This is because the divine word is like water, for just as water operates in different species of plants and vegetation and in different kinds of living things—by which I mean in human beings who drink the Word Himself—the Word is manifested in them through the virtues, in proportion to their level of knowledge and ascetic practice, like burgeoning fruit produced according to the quality of virtue and knowledge in each, so that the Word becomes known to others through other qualities and characteristics. For the divine word could never be circumscribed by a single individual interpretation nor does it suffer confinement in a single meaning, on account of its natural infinity.1
The first thing that struck me when I read this is how different the first paragraph is from current academic disciplines. Academics, in my experience, are more concerned with showing how everyone else in recorded history had it all wrong, but thank God I came around to finally reveal the truth. Oh, you lucky people, how fortunate you are to have me around! Granted, the rhetorical trope of expressing one’s own inability is just that: a trope. One might, then, be skeptical of Maximus here, but I think he is genuine based on his “theology of inspiration” that he describes in the second paragraph.
In the second paragraph, Maximus articulates what some might now call “virtuous” reading. What are the characteristics required of a reader to apprehend the meaning or significance of a text? For Maximus, virtue is connected to both knowledge and ascetic discipline. We get the knowledge part, though I doubt we take the ascetic discipline part seriously. Why does Maximus? Because Maximus has a more robust understanding of the “passions” than we do. After the quoted material above, Maximus continues, “You had asked me first to say something about the passions that trouble us…,”2 and then proceeds for three pages (in Constas translation) listing out all of Thalassius’s questions about the nature of the passions and how they affect us. I won’t quote the entire list (you should buy the book), but suffice it to say that Maximus perceives the passions, and the demons who use them, as the primary obstacle to a proper reading of Scripture that is only overcome by our soul’s union to God:
Through this union, the soul will ineffably receive from God the knowledge of real truth, as if it were a seed, and will no longer change and turn to sin, since the devil will no longer have a way to beguile it persuasively toward evil through ignorance of that which is beautiful by nature and which beautifies everything that has the capacity to participate in it.3
For those familiar with the Greek monastic and mystical tradition, this is more or less the teaching of Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa. If you are unfamiliar with the contours of Evagrius’s or Nyssa’s thought, I would recommend the recent English translation of Jean Daniélou’s Platonism and Mystical Theology: The Spiritual Doctrine of St. Gregory of Nyssa (see my review here where I summarize some of these aspects).
So a spiritual reading of Scripture is not merely a non-literal reading of Scripture. In Maximus here, the primary concern is what Scripture teaches us about the passions and how to fight them. Maximus is not against literal readings of Scripture. Indeed, in question 48, he shows that he is a subtle reader of the literal sense of Scripture when he notes the oddity of 2 Chronicles 26:10 saying that Uzziah had vine-dressers on Mount Carmel (a variant reading of the LXX). Maximus observes that he is
astonished and amazed at how Uzziah, though he was king of Judah, according ot the literal account, had “vine-dressers on Mount Carmel,” which did not belong to the kingdom of Judah but rather ot the kingdom of Israel, during whose reign the city of the kingdom of Israel was built.4
Whatever one makes of such an interpretation, it at least shows that Maximus was a keen observer of the text of Scripture. But such details are not his concern here. He is, instead, focused on reading Scripture to understand the nature of the passions and how to fight them. If we complain that he is not attending to the literal meaning of the scriptural text, it is because we have not attended to the literal reading of his text.
One last observation about Maximus that I want to make is how central Christ is to the whole endeavor of overcoming the passions. Question 21 is paramount in this regard. Here, Maximus is interpreting Colossians 2:15 which says that Christ stripped off the principalities and powers.5 First, Maximus explains the connection between passibility, sin, and the powers (= demons):
For in possessing, by virtue of its natural, contingent condition, the increase of sin within its very passibility, human nature came to possess the activites of all the opposing powers, principalities, and authorities—on account of the universal sin inherent in human passibility—operating through unnatural passions concealed under the guise of the natural passions. Through the unnatural passions, and by exploiting nature’s passibility, every power is actively at work, driving the inclination of the will by means of the natural passions into the corruption of unnatural passions.6
The demonic principalities and powers corrupted humanity by taking advantage of humanity’s contingent nature through the unnatural passions (=vices) that co-opt our natural passions.7 Christ, in taking on our contingent human nature but not sinning, has therefore “stripped the principalities and powers” from his incarnate human nature. This he did twice, according to Maximus: once in his temptation in the wilderness and then in his crucifixion. This point might be illustrated this way:
Human condition: Powers→unnatural passions(=vices)→corrupting natural passions→corrupting human nature
Christ’s solution: Incarnate nature→natural passions→refusal to follow unnatural passions (=virtue)→overcome the powers
Maximus summarizes his point this way:
…by His own power He freed—as if through the “first fruits” of His own holy flesh (which he took from us)—the whole human nature from the wicked power that had been mixed into its condition of passibility, subjugating to this very same passibility of nature the evil power that had formerly ruled within it, I mean in the passibility of nature.8
Passibility and contingency are not per se bad but have become corrupted and turned towards vice by the demonic powers.9 In his incarnation, temptation, and crucifixion, Jesus overcame the passions and the demonic influences that use them to corrupt and control us. Connecting this to the comment quoted early about the union of the soul with God, I think Maximus avoids the errors of exemplarism or mere moral influence. It is not that we imitate Jesus (though we do!) and so overcome the passions through our imitation, it is that our union with the Jesus who has overcome the passions and the powers that control us, empowers us to in turn overcome the unnatural passions within us through ascetic discipline. Without this union, we have no access to him who overcame the powers, and therefore our passions would still be subject to those powers.10
The most interesting thing in all of this is how I more or less was drawn to similar conclusions as I was reading—of all things—Scripture. Perhaps I will explain that in another post. While the language or style of Maximus may seem odd to us, it seems to me that he actually knew Scripture pretty well.
Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture. The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (2018), 77.
Maximus, Responses to Thalassios, 77.
Maximus, Responses to Thalassios, 80.
Maximus, Responses to Thalassios, 272.
Question 21 usually comes up in discussions about Maximus’s supposed universalism (e.g., his comments at the end about remaining silent on the “deeper secrets of the divine doctrines” (148). That is not my concern here.
Maximus, Responses to Thalassios, 144-45.
In the scholia, Eriugena identifies these as the motions of the soul: pleasure, grief, desire, and fear (148).
Maximus, Responses to Thalassios, 147-48. Whole human nature here, I think, is human nature as such and not the genus of human nature (or the aggregate of all individual human natures. The lines between these, however, if Johannes Zachhuber is right (The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics), are blurred in the wake of the Cappadocian settlement, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa.
One can also see here why divine impassibility becomes so important in patristic thought, and why modern criticisms of the traditional doctrine have missed the point. To yearn for a God just like us, tossed to and fro by his unnatural passions, is to confuse the problem with the answer.
Might this also explain the oddity of Paul’s comments about completing what is lacking in the suffering of Christ (Col 1:24)? That is, what Christ has accomplished (taming the passions of human nature) is being actualized in each of us—the body of Christ—and so Paul fulfills what is lacking in so far as his ministry helping us “suffer” (tame the passions through ascetic discipline).