A Language of Stone and Sky: Maximus and Augustine (Part Five)
This Blessed Inversion
So then in both Maximus and Augustine
we have seen that in Christ there must be two wills, for he was fully God and
fully man, and this precisely because it was our wills which swung away from
God and became entrenched in idolatry and egoism (which amount to much the same
thing). Here we might introduce Maximus’
concept of the “gnomic will”[1]
and again hope to demonstrate that while it is not explicitly in Augustine
under such a concept, there are nonetheless parallels to be found.[2] But in order to do so we must back up to view
how the concept of will is a sort of center within Maximus’ cosmology and
metaphysics. Only then will we be able
to see the true significance of the interruption of the gnomic will.
Our debates over the centuries
regarding predestination and free will have perhaps disposed us to readily
couch any discussion of “will” or “free will” by its positioning in relation to
the concept of libertarian freedom; which is to say the usual line of argument
is that the will itself is free if and only if it is true to say of any choice
that one could have chosen otherwise. Or
put otherwise: the will is free when it moves under no exterior
compulsion. However for Maximus—and Augustine—that
a will should be able to play weightless before a free-flowing sea of choices, would
only be seen as a very thin concept of will. As intellectual beings, writes
Maximus, our natural desire (qelhma fusikon) is an “intellectual desire” (qelhma logikon),[3]
which turns into a directed desire (boulhsiV) in which the imagination (orexiV fantastikh) fixates upon an object, bringing the
object into itself by desire, formulating ways and means to achieve it in
reality and thus executing a “choice” (boulh) to attain it.[4]
So far this sounds more or less in
line with a libertarian notion of will.
However the difference comes when the ability of free-spontaneity of the
will is not envisioned as a sort of “neutrality” able to leap suddenly out from
a prior repose of indifference. Here we
may remind ourselves of von Balthasar’s apt summary above: “For Maximus, as for Augustine,” he writes,
“freedom of the will involves more need than independence; it is an appetite
that reaches outward in search of its object (orexiV zhthtikh) and that must take its nourishment
from one of the two ‘trees.’”[5] And this is precisely because all of creation
was declared by God to be good; neither the will nor the world it surveys
represent a flat or neutral tableau, but is an array of varying proportions and
“tensionalities” (to use a term from Whitehead) whose dialectical synthesis of
movement and rest are nothing other
than an array of desires and loves which ultimately find God as their source
and center. “No creature by nature is
unmoved,”[6]
writes Maximus, “for movement driven by desire has not yet come to rest in that
which is ultimately desirable…therefore if something moves it has not yet come
to rest, for it has not yet attained.”[7] And at greater length:
God
is the one who scatters the seeds of agape (charity) and eros (yearning), for
he has brought these things that were within him outside himself in the act of
creation. That is why we read, ‘God is
love’ and in the Song of Songs he is called agape, and also ‘sweetness’ and
‘desire’ which are what eros means. For
he is the one who is truly loveable and desirable. Because this loving desire has flowed out of
him, he—its creator—is said to be himself in love; but insofar as he is himself
the one who is truly loveable and desirable, he moves everything that looks
towards him and that possesses in its own way, the power of yearning.[8]
All
created things have their motion in a passive way, since it is not a motion or
a dynamic that comes from the creatures own being. If, then, intellects are also created, they,
too, will necessarily be set in motion, because they are naturally led away
from their source, simply by existing, and towards a goal, by the activity of
their wills, for the sake of an existence fulfilled by value, of well-being. For the goal of movement in what is moved is,
generally speaking, eternal well being (aei eu einai) just as
its origin is being in general, which is God.
He is the giver of being and the bestower of the grace of well-being
insofar as he is its origin; motion of a particular kind is directed toward
him, insofar as he is its goal. And if
an intellectual being will only move in an intellectual way, as befits its
nature, it will necessarily become a knowing intellect; but if it knows, it
will necessarily also love what it knows; and if it loves, it must expand
itself in longing and live in longing expansion and so intensity and greatly
accelerate its motion…nor will it rest until it comes, in its fullness, to
enter into the fullness of what it loves, and is fully embraced by it, and
accepts, in the utter freedom of its own choice, a state of saving possession,
so that it belongs completely to what possesses it completely.[9]
The similarity to
Augustine, especially in this last passage, is striking (especially in regards
to the relation of loving what one knows, and knowing what one loves). We have already noted that for Augustine
everything is oriented by love—by vice or virtue, by proper use (uti) of the good created order and
enjoyment (frui) of God, or by an
improper elevation of the finite. While
obviously there are some conceptual differences, especially in regards to the
extent Maximus works out his cosmology compared to the briefer musings of
Augustine in de Trinitate, in a very real sense for Augustine, as for
Maximus, God himself is the ontological solidity of the creature: “This body by
the soul breathed into it is rational, and so although it is subject change, it
is capable of sharing in that wisdom which is changeless.”[10] And:
Then
that inexpressible embrace, so to say, of the Father and the image is not
without enjoyment, without charity, without happiness. So this love, delight, felicity, or
blessedness (if any human word can be found that is good enough to express it)
he calls very briefly “Use” and it is the Holy Spirit in the triad, not
begotten, but the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures
according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness, that
they might all keep their right order and rest in their right places.[11]
So that Augustine can
even be so radical as to speak of, not God’s distance, but immense closeness
precisely in transcendence: “And if a man is full of love, what is he full of
but God?”[12] When we love our brother, therefore, “we love
our brother out of God.”[13]
But conversely for Augustine, this does not result in an “occasionalism” where
the real world is purely epiphenomenon to God’s action, but rather a dialectic
ensues in which we equally at the same time move toward the concrete, embodied
nature of our fellow man precisely “loving out of God”: “Thus on the one hand
love of that form we believe [our brother] lived up to makes us love their life, and on the other belief in
their life stirs us to a more blazing charity toward that form; with the result
that the more brightly burns our love for God, the more surely and serenely we
see him, because it is in God that we observe that unchanging form of justice
which we judge that a man should live up to.”[14] And
not just man, but God is the good of the world:
Once
more come, see if you can. You certainly
only love what is good, and the earth is good with its lofty mountains and its
folded hills and its level plains, and a farm is good when its situation is
pleasant and its land fertile, and a house is good with its harmonious symmetry
of architecture so spacious and bright, and animals are good with their
animated bodies, and the air is good when mild and salubrious, and food is good
when tasty and health-giving…Why go on and on?
This is good and that is good.
Take away this and that and see good itself if you can. In this way you will see God, not good with
some other good, but the good of every
good. For surely among all these good things I have listed and whatever
others can be observed or thought of, we would not say one is better than
another when we make a true judgment unless we had impressed on us some notion
of good itself by which we both approve of a thing, and also prefer one to
another. That is how we should love God,
not this or that good but good itself, and we should seek the good of the soul,
not the good it can hover over in judgment but the good it can cleave to in
love, and what is this but God? Not good mind or good angel or good heavens but
Good Good.[15]
God is not locked away in transcendence, but is, as it were,
the very “breathing room,” of creation, the pure, free air that allows being to
be: the world “glows” with God, and we might speculate that it is the priestly
function of man to care for creation because he is the only one endowed with
the faculty of mind which can perceive the qualities of justice, beauty, truth,
love. It is these qualities which open
man to the world, precisely because he is open to God who is beyond and
encompasses the world (“what, after all, is not in God?”)[16] and
“when the mind loves God, and consequently as has been said, remembers and
understands him, it can rightly be commanded to love its neighbor as itself“[17]
or even more explicitly: “Oh, but you do see a trinity if you see charity…for
when we love charity we love her loving something, precisely because she does
love something. What then does charity
love that makes it possible for charity herself also to be loved? She is not charity if she loves nothing; but
if she loves herself, she must love something in order to love herself as
charity. So what does charity love but
what we love with charity? And this, to
move beyond our neighbor, is our brother.”[18]
Here we begin to approach the vistas
that lay beyond and through the keyhole of the two wills. The doctrine’s vital importance is not merely
that it is the last or seemingly smallest piece of the Chalcedonian
soteriological puzzle; the centrality of will and desire, its relation through
love to the universe, to God, to others, displays that the healing of our will
in Christ is perhaps the quintessential joint that allows us to see God
reflected in the goodness, love, and beauty of the tensional proportions and
reconciliations in the finite world.
That we find truth in the world, that the world also delights in it this truth of its very
worlding, display the grace of God flickering through them, passing by them
like Moses in the rock. It also however
displays the true interruptive power of what Maximus calls the “gnomic will.” There are not, analogous to Christ, two wills in us—gnomic and otherwise.
Rather the gnomic will here represents a tropic corruption of the logoV or nature of our will. It is a will that is no longer like Maximus’
description above, accelerating itself in longing expansion towards its
ultimate desire of God, but hesitates, draws back, is “deliberative.” The gnomic will asserts itself precisely
between the affinity of desiring free will and the pathway to God that is the
desire-filled cosmos. The simple radiant
enjoyment of the Garden is interrupted by “did God really say?...”
But these traces and feints of God
remain mere poetry or human invention if not for Christ. For both Augustine[19]
and Maximus, it is not only that our wills are now perverted, but indeed God is
essentially, that is, by nature, invisible
because of his absolute transcendence.
In a beautiful passage Maximus writes of God as “polyphonic silence,”
that “great echoing voice of the dark, inconceivable…”[20] He possesses only one characteristic that we
can know with certainty: “that we do not know it [that is, the divine essence]
as it is.”[21]
In fact Maximus goes further and says this even of the true substance of finite
things, for to know this would be to know God as God knows it.[22] Flung thus between twin darknesses, for us it
is only in the revelation of Christ, the mystery of Incarnation, where the
meaning of the scope and assembly of the universe is visible in its parts as
this “fluidity of love.” “By his
gracious condescension God became man…by this blessed inversion man is made God
by divinization, and God made man by hominization,”[23]
so that “The mystery of
the Word’s incarnation contains the force of all the hidden meanings and types
in scripture, and the understanding of the visible and intelligible
creatures. The one who knows the mystery of the
cross and tomb knows the true nature (touV logouV) of these aforementioned things. And the one who has been initiated into the
ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God made all
things.[24] And much the same with Augustine: our
perception of God is always through signs.
Yet even here our understanding has become darkened and in need of
Christ’s ontological and noetic salvation:
What
happens is that the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole, which is common to all
into the part which is its own private property. By following God’s directions and being
perfectly governed by his laws it could enjoy the whole universe of creation;
but by the apostasy of pride which is called the beginning of sin it strives to
grab something more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws; and
because there is nothing more than the whole it is thrust back into anxiety on
a part, and so by being greedy for more it
gets less.”[25]
Thus:
Our
knowledge therefore is Christ, and our wisdom is the same Christ. It is he who plants faith in us about
temporal things, he who presents us with the truth about eternal things. Through him we go straight to him, through
knowledge toward wisdom, without ever turning aside from one and the same Christ.[26]
In
fact much like Maximus Augustine grounds the beauty of the world precisely in
the Logos who is the Archetype of the Beautiful:
As
regards the image, I suppose he [Hilary of Poitiers] mentioned form on account
of the beauty involved in such harmony, in that primordial equality and primordial
likeness, where there is no discord and no inequality and no kind of
unlikeness, but identical correspondence with that of which it is the image
where there is supreme and primordial life, such that it is not one thing to
live and another to be, but being and living are the same…being as it were one
perfect Word to which nothing is lacking, which is like the art of the almighty
and wise God, full of all the living and unchanging ideas, which are all one in
it, as it is one from the one with whom it is one. In this art God knows all things that he has
made through it, and so when times come and go, nothing comes and goes for
God’s knowledge.[27]
[1] C.f. Von Balthasar, 265-266, 269-271.
[2] The concept of will and freedom and their relationship
to grace are obviously enormous topics in themselves for both thinkers. Here we can only briefly touch upon them as
they relate to our larger thesis about God’s visibility in the world.
[9] Ibid., PG 91, 1073BD.
Translation adapted slightly from Wilken’s and Blower’s, Cosmic Mystery p.50-51.
[19] This of course occupies Augustine for a major portion
of the beginning of de Trinitate
regarding how God is revealed in the world and which persons were revealed in
the epiphanies. Of the many innumerable
statements c.f. for example I.2.12 (p.74): “Now divinity cannot be seen by
human sight in any way whatsoever.”
[24] Maximus, Chapters
on Theology and Economy 2.57-8 (PG 90. 1108AB) hereafter Chapter on Theology and Economy abbreviated
as Ch.Th.
[28] Ayres, Nicaea
and its Legacy, 273-344.
[29] Obviously Maximus is not technically a “pro-Nicene” as
far as the time period in which he lived, yet of course as has been argued here
he bears enough affinity and continuity with the Cappadocians and Augustine
that it is fair to say that the attributes which attend to the label
“pro-Nicene” generally would apply also to Maximus in one form or another.
[30] Ayres, Nicaea
and its Legacy, 325.
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