A Language of Stone and Sky: Maximus and Augustine (Part Four)
Incarnation and
Aesthetics of Salvation
Is not man’s heart an abyss? And what abyss is deeper?...It is night, for
here the human race wanders blindly.
--St.
Augustine, Ennarations on the Psalms[1]
For reassurance that all of this is
not merely a pedantic journey to nowhere, we must at this point remind
ourselves what this theological enterprise is for: to understand the relation
of man and God in the act of our salvation in Christ. What we have seen so far is that, by
extension of the general principle “that which is unassumed, is unhealed,” and
the Chalcedonian logic “no confusion, no change, no division, no separation…”[2]
Christ must have two wills, in order to heal our will and change the entire tropoV of our nature to orient its “how” of
existence back to God, without thereby obliterating the distinction of God and
man, or the logoV of man’s
nature.[3] Here Augustine sounds much the same as
Maximus:
How
did our Lord marry two wills (he asks) so that they become one in the humanity
he bore? In his body, the Church, there
would be some people who, after wanting to do their own will, would later
follow the will of God. The Lord
prefigured these people in himself. He
wanted to show that though they are weak, they still belong to him, and so he
represented them in advance in his own person,
He sweated blood from his whole body, as a sign that the blood of
martyrs would gush from his body, the Church…He revealed the human will that
was in him, but if he had continued to insist on that will, he would have
seemed to display a perversity of heart.
If you recognize that he has had compassion on you, and is setting you
free in himself, imitate the next prayer he made: “Yet not what I will, but
what you will, be done Father.”[4]
And in the Confessions:
I
had only realized from the writings handed down concerning him that he at and
drank, slept, walked, was filled with joy, was sad, conversed, knew that his
flesh was not united to your word without a soul and human mind…To move the
body’s limbs at will at one moment, not another, to be affected by an emotion
at one time, not another, to utter wise judgment by signs at one moment, at
another to keep silent; these are characteristic marks of the soul and mind with
their capacity to change. If the writings about him were wrong in so
describing him, everything else would be suspected of being a lie, and there
would remain no salvation for the human race based on faith in these
books. So because the scriptures are
true, I acknowledge the whole man to be in Christ, not only the body of a man,
or soul and body without mind, but fully human person.[5]
Here then, though Augustine’s is
obviously on this point less technical (in the specific sense elaborated on in
Maximus above) it does agree in generality that there must be two wills in
Christ. Augustine is himself quite
famous for his development of introspection and the concept of human
“inwardness,” (even if this has often been mislocated as a fairly linear
precursor to a sort of Cartesian interiority).[6] In
fact here the argument will be made that something very similar to the tropos-logos distinction in Maximus is
likewise present in Augustine, though obviously not in those terms, or even in
any sort of detailed conceptual shorthand. Rather, what one can argue is that a “mode”
and “nature” concept must be present
in Augustine’s basic understanding of sin, not just as “privation,” but
specifically as “disordered love.” Which
is to say for Augustine the “essential nature” of human activity is love (as a mirror of the God who is
Trinity, who is love), where “rightly
ordered love” is virtue, and
“improperly ordered love” is vice.[7] Here we have in nuce a distinction of “what” (love) and “how” (rightly or
wrongly ordered)—indeed Augustine can even write “no one is evil by nature, only evil by vice [that is,
disordered love].”[8]
And the explanatory joint lying
between ordered and disorded love is Augustine’s anthropology of will. As Albrecht Dihle writes: “St. Augustine interpreted
freedom of choice, traditionally attributed to all rational beings, as the
freedom of will…the direction of will, however, is thought and spoken of as
being independent of the cognition of the better and the worse. This indeed supersedes the famous Socratic
problem of oudeiV ekwn amartanei, no one does wrong on purpose. It
is not surprising that everything, in the view of St. Augustine, depends on voluntas in religious and moral life.”[9] And
in the Garden man was created by God with a good will,[10] one
that was not corrupted by the eating of
the fruit, per se, as the body might be physically corrupted by poison, rather
the first evil will, which preceded all man's evil acts, was rather
a kind of falling away from the work of God to its own works than any positive
work. And therefore the acts resulting were evil, not having God, but the will
itself for their end; so that the will or the man himself, so far as his will
is bad, was as it were the evil tree bringing forth evil fruit. Moreover, the
bad will, though it be not in harmony with, but opposed to nature, inasmuch as
it is a vice or blemish, yet it is true of it as of all vice, that it cannot
exist except in a nature, and only in a nature created out of nothing.[11]
Thus Eve—and Adam after her—in
listening to the Serpent and turning her will toward the fruit already sinned in this gesture, since
the will, and so the love that goes along with it, became disordered in its
ordering toward material and penultimate objects. And so Augustine writes in de Trinitate: “Now all wills or wishes
are straight, and all the ones linked with them too, if the one to which they
are all referred is good; but if that is bent then they are all bent. And thus a sequence of straight will is a
ladder for those who would climb to happiness…but a skein of bent and twisted
wishes or wills is a rope to bind anyone who acts so…”[12] One can already see here that with one initial sin Augustine has set the
course of the need for a Redeemer of the will.
Thus now many things that our mind and will do in fact demonstrate its
perversion: “Thus, for example, it sees certain inner beauties in that more
excellent nature which is God; but instead of staying still and copying them as
it ought to, it wants to claim them for itself, and rather than be like him by
his gift it wants to be what he is by its own right. So it turns away from him and slithers and
slides down into less and less which is imagined to be more and more.”[13] These finite things are found wanting
precisely because the root love and desire that constitutes the human is only
satisfied in God.[14]
The material world distracts our ever-roving love, being exaggerated in
importance by our gaze and dragging it down, curving us inward away from God
and weighting the soul with a mistaken idolatry. Thus Augustine prays: “In all such things let
my soul praise you God, but let it not cleave too close in love to them through
the senses of the body. For they go
their own way and are no more; and they rend the soul with desires that can
destroy it, for it longs to be one with
the things it loves and to repose in them.
But in them there is no place of repose, because they do not abide.”[15]
Here Maximus sounds very similar to
Augustine. He paints a scene in which
the two trees in the garden actually represent two possible noetic or
epistemological paths of evaluation for man:
The
two trees are, in the symbols of Scripture, our faculties that enable us to
distinguish between particular things: our intellect, that is, and our
senses. The intellect has the ability to
discern between the intellectual and the sensible, between temporal and eternal
things; it is the gift of discernment that urges the soul to give itself to
some thing and refrain from others. The
senses, on the other hand, have the criteria for telling bodily pleasure from
pain; more precisely, they are the power of ensouled and sensitive bodies that
gives them the ability to be attracted by pleasurable things and to avoid
painful things.[16]
Von Balthasar notes that it is not
that Maximus views sensual knowledge as evil in itself—however the free choice
of the tree represented a rebellion of the lower law of knowledge through
senses against the higher law of purely intellectual knowledge, and thus a
fundamentally disordered pride.[17] “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.’”[18] This statement will be incredibly important
to keep in mind for the next section. As
with Augustine, for Maximus sin is an attempt to have the material things for
ourselves in our own right, no longer as gift.
“For certainly God created these things and gave them to the human race
for their use. And everything that God
made is good and was intended for us to use well. But in our weakness and fleshly attitudes, we
have preferred material things to the commandment of love.”[19] And this preference for the material conveys
an attitude of egoism, as in Augustine, the “attempt to take control of things
without God and before God and not according to God.”[20]
[2] asugcutwV, atreptwV, adiairetwV,
acwristwV gnorizomenon.
[3] “He
took on himself our human nature in deed and in truth and united it to himself
hypostatically—without change, alteration, diminution, or division; he
maintained it inalterably, by its own essential principle” (Amb. 42
In On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ:
St. Maximus the Confessor trans.Paul M Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (New
York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 84.
[5] Augustine, The
Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 140
(VII.19.25.) Reminds one of the earlier
quote from Maximus in Disputation 24-25:
“If man has the faculty of will by nature, as has just been demonstrated, and
if they yet maintain that Christ had the human will only by mere appropriation
of it, then…it follows that the whole mystery of the economy must be assumed to
be an illusion.”
[6] For recent appraisals overcoming so older biases, c.f.
Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity
(London: Routledge, 2003), 134-159;
Matthew Drever, “The Self Before God?
Rethinking Augustine’s Trinitarian Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 100 vol.2 (2007): 233-242; Thomas
Harmon, “Reconsidering Charles Taylor’s Augustine,” Pro Ecclesia 20 vol.2: 182-206.
[9] Quoted in Daley, “Making a Human Will Divine,” 114,
n.24.
[11] Ibid. C.f. XIV.6: “But the character of the human
will is of moment; because, if it is wrong, these motions of the soul will be
wrong, but if it is right, they will be not merely blameless, but even
praiseworthy. For the will is in them all; surely, none of them is anything
else than will. For what are desire and joy but a volition of consent to the
things we wish? And what are fear and sadness but a volition of aversion from
the things which we do not wish? But when consent takes the form of seeking to
possess the things we wish, this is called desire; and when consent takes the
form of enjoying the things we wish, this is called joy. In like manner, when
we turn with aversion from that which we do not wish to happen, this volition
is termed fear; and when we turn away from that which has happened against our
will, this act of will is called sorrow. And generally in respect of all that
we seek or shun, as a man's will is attracted or repelled, so it is changed and
turned into these different affections. Wherefore the man who lives according
to God, and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and therefore a
hater of evil.”
[14] Confessions I.1 “You have made us and draw us to yourself, and our
heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”
[17] Von Balthasar, Cosmic
Liturgy, 183.
[19] Quoted in von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy 184.
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