Maximus the Confessor and Divine Freedom
Part 1: Setting Up the Issue
I think it is safe to say, in a certain theological respect, that there is only one will, one power, and one undivided operation in God with respect to all external works, enacted tri-personally according to personal origin. In relation to creation, this one operation is Christically specified without compromising divine simplicity or freedom. Here identity means provenance: who God is is fixed by origin–unbegotten Father, begotten Son, proceeding Spirit–so that the one simple act is personally specified by the taxis: from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Working around that claim, I stage a direct conversation between Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor as read by Jordan Daniel Wood. Gregory supplies the grammar of monarchy and inseparable operation. Wood’s Maximus supplies the Christic specification of that single act. Thomas Aquinas appears as a witness to pro-Nicene commitments on simplicity, on freedom with respect to creatures, and on the one principle of divine action. Pseudo-Dionysius keeps the discourse apophatically reverent and secures the Creator and creature distinction through the discipline of analogy and the logic of participation. John Scottus Eriugena helps illuminate how monarchy, procession, and inseparable operation coinhere within one triune causality from which the economy flows and to which it returns. Wood’s work clarifies and intensifies the Maximian claim, while I guide Gregory’s sources and authorities to bring Nazianzus into precise dialogue with Wood’s Maximus. It also provides a powerful guide through the issues around Maximus’s post Chalcedonian Christ. The outcome, of this paper however, is to peddle a pro-Nicene account of divine freedom as plenitude of self-gift, with Christ necessary by consequence toward a rational-communion world freely willed by the Triune God. I won’t be able to scrape the soles of Wood’s boots of his work, figuratively speaking. What I’ll do instead, is a reading, where I’ll argue Wood elevates Maximus’s participatory trajectory into a constructive identity thesis: not only is the one triune operation Christically specified; creatio’s very horizon is the incarnational economy. What follows tries to assume the classical metaphysical horizon and argues that identity by origin yields a non-escalatory reading of Maximus; Part 2 will make that horizon explicit and argue why provenance, not property-sameness, is how Maximus keeps one act indivisible while letting it be contrasted to Wood’s Christically specified escalation, but I’ll try to show and illustrate the “without escalation¹” approach through his.
I. Gregory’s Grammar: Monarchy and Inseparable Operation
Gregory’s grammar is my point of departure because, in a handful of crystalline sentences, it secures unity, distinction, and the indivisibility of the divine act, and it gives Jordan Daniel Wood’s Maximian thesis the trinitarian rails it requires. In the Third Theological Oration he writes, “It is, however, a Monarchy that is not limited to one Person, for it is possible for Unity if at variance with itself to come into a condition of plurality; but one which is made of an equality of Nature and a Union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity—a thing which is impossible to the created nature—so that though numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence. Therefore Unity having from all eternity arrived by motion at Duality, found its rest in Trinity. This is what we mean by Father and Son and Holy Ghost.“² The identity of motion here does not describe three parallel maneuvers. It names the one work of the one God enacted tri-personally. Gregory then gives the personal architecture that underwrites this unity in a line that collapses the Arian premise at the root: “How then are They not alike unoriginate, if They are coeternal? Because They are from Him, though not after Him. For that which is unoriginate is eternal, but that which is eternal is not necessarily unoriginate, so long as it may be referred to the Father as its origin. Therefore in respect of Cause They are not unoriginate; but it is evident that the Cause is not necessarily prior to its effects, for the sun is not prior to its light.“³ Origin, not sequence, names the Father’s monarchy, and so the Son and the Spirit are eternally from the Father without posteriority. His doxological image in the Fifth Oration turns grammar into vision: “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God. This was what David represented to himself long before when he said, In Your Light shall we see Light. And now we have both seen and proclaim concisely and simply the doctrine of God the Trinity, comprehending out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).“⁴ The threefold Light confesses real personal distinction. The One Light confesses consubstantial unity. Together they entail one operation.
A further text from Gregory proves decisive because it links monarchy directly to the inseparability of the triune life and work in the very cadence of Christian worship. In the Vinson translation of Oration 6 Gregory presents the rule of faith in unmistakably pro-Nicene terms: “reverencing Father and Son and Holy Spirit; knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit, in which names we have been baptized, in which we believe, and under which we have been enlisted, dividing them before combining them, and combining them before dividing them, not regarding the three as a single individual, for they are not without individual reality, nor do they comprise a single reality, as though our treasure lay in names and not in actual fact, but rather believing the three to be a single entity. For they are a single entity not in individual reality but in divinity, a unity worshipped in Trinity and a Trinity summed up into unity, venerable as one whole, as one whole royal, sharing the same throne, sharing the same glory, above space, above time, uncreated, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, its internal ordering known only to itself.“⁵ The compact clause from the same sentence is Gregory’s perichoretic formula in a single breath: “knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit.“⁶ These lines do more than ornament Nicene piety. They articulate the taxis by which the one operation is enacted. The Father is known in the Son and the Son in the Spirit. Later theology will paraphrase this as from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The monarchy of the Father and the inseparability of the ad extra works are twinned in this one passage. The divine royalty is one, the throne is one, the glory is one. Therefore the operation is one. The Persons have individual reality according to origin. Therefore the operation is tri-personally enacted. Because for Gregory the monarchy yields one indivisible operation—from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—Wood’s Maximus can be heard not as multiplying agencies but as naming the Christic content of that single operation toward creatures.⁵
Gregory also gives this grammar a cosmic and ethical horizon that dovetails with Christic specification. In Oration 44, preaching amid spring’s renewal, he exclaims, “What a happy day! The whole of creation gathers for our festival and joins in the merriment. Just look at the wonders before our eyes!“⁸ The trinitarian God whose one motion is indivisible is also the Lord of a liturgical cosmos. The world is not a neutral stage but a festival drawn into praise. In the same oration Gregory turns liturgy into ethics. “Brush not aside the pauper, you who have received the wealth of divinity; but if not, for even this is asking much of the insatiably greedy, at least grow not rich at his expense.“⁹ The unity of motion is inseparable from the unity of love. And when he urges a baptismal renovation of life, he promises, “If these things guide your thoughts and actions, there shall be a new heaven for you and a new earth, and you will come to understand their meaning, and all else too.“¹⁰ The ethical, liturgical, and cosmological registers in Gregory are not an appendix. They display the scope of the one motion that his trinitarian grammar secures.
The Catholic codification of this pro-Nicene insight is precise and programmatic. “As the Trinity has only one and the same nature, so too does it have only one and the same operation, ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle’.“¹¹ That rule is emulated and echoed in the argument here. A standard contemporary Thomist puts the same point with elegant symmetry of being and act: “They are inseparable in their dwelling, just as they are inseparable in their working.“¹² The ad intra perichoresis grounds the ad extra inseparability of operation.
II. Aquinas and Dionysius: Metaphysical Guardrails for One Act in God
Maximus’s claim that “the Logos wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment” presupposes no inner plurality in God; plurality belongs to creaturely modes of reception, while the giver’s act remains one and simple.
In Maximian terms the metaphysical work is already done by his own tools. Participatory realism locates unity at the source since the logoi are one in the Logos, and it locates plurality in receptions. Inseparable operation secures one will and one energy in God with respect to all works ad extra, personally owned according to the taxis. The freedom grammar then follows: what is necessary in se is God’s uncoerced fullness; what is contingent ad extra are the orders freely given; Christic specification is therefore consequent upon a free decree.
When I cite Aquinas below, it is only as a later shorthand for the same discipline that is probably, or at least plausibly already operative in Maximus through Dionysian apophasis and Cappadocian taxis. Also, I’m just more comfortable in Thomistic languages. The scholastic idiom can clarify and sharpen what is present in that earlier horizon, but it is not a foreign premise and it is not deployed in opposition to Wood’s Maximus.
If Gregory and the Catechism expresses what a secure grammar looks like for the task at hand, Aquinas witnesses the same security for the metaphysics of the agent. Divine simplicity blocks all pictures of God as a composite chooser among internal alternatives. “God is His own existence, and although every essence may have something superadded to it, this cannot apply to absolute being.”¹³ Because essence and existence are identical in God, there is no admixture of potency that would require supplementation. On that basis Aquinas draws the guardrail for speaking about freedom. “God wills His own goodness necessarily, God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end.”¹⁴ Necessary self-willing and free willing with respect to creatures is the backbone of any orthodox account of divine freedom. Applied to creation, Aquinas gives the hinge claim that keeps our conversation with Gregory exact: “To create belongs to God according to His being, that is, His essence, which is common to the three Persons. Hence to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.”¹⁵ One simple essence and one undivided operation ad extra, tri-personally enacted according to origin, is the metaphysical and doctrinal baseline.
The apophatic adjustment supplied by Dionysius keeps our language reverent and our inferences chaste. “The Good above word is unutterable by word, Cause of being to all, but Itself not being.”¹⁶ If God is the cause of being and beyond being, then every cataphatic claim about divine will or work requires analogical reserve. That reserve does not weaken the Gregory-Aquinas baseline. It calibrates it. The One whose power is without remainder gives being and goodness to all without being contained by any created predicate. That is the theological posture in which a Christically specified single act may be confessed without partitioning God.
III. Maximus with Wood: The Christic Specification of Inseparable Operation
My interpretive stance is charitable harmonization. I construe Wood’s “creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation” as a way of specifying Gregory’s rule of monarchy and inseparable operation rather than as a rival principle. That is, I receive Wood’s identity thesis within the pro-Nicene guardrails that the one simple divine essence acts as one undivided principle ad extra, and that this act remains free with respect to creatures.¹⁷
Into this grammar and under these guardrails we place Maximus’s astonishing claim about the content of God’s act with respect to creation. In Ambiguum 7 the Confessor writes, “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.“¹⁸ The sentence both intensifies and specifies Gregory’s identity of motion. If the single operation of God ad extra is tri-personal and indivisible, then Maximus identifies its creature-facing specification as Christic through and through. The Logos wills always, and in all things, the mystery of his embodiment. The same passage supplies the beautiful inversion that runs like a current through the Greek Fathers’ soteriology. “… he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by his condescension is and is called man ….“¹⁹ The deification of the saints is not an analogy loosely near the Incarnation. It is the graced participation of the many in the one Incarnation, without confusion and without erasure of natures. The specification is Christic and the telos is deification.
To grasp the scope of this Christic economy, Maximus’s Ambiguum 41 provides a cosmic narrative of divisions and their recapitulation. “man, who is above all–like a most capacious workshop containing all things, naturally mediating through himself all the divided extremes, and who by design has been beneficially placed amid beings–is divided into male and female, manifestly possessing by nature the full potential to draw all the extremes into unity through their means, by virtue of his characteristic attribute of being related to the divided extremes through his own parts.“²² Humanity is the microcosm tasked with uniting the five great divisions of creation. Yet sin disrupts this, leading to the Word’s incarnation to fulfill the plan. “had man united created nature with the uncreated through love (oh, the wonder of God’s love for mankind!), he would have shown them to be one and the same by the state of grace, the whole man wholly pervading the whole God, and becoming everything that God is, without, however, identity in essence, and receiving the whole of God instead of himself…“²³ The Word achieves this recapitulation: “to fulfill the great purpose of God the Father, recapitulating all things, both in heaven and on earth, in Himself, in whom they also had been created.“²⁴ “He recapitulated in Himself, in a manner appropriate to God, all things, showing that the whole creation is one, as if it were another human being, completed by the mutual coming together of all its members, inclining toward itself in the wholeness of its existence, according to one, unique, simple, undefined, and unchangeable idea: that it comes from nothing.“²⁵ And drawing on Dionysius, “For there is no multiplicity which does not in some way participate in the One, but that which is many by its parts, is one in the whole; and that which is many by its accidents, is one in the subject; and that which is many in number or potentialities, is one in species; and that which is many by the species, is one by the genus; and that which is many by the processions, is one in its source. And there is none among beings that does not participate in some way in the One.“²⁶ This participatory unity underscores that the Christic recapitulation is literal, binding all in him, the simple principle of creation’s unity.
Recent scholarship has pressed the literalness of this vision against the temptation to reduce it to metaphor. “For Maximus, this ‘universal incarnation’ … is accomplished by the deification of human beings.” Samuel Korb writes that “Maximus … describes deification as incarnation … without any kind of ‘metaphorical’ qualifications” and that “He even repeats the exact same language elsewhere … indicating that he sees them as one and the same.“²⁰ If that is right, then the Christic shape of God’s indivisible operation is not an extrinsic overlay attached late in the story. It is the inner line of the story itself, from the beginning of creation through the Church’s sacramental economy to the final transfiguration of all things.
Wood renders this Maximian intuition as a constructive thesis about the identity of the logic of creation and the logic of the Incarnation. He claims, “Maximus Confessor conceives the logic of creation from nothing as the logic of the divine Word’s historical Incarnation.” His monograph sharpens the formulation and makes the kenotic center explicit: “Maximus envisions creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis: the mystery of Christ is the revealed identity of the Word’s historical and cosmic Incarnation.“²¹ One of his programmatic tags fixes the scope in a memorable line: “creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation.“²¹ Wood also summarizes the heart of Maximus’s stance in a form that speaks directly to our Gregory-Aquinas baseline. “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude.“²¹ Finally, Wood underscores why this reading belongs in a Catholic, pro-Nicene grammar rather than outside it. “If one takes Maximus at his word, creatio ex nihilo is neither a denial of creatio ex Deo nor a rival to it, but the very way that the self-emptying God makes room for what is not God precisely by giving God’s own self in and as the Logos’s embodied history.“²¹ These claims do not invent a second principle of action. They specify the single triune act in its relation to creatures. I acknowledge that Wood intentionally presses toward a normative identity thesis stronger than what Maximus states everywhere verbatim. My constructive choice is to receive that pressure within Gregory’s monarchy and the Catholic rule of inseparable operations, so that the identity claim functions as Christic specification of one free triune act rather than as a second principle alongside it.¹⁷
The pressure point is freedom. I want to read Wood’s identity thesis as consequent, not antecedent, although I suspect he actually wants to push another direction. But, for this part of the paper, I continue to go this way. We’ll do otherwise at the end.
First, the one God freely wills a rational-communion world ad extra. Then, given that free decree, the one operation’s created specification is Christic always and in all things in Maximus’s sense. So construed, Wood’s claim intensifies content without introducing a second principle or collapsing freedom into necessity.
The immediate pressure that such a strong claim raises is the freedom question. Does Christic specification make God unable to do otherwise? The Catholic rule already named answers by distinguishing necessity in se from freedom ad extra. “God wills His own goodness necessarily, God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end.“¹⁴ Creation is not necessary. Creation is gratuitous. Once the Triune God freely wills a rational-communion world, Maximus would say that the fitting and indeed the willed form of that world’s relation to God is the Incarnation, since the Logos wills always and in all things to actualize the mystery of his embodiment.¹⁸ That is a consequent necessity grounded in a free decree, not a prior necessity in God. Within the one act there are no inner alternative tracks, because there are no parts in God. There is every mark of freedom in the gratuitous decree to create and call to deification.
At this point Gregory reenters as careful interlocutor rather than distant authority. Gregory’s favorite images shelter the Maximian claim by insisting on inseparable operation according to origin. “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God. This was what David represented to himself long before when he said, In Your Light shall we see Light. And now we have both seen and proclaim concisely and simply the doctrine of God the Trinity, comprehending out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).“⁴ The Light who is the Son is never known apart from the Father and is only seen in the Spirit. To say the one operation is Christically specified is not to isolate the Son’s agency from the Father and the Spirit. It is to say that the Father from whom all things are, through the Son in whom all things hold together, in the Holy Spirit who perfects all things, wills the world as the realm in which the Son’s embodiment is the form of communion. Here the Catechism’s formula serves as rule and guide. “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.“¹¹ Christic specification does not add a second principle. It names the mode in which the one principle wills and perfects creation.
Divine simplicity keeps the same line firm. “God is His own existence, and although every essence may have something superadded to it, this cannot apply to absolute being.“¹³ If there are no parts in God, then the unity of the operation does not admit compositional variation. The single act is not an aggregate of sub-acts. On the creature’s side, Dionysius keeps the asymmetry intact. “The Good above word is unutterable by word, Cause of being to all, but Itself not being.“¹⁶ The One gives being and remains beyond being. Therefore God is not completed by the world God makes. That asymmetry is the safeguard for gratuity. It also explains why Maximus’s inversion is pure grace, not confusion of orders. “… he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by his condescension is and is called man ….“¹⁹ The saint’s participation is real and literal, yet it never threatens the Creator and creature distinction because the participation is by grace in the one incarnate economy, not by nature.
IV. Eriugena’s Help: Monarchy, Procession, and Inseparable Causality
Eriugena’s Periphyseon adds conceptual wattage to the conversation, not as a rival metaphysics but as an analytic lens through which Gregory’s monarchy and Maximus’s Christic specification can be contemplated together. Eriugena is explicit that there is one essential Cause of all things and that the three personal subsistences are Causes in the one Cause, not by nature divided but by relation distinguished. Within that framework he is keen to preserve monarchy and inseparability at once. His most compact and vivid statement appears in the light analogy from Book II: “As brightness proceeds from the fire through the ray because the whole of the fire itself subsists in the whole of the ray and from it through the ray the brightness is emitted, so too the Catholic Faith teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son because the Father himself, who is the principal and sole Cause of the procession of the Holy Spirit, is wholly in the whole of the Son, just as the Son also is wholly in the whole of the Father; and from the Father through the Son the Holy Spirit proceeds. And as the whole of the fiery force remains in the whole of the ray which is begotten of it, and the whole of the ray itself and the whole of the fiery force of which it is begotten exist in the whole of the brightness, and the whole of the brightness, proceeding from the fiery force through the ray, exists in the whole of the ray itself and the whole of the force itself from which it proceeds, so the whole of the Father who begets is in the whole of the begotten Son, and the whole of the begotten Son is in the whole of the Father who begets, and the whole of the Father who begets and the whole of the begotten Son are in the whole of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son; and the whole of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son is in the Father from whom he proceeds and in the Son through whom he proceeds, and the Three are One through the Trinity understood in Unity.“³⁹
This paragraph is gold because it compresses monarchy, inseparable operation, and procession through the Son in one image. The Father is the principal and sole Cause. That is monarchy. The Spirit’s procession is through the Son. That is the taxis Gregory breathes and that later pro-Nicenes will formalize as from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The causal whole is everywhere in each. That is inseparability. For Eriugena this inseparability means that the single divine act cannot be partitioned among the Persons even as the Persons remain irreducibly distinct with respect to origin.
Eriugena’s cosmological imagination also aligns naturally with the Maximian arc of exitus and reditus. A standard précis of his project notes that “the whole of reality or nature is involved in a dynamic process of outgoing (exitus) from and return (reditus) to the One.“⁴⁰ Read alongside Maximus, the outgoing is already the economy of the Word’s embodiment, and the return is the creature’s deifying participation in that embodiment. Gregory’s festival of creation, “What a happy day! The whole of creation gathers for our festival and joins in the merriment. Just look at the wonders before our eyes!” sits comfortably within this Eriugenian horizon, because the procession of the One into the many is already a call to praise, and the return of the many into the One is the perfection of that praise as communion.⁸
Eriugena therefore helps the dialogue between Nazianzen and the Confessor in three ways. First, he articulates monarchy as causal priority in a way that supports Gregory’s “How then are They not alike unoriginate, if They are coeternal? Because They are from Him, though not after Him. For that which is unoriginate is eternal, but that which is eternal is not necessarily unoriginate, so long as it may be referred to the Father as its origin. Therefore in respect of Cause They are not unoriginate; but it is evident that the Cause is not necessarily prior to its effects, for the sun is not prior to its light.” Second, he renders procession through the Son in exact harmony with Gregory’s “knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit,” for the Spirit’s procession through the Son is precisely a case of the Father being known in the Son, and the Son in the Spirit. Third, he insists that the whole of God’s causal power is present in each Person such that the one operation is never divided among them. It is exactly on that ground that a Christically specified operation can be confessed without introducing competing principles in God.
V. Bringing the Voices Together: Nazianzen Converses with Wood’s Maximus
We can now stage the conversation more directly. Gregory insists that the divine monarchy and identity of motion entail one indivisible operation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Maximus, read with Wood, replies that this one indivisible operation toward creatures is everywhere Christic in its specification, from creation to consummation. Gregory asks whether such specification risks privileging one Person’s agency. Maximus answers by pointing to Gregory’s own taxis: the Father is known in the Son and the Son in the Spirit. There is no rivalry because there is no partition. Gregory then asks about freedom. Aquinas responds that God necessarily wills the divine goodness while freely willing creatures as ordered to that goodness. Necessary self-willing and free ad extra willing can coexist only where being and act are identical and uncomposed, which is precisely the case for the simple God confessed at Nicaea. Dionysius closes the circle by warning that all such speech is analogical and borne by reverent unknowing. Eriugena, standing a step back, draws the picture that shows how these affirmations coordinate. The Father is the sole Cause, the Son is the ray, the Spirit is the brightness, and the whole is everywhere in each. The one act is tri-personally enacted according to personal origin. The creaturely effect of this one act is, throughout its scope, the embodiment of the Word for the sake of the deification of creatures.
Seen from within that conversation, several corollaries follow for a theology of creation and salvation.
First, creatio ex nihilo is not a preliminary stage, neutral with respect to Christ. Wood’s formulation that “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude” expresses the point with salutary bluntness.²¹ Gregory’s insistence on one operation reinforced by the Catechism’s rule that the three Persons are “not three principles of creation but one principle” prevents any misreading of this as an intratrinitarian division of labor.¹¹ Creation is the Word’s own scope, yet it is the Word’s as the Son of the Father in the Spirit. The unity of operation holds. (I do other work on ex nihilo here if interested: https://robertdryer.com/defending-the-principle-of-relationality-a-relational-first-paradigm-for-divine-simplicity-and-trinity/divine-freedom-divine-simplicity-and-creatio-ex-nihilo-in-light-of-gods-relation-to-reality/)
Second, the sanctification of the world is not an extrinsic addition to creation but the unveiling of creation’s deepest logic. Wood again clarifies what Maximus implies when he writes that creatio ex nihilo is creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis.²¹ The Word does not add a second action to the first. The one act that brings what is not into being is the same act that unites the creature to God in Christ. Hence Korb’s claim that for Maximus deification “is accomplished by the deification of human beings” and that deification is “incarnation” without metaphor makes sense.²⁰ In Ambiguum 46, Maximus elaborates this providential span: “the year acceptable to the Lord … is the entire extension of the ages, beginning from the moment when God was pleased to give substance to beings and existence to what did not exist.“³⁶ “Thus the Lord is called the sun of righteousness … He is the maker and perfecter of the ages, and the beginning and end of all things.“³⁷ “‘or is circumscribed in the one whom we see,’ either because He rushes forth like ‘light from light’ … or because He Himself as man is circumscribed in the visible form of our nature.“³⁸ This Christ is the arche and telos, with two origin-tags (eternal procession and temporal birth) under one subject.
Third, divine freedom is not freedom from specification. God does not need a field of unexercised options within the divine life in order to be free. God is free because God is identical with the divine act of being, willing the divine goodness necessarily and creatures freely as ordered to that goodness.¹⁴ The specification of the one act as Christic does not add a necessity that compromises freedom. It names what God freely wills as the mode of creaturely participation in divine life. It is therefore a consequent necessity grounded in a free decree. Once God freely wills a rational-communion world, the highest form of communion is the embodiment of the Word in which creatures are deified.¹⁸ As Maximus notes in Ambiguum 41a, this involves divine freedom and innovation: “according to its own free will, our fleshly birth”²⁷; “this flesh was in every way the same and indistinguishable from ours, but without sin”²⁸; “our nature gave flesh without seed, and that a virgin gave birth without corruption.“²⁹; “on the one hand concealing and on the other hand revealing the ineffable and unknown principle according to which they took place”³⁰; “revealing by the principle of faith, by which all things beyond nature and knowledge may readily be grasped.“³¹; “to discover on your own and give expression to a better and wiser solution”³².
Fourth, the cruciform center of the economy remains in view. Wood’s exposition of Maximus’s “Christo-logic” repeatedly insists that we learn the logic of God’s act not by abstract speculation but by contemplating the event of Jesus Christ. He writes, for example, that “Christo-logic does not amount to a contemplative guess about the nature of things, their beginning and end. Its necessary source is the event of God’s Incarnation.” He adds that only when we behold “the peculiar mode of these whole and simultaneous and interpenetrating activities proper to incommensurable natures are we granted intellectual vision into the logic of God’s own identity with what he is infinitely not by nature.“³³ These are not vague gestures. They are practical directives to bind theology’s grammar to the concrete story by which it is learned. Within that story it is possible to say with literal force, as Wood stresses while reading Maximus, that on the cross “you must say ‘God suffered’ and ‘died’,” because there the truth of the Word’s identity with both natures presses language to its theandric edge.³⁴ Gregory’s own insistence that person and nature must be carefully distinguished at precisely this point confirms the same discipline of speech.³⁵
Finally, the ecclesial and ethical corollaries return us to Gregory’s festival and injunctions. A world whose very order is the Word’s embodiment is a world that resists treating the poor as disposable. To refuse the pauper while basking in the riches of divinity is to deny the form of the one operation that orders all things toward deifying communion.⁹ To seek a “new heaven and a new earth” in one’s ways is already to participate in the exitus–reditus of creaturely life that Eriugena depicts and that Gregory preaches.⁴⁰,¹⁰
VI. Conclusion
In that light the conversation between Nazianzen and the Confessor resolves into a single confession. The Triune God acts inseparably as one principle. The one divine act toward creation is Christically specified from first to last. Divine freedom is the uncoerced plenitude of this self-gift, not a calculus of inner alternative tracks. The saints’ deification is the literal and graced extension of the Incarnation to the many. The world’s story, from beginning to end, is the mystery of the Word’s embodiment becoming all in all. “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.“¹⁸ Gregory’s “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God. This was what David represented to himself long before when he said, In Your Light shall we see Light. And now we have both seen and proclaim concisely and simply the doctrine of God the Trinity, comprehending out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost),” Eriugena’s fire, ray, and brightness, Aquinas’s simple act of being, Dionysius’s Good beyond being, and Wood’s Maximus with his Christically specified creatio all point to the same grammar of glory.⁴,³⁹,¹³,¹⁶,²¹ The Triune God is one principle of operative love, and the world is the Incarnation’s cosmic amplitude in which the Spirit brings creatures to share the life of the Father through the Son.
Historical Backdrop: Classical Theism
Maximus the Confessor in Context: How Much of Divine Simplicity Did He Have, Plausibly Speaking?
Intro: Snapshot of Context and Education
Maximus was born around 580 and died in 662. Before becoming a monk he served at the imperial court in Constantinople, reportedly as chief of the chancery under Heraclius. Even bracketing hagiographic embellishment, this role presupposes elite formation in the capital’s paideia, which centered on grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. Such training oriented students to Aristotle as mediated by late antique handbooks and to Neoplatonic habits of metaphysical analysis [Louth 1996, 26–33; Allen and Neil 2015; Bradshaw 2004]. Constantinople was not an abstract schoolroom. It was a city in which theological discourse was braided with the pro-Nicene legacy of the Cappadocians and with the reception of the Dionysian corpus [Louth 1996, 26–33; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, Introduction; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite”]. After leaving the court, Maximus entered the monastery at Chrysopolis across the Bosporus, then moved through Cyzicus and eventually to Carthage, where he joined networks that included Sophronius of Jerusalem. These trajectories brought him into the streams through which Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius were read, excerpted, and taught. His later trials in the monothelite controversy show a thinker capable of technical distinctions about nature, will, and energy whose precision makes sense only against such an education [Maximus, Opuscula theologica et polemica; Maximus, Disputatio cum Pyrrho; Allen and Neil 2015].
Thesis
As this very brief snapshot shows it is historically plausible that Maximus the Confessor worked within a milieu in which the core principles often gathered under the banner of “classical theism” may have already been part of his intellectual backdrop. On this reading, his originality does not consist in adding a new metaphysical plank but in specifying the one inseparable divine operation toward creatures in a Christological key.
Principles of Classical Theism
Classical theism can be sketched by six interlocking principles, each associated with a canonical thinker, and together they yield a single picture of God. First, Aristotle argues that the ultimate source of motion is unmoved and wholly in act rather than in potency: “there must, then, be such a principle, whose very essence is actuality” (Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.6, 1071b17–20, trans. W. D. Ross, 1933). He also insists that wherever a true many is “one” rather than a heap there must be a cause of unity, since “the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause” (Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII.6, 1045a8–12, trans. Ross, 1933). Thomas Aquinas systematizes the result with the claim that every composite is posterior to and dependent on its parts and that “every composite has a cause, for things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite,” so the first cause must be absolutely simple (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.3, a.7, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1947–48). Aquinas likewise maintains that God is not in any genus, since being is not a genus and nothing is prior to God even mentally (Summa Theologiae I, q.3, a.5). Avicenna formulates the Necessary Existent as having no quiddity other than existence itself, “The First has no quiddity other than His individual existence” (Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, Ilāhiyyāt VIII.4, trans. Michael E. Marmura, 2005, p. 274). Maimonides then draws the theological consequence for unity: “There cannot be any belief in the unity of God except by admitting that He is one simple substance, without any composition or plurality of elements” (Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed I.51, trans. M. Friedländer, 1904, p. 69).
Taken together these principles define what “God” means for classical theists. Pure actuality rules out unrealized potency, which underwrites divine immutability and eternity. The cause of unity and the axiom that all composites require a composer exclude any model of deity as a pile of properties or faculties whose togetherness would need explanation outside the first. Simplicity and not being in a genus mean that God is not comparable on a common scale with creatures and that the divine perfections are not added items alongside an underlying essence but are identical with the one, undivided reality that God is. Avicenna’s Necessary Existent closes the door on essence plus existence composition at the top, while Maimonides’ unity cautions that positive names for God must be used in a way that avoids multiplying really distinct attributes, typically by way of negation and eminence. The composite result is a unique, necessary, simple, noncomposite source of all, whose being is pure act, whose perfections are identical with the divine essence, and whose relation to creatures is not measured by any genus shared in common.
The sixth principle in its later Avicennian idiom, the identity of essence and existence, is not stated by Maximus as such, yet functional equivalents appear through his Dionysian apophasis and strict commitments to simplicity and non-genus. What follows defends this as a plausibility thesis, not as an anachronistic projection, by sketching context, education, textual networks, and close conceptual fit.
Textual Networks and Likely Reception of Maximus’s Milieu
The two most evident anchors for Maximus’s metaphysical grammar are Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius. The Ambigua are, in part, a sustained engagement with Gregory’s orations. The Scholia on the Divine Names and the Celestial Hierarchy show detailed familiarity with Dionysius. Through these authors Maximus inherits the influence of inseparable operations [Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration (Oration 29), §2, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, trans. Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow, 1894], monarchy and taxis [Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29, §3, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, trans. Browne and Swallow, 1894], and a disciplined apophatic practice that refuses to place God under a common measure with creatures [Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names I.1 and Mystical Theology 1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, New York: Paulist Press, 1987]. He also drinks from wider patristic wells. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa articulate versions of simplicity and non-genus suitable for Christian theology. Cyril supplies Christological resources that guard the unity of the person while distinguishing natures [Cyril of Alexandria, “Third Letter to Nestorius” with the Twelve Anathemas, in Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum I.1.1; see how Maximus deploys Cyril’s formulae in Opuscula theologica et polemica (PG 91), especially the anti-Monothelite pieces, and in the Disputation with Pyrrhus, to defend one hypostasis of the Word with two natural wills and two natural energies]. Evagrius supplies a technical vocabulary for contemplation and participation [Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1 and Kephalaia Gnostika; note Maximus’s adaptation of the triad praktikē–physikē–theologia, of apatheia, and of the analysis of thoughts in Four Hundred Chapters on Love I.1–10 and II.1–8 and in selected Ambigua; cf. Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996), ch. 2]. Aristotle, though not cited with scholastic apparatus, is present indirectly in the act-and-potency framework and in the analysis of unity and causality mediated through the Christian Neoplatonic schools [Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I and Mystical Theology 1 as immediate conduit; see Maximus, Ambigua 7 and 41 (ed. and trans. Nicholas Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, vol. 1, pp. 103–109; vol. 2, pp. 105–121) together with the anti-Monothelite Opuscula on energeia; cf. David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 6].
By contrast, Avicenna and Maimonides come later and do not belong to Maximus’s sources. Aquinas is later still. They matter here only as comparators that can name with later precision what late antique authors already presuppose in different idioms. For example, Aquinas is quoted here only because he gives a compact voice to the six-principle grammar classical theists codify.
Five Classical Principles as Backdrop
If we ask whether Maximus’s milieu is plausibly supplied five of the six principles, the answer is yes. First, pure actuality appears in the Dionysian claim that God is beyond change and beyond matter, which Maximus deploys in apophatic mode. What moves without being moved, what is good without admixture, what is simple beyond composition, are all Dionysian ways of saying what Aristotle would call act rather than potency. Second, the cause of unity is explicit in Maximus’s Christological ontology of the logoi. The many rational principles of beings are one in the Logos, not by aggregation but by the formal and causal primacy of the Word through whom all things were made. When Maximus insists that creation is recapitulated in Christ he is invoking a unifier rather than a pile of parts. Third, simplicity and non-posteriority surface whenever he argues that what is first is not composite and that divine life is not the resultant of elements in need of a composer. The anti-Monothelite treatises sharpen the point by distinguishing natural energy and will in Christ without allowing any inner plurality in the divine nature that would need a unifier. Fourth, not in a genus is the constant implication of his apophatic theology. God is not an instance under a broader kind called being or power. Names are true of God in a mode that refuses a common scale with creatures. Fifth, unity without attribute plurality is maintained by the same apophatic discipline. Maximus can speak richly of divine goodness, wisdom, and power while refusing to multiply really distinct positives in God. The plurality lies in our ways of naming. The reality is the simple God confessed by Scripture, prayed by the liturgy, and defended by the Fathers.
The Functional Place of the Later 6th Principle
The remaining principle is the Avicennian identity of essence and existence. Maximus does not formulate this claim. Yet, his sources provide functional pressure toward it. Dionysius names God as the Good beyond being, which in effect denies that God stands under the essence-plus-existence structure that characterizes possible beings. Maximus’s use of Dionysius to police predication blocks any account in which God receives existence or stands to it as to a superadded act. A first principle that gives being to all without receiving being must, in some idiom, be pure existence or be beyond the kind of composition that pairs whatness with thatness. The idiom is different, the constraint is similar. If one insists that the later formulation cannot be read back, that caution is correct. If one asks whether Maximus’s practice of apophatic simplicity leaves conceptual space for essence and existence to be really distinct in God, the answer is no.
Continuity, Not Rupture
On this reading Maximus is best described as a developmental thinker inside a received grammar. The Cappadocian principle that the triune works ad extra are inseparable, enacted from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, remains in place. The Dionysian insistence that names are true by participation and by negation guards the Creator and creature distinction. Within those rails Maximus specifies the creature-facing content of the one operation as Christic. His famous line that the Logos wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment should not be taken as a second principle of action. It is the specification of the one principle in its relation to the world. That is why his theology of deification is both literal and non-competitive. Creatures become gods by grace because the one incarnate economy extends to the many, not because a metaphysical addition alters God. This is also why the freedom structure remains intact. God necessarily wills the divine goodness. God freely wills creatures as ordered to that goodness. Given that free decree, the Christic form of communion follows as consequent rather than antecedent necessity.
Education, Social Location, and Plausibility of Presupposition
Maximus’s early service in the imperial chancery and his polished literary Greek point to elite paideia in Constantinople, even if the Greek Life’s claim of noble birth is late and contested (Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996, 26–33; Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, 2015). Constantinople’s schools and court culture supplied the rhetorical and philosophical formation reflected in his writings, and his subsequent monastic path at Chrysopolis, through Cyzicus, and then to North Africa placed him in Greek-speaking ecclesial networks around Sophronius that likely intensified inherited patterns rather than altered them (Louth 1996, 32–33). In North Africa he met circles that probably deepened these currents because, well, that’s what a spiritually deep person does. His corpus engages Gregory of Nazianzus in the Ambigua and comments on the Dionysian corpus, which fits access through urban libraries, florilegia, and liturgical–monastic channels (Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas, 2014; Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, 1987). He deploys Cyrillian Christology when arguing for one hypostasis with two natural wills and two natural energies in the Opuscula and the Disputation with Pyrrhus, and he adapts Evagrian ascetical vocabulary in the Four Hundred Chapters on Love (Maximus, Opuscula theologica et polemica and Disputatio cum Pyrrho, PG 91; Maximus, Capita de caritate; Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos and Kephalaia Gnostika). Nothing in this picture suggests a radical break with the tradition. Everything suggests a theologian who receives, sharpens, and specifies.
Verdict
The case for plausibility is strong. Five principles of the six mentioned appear not as novelties but as the possibilities of the air Maximus breathes. Arguably, the sixth principle appears by function if not by name. In this ancient atmosphere his contribution is best read as Christological specification of the one inseparable act of the triune God, not as metaphysical rupture. This is a neutral-leaning judgment that could be revised by new textual evidence, yet it fits what I know of his education, his sources, and his corpus.
This was an odd way to say Maximus was a classical theist, I understand that. And the claim he is one, should not be controversial. However, the content of that theism is crucial because how he proposes God’s freedom, in this case Christically, is directly tied to how he adopts and appropriates his intellectual tradition on God, specifically his divine simplicity. The 6 principles presented here are the robust sense of divine simplicity the later tradition accepted officially in council and creed as the backdrop to communicating and forming theological clarity. Let’s go back to Divine Freedom in Maximus.
Part 2: Identity by Origin—Christic Specification, Inseparable Operations, and Divine Freedom in Maximus
Introduction
Part 1 argued that a pro-Nicene grammar—monarchy and taxis in Gregory of Nazianzus, apophatic discipline in Dionysius, the Thomistic witness to the tradition of simplicity and freedom, and the rule of inseparable operations from Nazianzus—already secures one divine principle of action ad extra while allowing that action to be Christically specified “always and in all things.” What Jordan Daniel Wood calls the “subject–act identity” of creation and Incarnation remains a strikingly plausible intensification of Maximus the Confessor’s rhetoric, but it is not required once this classical horizon is made explicit. The point was not to diminish Wood’s constructive proposal, but to place it in a conversation where Gregory’s monarchy and the Catechism’s commitment—“The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle”^1—set the rails within which any Christic maximalism must run with what Classical theism has accomplished for the Christian tradition.
The task of Part 2 is to make that horizon explicit and then to adjudicate between two ways of describing identity: Wood’s escalatory “subject–act identity,” on the one hand, and, on the other, identity by provenance (origin) and specification. The latter claims that the one simple, indivisible triune act is personally owned and enacted from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—Gregory’s taxis—and that, with respect to creatures, this one operation is Christically specified in Maximus’s sense that “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”^2 Both readings intensify identity. But the provenance/specification rule secures the same Christic scope without compromising simplicity or freedom, since any “necessity” of Incarnation it asserts is consequent on a free decree rather than antecedent in God. The argument proceeds by articulating the classical horizon plausibly available to Maximus, presenting Wood’s thesis and its strengths, developing provenance/specification in detail with Gregory, Dionysius, Aquinas, and Eriugena, and finally comparing the two accounts at the level of freedom and principle.
I. The Classical Horizon
As we mentioned in the background above, there are basically five interlocking principles that mark the late ancient theistic horizon within which Maximus plausibly thought: pure act, the cause of unity, simplicity, non-genus, and unity without property-plurality. Aristotle’s metaphysics supplied a durable shorthand for the first two. Against any regress of movers and to explain the actuality of motion, “there must, then, be such a principle, whose very essence is actuality.”^3 If actuality is primary, then wherever a many is genuinely one rather than a heap “the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause.”^4 Early Christian metaphysics took this “cause of unity” with utmost seriousness, not as a flavored add-on to piety but as a guard against imagining God as a composite whose togetherness would require a composer.
Gregory of Nazianzus makes the theological consequence luminous. His Third Theological Oration confesses a monarchy that secures unity, distinction, and the indivisibility of divine act at a stroke: “It is, however, a Monarchy that is not limited to one Person, for it is possible for Unity if at variance with itself to come into a condition of plurality; but one which is made of an equality of Nature and a Union of mind, and an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity—a thing which is impossible to the created nature—so that though numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence. Therefore Unity having from all eternity arrived by motion at Duality, found its rest in Trinity. This is what we mean by Father and Son and Holy Ghost. This is what we mean by Father and Son and Holy Ghost.”^5 “Identity of motion” names the indivisible work of the one God enacted tri-personally. In the next section Gregory links this to origin rather than sequence: “How then are They not alike unoriginate, if They are coeternal? Because They are from Him, though not after Him. For that which is unoriginate is eternal, but that which is eternal is not necessarily unoriginate, so long as it may be referred to the Father as its origin. Therefore in respect of Cause They are not unoriginate; but it is evident that the Cause is not necessarily prior to its effects, for the sun is not prior to its light.”^6 Identity in God is identity by provenance. The “Was and Was and Was” of doxology seals the point: “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God. This was what David represented to himself long before when he said, In Your Light shall we see Light. And now we have both seen and proclaim concisely and simply the doctrine of God the Trinity, comprehending out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).”^7
Gregory’s liturgical rule makes taxis practicable for theology and worship: “reverencing Father and Son and Holy Spirit; knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit, in which names we have been baptized, in which we believe, and under which we have been enlisted, dividing them before combining them, and combining them before dividing them, not regarding the three as a single individual, for they are not without individual reality, nor do they comprise a single reality, as though our treasure lay in names and not in actual fact, but rather believing the three to be a single entity. For they are a single entity not in individual reality but in divinity, a unity worshipped in Trinity and a Trinity summed up into unity, venerable as one whole, as one whole royal, sharing the same throne, sharing the same glory, above space, above time, uncreated, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, its internal ordering known only to itself.”^8 The compact clause—“knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit”^9—renders inseparable operation in a single breath.
Divine simplicity provides the real metaphysical guardrail that follows from act and unity. Aquinas articulates the upshot with lapidary clarity: “God is His own existence, and although every essence may have something superadded to it, this cannot apply to absolute being.”^10 Simplicity excludes the composition of essence and existence at the summit. Later Arabic and Jewish philosophy sharpened the same point in their own idioms: “The First has no quiddity other than His individual existence,”^11 and “There cannot be any belief in the unity of God except by admitting that He is one simple substance, without any composition or plurality of elements.”^12 On Christian lips the consequence becomes a doctrinal rule about operation: “To create belongs to God according to His being, that is, His essence, which is common to the three Persons. Hence to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.”^13 The Catechism receives this as settled: “As the Trinity has only one and the same nature, so too does it have only one and the same operation, ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle’.”^14
Non-genus and unity without property-plurality are the apophatic correlates of simplicity. Dionysius reminds us that the Source is above every created predicate: “The Good above word is unutterable by word, Cause of being to all, but Itself not being.”^15 God is not the most perfect member of a class called “being” or “cause.” Names for God are true by eminence and participation, and their plurality lies in our mode of signifying, not in God as a sum of items. When later scholastic formulae speak of God as ipsum esse and of a unique identity of essence and existence, they supply a precision that is formally later, but functionally lodged within this Dionysian discipline and Gregory’s taxis. The sixth principle—essence equals existence—is thus absent as an explicit Maximian formula but is, I submit, implied by the horizon he inhabits through Dionysius and the pro-Nicene rule.
This horizon disciplines all identity claims. Inseparable operations means one principle of action in God. Monarchy and taxis name how that one act is personally owned and enacted. Simplicity forbids multiplying principles. Apophatic reserve blocks placing Creator and creature under a common genus. Within these guardrails, identity must be located on God’s side—provenance—not in fusing creaturely effects by property-sameness.
II. Wood’s Subject–Act Identity
Wood’s interpretation of Maximus is a vigorous and learned effort to express the Christic density of the tradition in a single constructive thesis. He contends that “Maximus Confessor conceives the logic of creation from nothing as the logic of the divine Word’s historical Incarnation.”^16 The idiom is uncompromising: “Maximus envisions creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis: the mystery of Christ is the revealed identity of the Word’s historical and cosmic Incarnation,”^17 indeed, “creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation.”^18 Hence the aphorism that tightens the screw: “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude.”^19 If creation and Incarnation share one kenotic identity, creatio ex nihilo is “neither a denial of creatio ex Deo nor a rival to it, but the very way that the self-emptying God makes room for what is not God precisely by giving God’s own self in and as the Logos’s embodied history.”^20
This reading is not free invention. It is keyed to Maximus’s own daring declaration: “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”^21 It resonates with Maximian soteriology’s literalism: “… he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by his condescension is and is called man ….”^22 Samuel Korb has shown how consistently Maximus “describes deification as incarnation … without any kind of ‘metaphorical’ qualifications,” adding that “He even repeats the exact same language elsewhere … indicating that he sees them as one and the same.”^23 The “Christo-logic” that Wood discerns follows: “Christo-logic does not amount to a contemplative guess about the nature of things, their beginning and end. Its necessary source is the event of God’s Incarnation.”^24 Only by contemplating “the peculiar mode of these whole and simultaneous and interpenetrating activities proper to incommensurable natures are we granted intellectual vision into the logic of God’s own identity with what he is infinitely not by nature.”^25 It is from that concrete edge that one must dare to say with Maximus’s tradition that “you must say ‘God suffered’ and ‘died’.”^26
The strengths are obvious. Wood puts front and center what too often recedes to an appendix: that for Maximus and much of the Greek patristic tradition, the Incarnation is not a late intrusion but the center of gravity from which creation is understood in the first place. He refuses a neutral cosmology and turns ontology toward liturgy and communion. Nevertheless, pressure points emerge precisely because of the classical horizon. If one writes identity as subject–act, does antecedent necessity creep in and squeeze divine freedom? If creation “is” Incarnation, does one risk a compositional strain against simplicity by tacitly multiplying the terms inside God’s act? If one renders creation as Incarnation tout court, does one risk an imbalance vis-à-vis monarchy, such that the Son’s mode subsumes the from and the in of taxis? It is possible to avoid all three, but doing so requires careful appeal to provenance.
III. Provenance and Christic Specification
Identity by origin or provenance does not deny Wood’s intensification. It transposes the chord to Gregory’s key. Gregory first: the monarchy of the Father and the inseparability of the triune operation are the rails on which all Christic specification runs. The Father’s monarchy is “not limited to one Person,” because the unity is “made of an equality of Nature and a Union of mind, and an identity of motion,” and therefore “though numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence.”^27 The Father’s priority is causal, not temporal—“from Him, though not after Him. … the Cause is not necessarily prior to its effects, for the sun is not prior to its light.”^28 The ad intra taxis shines out in worship: “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God … comprehending out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).”^29 The rule becomes a doxological epistemology: “knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit.”^30 On this grammar, all ad extra operation is one, owned from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
Dionysius imposes the apophatic adjustment required to keep this speech reverent: “The Good above word is unutterable by word, Cause of being to all, but Itself not being.”^31 Identity can never be a genus-claim. It must be God’s own identity of act, refracted in the many effects. Aquinas then secures the metaphysical backbone. The principle of action is simple and indivisible: “God is His own existence,”^32 and therefore “To create belongs to God according to His being, that is, His essence, which is common to the three Persons. Hence to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.”^33 Freedom is articulated within that simplicity: “God wills His own goodness necessarily, God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end.”^34 The necessary willing is in se; the willing with respect to creatures is free. The Catechism gathers the doctrinal net: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.”^35
John Scottus Eriugena offers a compact image that lets monarchy, taxis, and inseparable causality be contemplated together: “As brightness proceeds from the fire through the ray because the whole of the fire itself subsists in the whole of the ray and from it through the ray the brightness is emitted, so too the Catholic Faith teaches that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son because the Father himself, who is the principal and sole Cause of the procession of the Holy Spirit, is wholly in the whole of the Son, just as the Son also is wholly in the whole of the Father; and from the Father through the Son the Holy Spirit proceeds. And as the whole of the fiery force remains in the whole of the ray which is begotten of it, and the whole of the ray itself and the whole of the fiery force of which it is begotten exist in the whole of the brightness, and the whole of the brightness, proceeding from the fiery force through the ray, exists in the whole of the ray itself and the whole of the force itself from which it proceeds, so the whole of the Father who begets is in the whole of the begotten Son, and the whole of the begotten Son is in the whole of the Father who begets, and the whole of the Father who begets and the whole of the begotten Son are in the whole of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son; and the whole of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father through the Son is in the Father from whom he proceeds and in the Son through whom he proceeds, and the Three are One through the Trinity understood in Unity.”^36 The fire–ray–brightness analogy underwrites provenance: the one causal whole is everywhere in each, and the procession through the Son is precisely the place where specification happens without a second principle.
Placed inside these rails, Maximus’s Christic intensity reads as specification of the one act, not as a collapse of acts or as the addition of a second principle. His lightning-strike sentence is the hinge: “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”^37 On the Godward side this confesses a single willing identical with God’s simple act (simplicity, non-genus). On the creaturely side it names the mode in which that act is specified—Christically. The same Ambiguum immediately gives the participatory inversion that displays the aim of the specification: “… he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by his condescension is and is called man ….”^38 The identity invoked here is not property-sameness between Creator and creature. It is the graced participation of the many in the one Incarnation, “without any kind of ‘metaphorical’ qualifications,” as Korb puts it, indeed “one and the same.”^39
Maximus’s cosmic narrations sustain the same specification. In Ambiguum 46 he stretches the Christic horizon across time: “the year acceptable to the Lord … is the entire extension of the ages, beginning from the moment when God was pleased to give substance to beings and existence to what did not exist.”^40 Christ is not an insertion but the alpha and omega of history: “Thus the Lord is called the sun of righteousness … He is the maker and perfecter of the ages, and the beginning and end of all things.”^41 The same passage dares the double vision by which the one subject is confessed under two origin-tags: “‘or is circumscribed in the one whom we see,’ either because He rushes forth like ‘light from light’ … or because He Himself as man is circumscribed in the visible form of our nature.”^42 Ambiguum 41a adds the notes of freedom, virginal novelty, and apophatic reserve that inoculate this christocentrism against modal collapse: “according to its own free will, our fleshly birth”; “this flesh was in every way the same and indistinguishable from ours, but without sin”; “our nature gave flesh without seed, and that a virgin gave birth without corruption”; “on the one hand concealing and on the other hand revealing the ineffable and unknown principle according to which they took place”; “revealing by the principle of faith, by which all things beyond nature and knowledge may readily be grasped”; “to discover on your own and give expression to a better and wiser solution.”^43 Freedom, apophasis, and specification are all of a piece.
How, then, to speak of “necessity”? Let’s slip into a bit of Aquinas’s here just to get some idea grease to keep things moving: God necessarily wills His own goodness; with respect to creatures God wills freely.^44 On that kind of basis, Christic “necessity” is consequent, not antecedent. First, the triune God freely wills a rational-communion world. Then, given that decree, the one act’s created specification is Christic “always and in all things” in Maximus’s sense. The taxis “from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit”—Gregory’s “knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit”^45—means that Christic specification never isolates the Son from the Father and the Spirit. It names the mode in which the one principle’s single act reaches creatures: from the Father, in the Spirit, through the Son who is the Word made flesh. In this way, the classical horizon does the work Wood wants while leaving divine simplicity and freedom unstrained.
IV. Comparison and Freedom
Both accounts—Wood’s subject–act identity and the provenance/specification rule—are disciplined by the same texts and aim at the same outcome: that no “non-Christic” cosmology is theologically tolerable. Both reject property-sameness as the basis of identity. The difference is where each locates identity’s tightness.
Wood grounds unity in the Logos’s one kenotic act such that creation is Incarnation: “creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation”; “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude.”^46 On this telling, creatio ex nihilo is creatio ex Deo precisely because the Word’s kenosis is the identity of God’s historical and cosmic Incarnation.^47 The gain is maximalism. The risk is that, unless carefully hedged, “identity” slides toward antecedent necessity, or toward compressing taxis into the Son’s mode.
The provenance/specification account grounds unity in taxis, with identity resting on who acts and how, according to origin: one simple act, one principle “not three principles of creation but one principle,”^48 personally owned “from … through … in.” Gregory supplies the grammar; Dionysius the apophatic reserve; Aquinas the modal and metaphysical guardrails; Eriugena the vivid causal image. On this telling, Maximus’s “wills always and in all things” is read as a specification of the single triune operation toward creatures rather than as an identification of creaturely termini. The gain is the same maximal Christic scope, but now with divine freedom conceptualized as consequent necessity. God could have refrained from creating. Having freely willed a rational-communion world, God wills it Christically from the beginning: “the year acceptable … beginning from the moment when God was pleased to give substance to beings.”^49 That is a necessity of faithfulness to a free decree, not a compulsion in God’s nature.
In short: Wood’s path to identity is escalatory—subject and act are identified as one kenosis, so creation is Incarnation; the provenance/specification path is non-escalatory—identity is by origin and taxis, the one act is indivisible, and its creaturely specification is Christic as willed. The latter is, I submit, the more plausible route inside Maximus’s horizon precisely because it renders the same christological amplitude without threatening simplicity or freedom, and because it keeps Gregory’s monarchy and inseparable operations as the grammar in which Maximus must be read.
Conclusion
Part 1 set the dialectic; Part 2 has shown how the classical horizon resolves it without reduction. Wood’s subject–act identity remains a plausible way of reading Maximus’s rhetoric, and its insistence that “Christo-logic does not amount to a contemplative guess … [its] necessary source is the event of God’s Incarnation”^50 is salutary. Yet that salutary insistence need not—and should not—be cashed out as an ontological identification of creaturely termini. Gregory’s monarchy and taxis, Dionysius’s apophatic reserve, Aquinas’s simplicity and freedom, and Eriugena’s inseparable causality provide a better route: identity by origin. The one simple, indivisible operation of the triune God is enacted from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. With respect to creatures, that one operation is specified Christically “always and in all things.”^51 Any necessity here is consequent upon a free decree, not antecedent in God. Thus we keep one principle without partition, one operation without escalation, one freedom without modal collapse. Or, to return to Gregory’s vision: “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God … out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).”^52
Ultimately, Wood treats divine freedom as the unconstrained self-expression of the Logos’s intrinsic kenotic act, such that creation and Incarnation are one and the same subject-act and their Christic necessity is antecedent to God’s identity rather than consequent upon a discretionary decree. By making the Christic outcome antecedently necessary to God’s very identity, this risks modal collapse (no genuine alternatives to create or not), strains divine simplicity by tethering God’s being to an act with creaturely termini, blurs the distinction between Creator and creature, and tilts the trinitarian taxis toward a Logos-centric principle that undercuts monarchy and inseparable operations.
It is conceivable he employs Hegel here in some sense. The opposites of necessity vs. freedom as a dilemma, if I had to guess for Wood, is like a false opposition; and this opposition, I can hear Wood saying, is resolved in the Christ-event itself, arguing that divine freedom is the unconditioned self-diffusion of love such that the Logos’s kenotic self-expression eternally and historically gives the same act in creation and Incarnation, an identity disclosed rather than imposed by the hypostatic union (There’s much of this kind of thing in his book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022]; and in his PhD, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” PhD diss., Boston College, 2018). (smartcatholics.com, SAGE Journals)
Wood, as far as I can tell, will stage contraries in order to show their coincidence without confusion, so he may say something like, what appears as antecedent necessity is in truth the Logos’s self-determining love, in which the divine and human energies are wholly simultaneous and interpenetrating, and that therefore freedom is most itself when it is perfectly identical with this Christic act that constitutes the world’s very being as Incarnation’s amplitude (jordandanielwood.substack.com, smartcatholics.com).
On this reading of Wood, he would deny modal collapse by insisting that the one triune act is simple and indivisible while nevertheless historically manifest as Jesus Christ, so the necessity in question names not external compulsion but the inner logic of divine love that is identical with the Logos’s act of creating and redeeming (which is the way Wood talks in Whole Mystery of Christ, see also smartcatholics.com again).
But, I hope that my contention by defending divine freedom as the non-necessitated, simple willing by which the triune God, one principle acting from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, freely decrees to create and redeem, so that any Christic necessity is consequent upon that decree rather than antecedent in God is more compelling. More importantly, I hope said view is not only as plausible but more likely in historical context which is why I framed Maximus as a classical theist not a Hegelian. I’ve covered my view in detail here, if you need, much much more: Defending Divine Simplicity (Trinity) – RobertDryer .
Postscript
After I drafted this piece, Wood published a follow-up that doubles down on the same line from his book—only louder, bolder, less shy about saying the quiet part out loud. Here’s where he published it: Hegel as Alexandrian Christian – by Jordan Daniel Wood
Here’s the gist, at full volume and without flinching: creation is not a neutral foyer where Christ walks in later; creation is already thick with Christ. Wood names it—memorably, provocatively—“creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation,” and then drives the point home with the line that has the argumentative weight of a thesis statement and the pastoral sting of a rebuke: “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude.” Everything else he does hangs from that beam: the method (start from the event, not speculation), the metaphysics (one act showing up kenotically), the language discipline (say what the cross forces you to say, and stop where adoration starts). It’s a tight, insistent through-line: no spare cosmology, no vacant stage, no “add-Christ-later” option—just the one triune act shining in and as the Word’s embodied history.
In Part 1 I argue one will, one power, one undivided operation—personally owned from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit—and then say that, ad extra, this single act is Christically specified. Wood’s new piece supplies the vivid diction for that specification; my frame supplies the rails. His intensification (“cosmic Incarnation,” “no non-Christic creation”) reads cleanly inside the pro-Nicene guardrails I defend: identity by provenance rather than property-sameness; inseparable operations rather than split agencies; freedom preserved by treating any Christic “necessity” as consequent on a free decree, not antecedent in God. In short: Wood turns up the Christic brightness; the Cappadocian–Dionysian–Thomist grammar keeps the light from blinding the doctrine (of Simplicity). The main issue still stands: Wood treats identity as the Logos’s own subject-act such that creation is the Word’s cosmic Incarnation, which tends toward antecedent necessity rather than a decree freely chosen. If this is a creative heterodox framing it’s not a big deal, as long as it doesn’t contradict anything necessary in the tradition. I’m not smart enough to figure that out; but as you can tell from my, “quiet part out loud,” I’m suspect. My point is, however, we don’t have to go there and can have a divine simplicity friendly version that can appropriate his work if need be.
Notes for Part 1
- Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 1–5.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.2, trans. Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow, in NPNF 2.7 (1894).
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.3, NPNF 2.7 (1894).
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.3, NPNF 2.7 (1894).
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 6.20, in Select Orations, trans. Martha Vinson (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2003), 20.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 6.20, Select Orations, 20.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 6.20, Select Orations, 20.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 44.10, Select Orations, 237.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 44.7, Select Orations, 235.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 44.9, Select Orations, 236.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (1997), §258.
- Gilles Emery, The Trinity (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2011), 77–78.
- Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia, q.3, a.7 (Blackfriars, vol. 2), 119–21.
- Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia, q.19, a.3 (Blackfriars, vol. 5), 83–85.
- Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia, q.45, a.6 (Blackfriars, vol. 7), 89–91.
- Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I.1, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), 52–53.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 748–761 and 1120–1134; CCC §258; Aquinas, ST Ia, q.19, a.3.
- Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 7, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2014), 103–105.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:105.
- Samuel Korb, “Whole God and Whole Man: Deification as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor,” Scottish Journal of Theology 75.3 (2022): 300–318, at 300–302.
- Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 1–5 (and passim); and “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2018), abstract.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41, Ambigua, 2:105.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41, Ambigua, 2:109.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41, Ambigua, 2:111.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41, Ambigua, 2:115.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41 (citing Dionysius), Ambigua, 2:119.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1307–1347.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1331.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1331 (citing Gregory).
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:203–205.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:205.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:205–207.
- John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon II, 609A–D, trans. I.P. Sheldon-Williams and John J. O’Meara (Montreal/Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks/CCS, 1987), 221.
- Dermot Moran, “John Scottus Eriugena,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018), s.v. “Periphyseon.”
Notes for Part 2
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §258: “As the Trinity has only one and the same nature, so too does it have only one and the same operation, ‘The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle’.”
- Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 103–105: “The Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.”
- Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.6, 1071b17–20, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933): “there must, then, be such a principle, whose very essence is actuality.”
- Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII.6, 1045a8–12, trans. Ross: “the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause.”
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.2, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7, trans. Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994 [1894]).
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 29.3, NPNF 2.7.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.3, NPNF 2.7: “Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God. … out of Light (the Father), Light (the Son), in Light (the Holy Ghost).”
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 6.20, in Select Orations, trans. Martha Vinson (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 20.
- Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 6.20, Select Orations, 20: “knowing the Father in the Son, the Son in the Holy Spirit.”
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, q.3, a.7 (Blackfriars, vol. 2), 119–21: “God is His own existence, and although every essence may have something superadded to it, this cannot apply to absolute being.”
- Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing (al-Ilāhiyyāt), trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 2005), VIII.4, 274: “The First has no quiddity other than His individual existence.”
- Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1904), I.51, 69: “There cannot be any belief in the unity of God except by admitting that He is one simple substance, without any composition or plurality of elements.”
- Thomas Aquinas, ST Ia, q.45, a.6 (Blackfriars, vol. 7), 89–91: “To create belongs to God according to His being, that is, His essence, which is common to the three Persons. Hence to create is not proper to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity.”
- Catechism §258.
- Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I.1, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), 52–53: “The Good above word is unutterable by word, Cause of being to all, but Itself not being.”
- Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 1–5 (and passim).
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5: “Maximus envisions creatio ex nihilo as creatio ex Deo in the event of the Word’s kenosis: the mystery of Christ is the revealed identity of the Word’s historical and cosmic Incarnation.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5; see also Kindle 748–761 and 1120–1134: “creation as the Word’s cosmic Incarnation.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5: “For Maximus there simply is no non-Christic creation. The world is not first a neutral theatre upon which the Incarnation later occurs. The world is the Incarnation’s own cosmic amplitude.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:103–105.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:105: “… he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by his condescension is and is called man ….”
- Samuel Korb, “Whole God and Whole Man: Deification as Incarnation in Maximus the Confessor,” Scottish Journal of Theology 75, no. 3 (2022): 300–318, at 300–302: “describes deification as incarnation … without any kind of ‘metaphorical’ qualifications” and “He even repeats the exact same language elsewhere … indicating that he sees them as one and the same.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1307–1347: “Christo-logic does not amount to a contemplative guess … Its necessary source is the event of God’s Incarnation.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1307–1347: “the peculiar mode of these whole and simultaneous and interpenetrating activities proper to incommensurable natures are we granted intellectual vision into the logic of God’s own identity with what he is infinitely not by nature.”
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1331: “you must say ‘God suffered’ and ‘died’,” with Gregory’s caution that “person and nature must be carefully distinguished at precisely this point.”
- Gregory, Oration 29.2, NPNF 2.7.
- Gregory, Oration 29.3, NPNF 2.7.
- Gregory, Oration 31.3, NPNF 2.7.
- Gregory, Oration 6.20, Select Orations, 20.
- Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I.1, 52–53.
- Aquinas, ST Ia, q.3, a.7.
- Aquinas, ST Ia, q.45, a.6.
- Aquinas, ST Ia, q.19, a.3 (Blackfriars, vol. 5), 83–85: “God wills His own goodness necessarily, God wills things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as their end.”
- Catechism §258: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.”
- John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon II, 609A–D, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and John J. O’Meara (Montreal/Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks/CCS, 1987), 221.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:103–105.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:105.
- Korb, “Whole God and Whole Man,” 300–302.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:203–205: “the year acceptable to the Lord … is the entire extension of the ages, beginning from the moment when God was pleased to give substance to beings and existence to what did not exist.”
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:205: “Thus the Lord is called the sun of righteousness … He is the maker and perfecter of the ages, and the beginning and end of all things.”
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:205–207: “‘or is circumscribed in the one whom we see,’ either because He rushes forth like ‘light from light’ … or because He Himself as man is circumscribed in the visible form of our nature.”
- Maximus, Ambiguum 41a, Ambigua, 2:121: “according to its own free will, our fleshly birth”; “this flesh was in every way the same and indistinguishable from ours, but without sin”; “our nature gave flesh without seed, and that a virgin gave birth without corruption”; “on the one hand concealing and on the other hand revealing the ineffable and unknown principle according to which they took place”; “revealing by the principle of faith, by which all things beyond nature and knowledge may readily be grasped”; “to discover on your own and give expression to a better and wiser solution.”
- Aquinas, ST Ia, q.19, a.3.
- Gregory, Oration 6.20, Select Orations, 20.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5; Kindle 748–761 and 1120–1134.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, 1–5.
- Catechism §258.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 46, Ambigua, 2:203–205.
- Wood, Whole Mystery, Kindle 1307–1347.
- Maximus, Ambiguum 7, Ambigua, 1:103–105.
- Gregory, Oration 31.3, NPNF 2.7.
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———. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 7. Translated by Charles G. Browne and James E. Swallow. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994 (orig. 1894).
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———. “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor.” PhD diss., Boston College, 2018.