Fr.

Maximos (Constas)

Seminar on St. Maximos the Confessor:

The Four Hundred Chapters on Love

Holy Cross Greek School of Theology

Fall Semester 2011

The monastic literary genre of the Centuries is often considered to consist in a generally
random (not to say incoherent) collection of chapters (), sayings, and
aphorisms, without significant internal structuring or deeper patterns of over-arching
argumentative forms. A close reading of Maximos the Confessors Chapters on Love,
however, will readily enable us to question and ultimately reject such assumptions. As the
following analysis demonstrates, far from being a fragmented and disjointed collection of
gnomic material, the Chapters on Love presents us with a carefully crafted treatise in which
accumulative, intertextual, and unfolding spiral concepts reveal deeper structures of
thought. The following is focused solely on the first 20 chapters of Maximoss First
Century; interested students are encouraged to explore the remaining 380 aphorisms, and
add to our knowledge of this well known but understudied treatise.

I.1: Thesis
Maximos first word is love. This initial sentence summarizes the work as a whole, and sets forth the basic
contrast between the life of passion and divine life. At the same time, it marks a major reworking of the
theology of Evagrios, and thus a bold statement of the Confessors aim: to modify the fundamental principles
of the Evagrian spiritual tradition.

I.1: *
,

**
,

***.

I.1: Love is a good *disposition of

the soul, according to which it
prefers none of beings to the
knowledge of God. It is impossible
to reach the **lasting possession of
this love if one has a ***passionate
attachment to any worldly thing.

The disposition of love is disabled by the human prospatheia (attachment) to earthly things. Here,
the word apatheia is the link between this sentence and the next, as if Maximos were saying: If love is
supreme, and if its acquisition is obviated by prospatheia, then it is important to know what apatheia is,
and to discover its place within the larger structure of spiritual experience.

I.2-I.3: Elucidation

I.2: *
, **
,
,
*** -

,
, .



I.2: LOVE is engendered by
*dispassion; dispassion by **HOPE
in God; hope by patience and long-

suffering; these are engendered by

***all-embracing self-mastery; self-

mastery from fear of God; fear of

God from FAITH in the Lord.

Having pointed to the summit of the ladder (i.e., love) in I.1, Maximos shows us in I.2 the seven steps
that lead to this summit, and thus we begin at the top of the ladder and descend to its origin and
foundation (i.e., faith in the Lord). This is at once an ascetical, moral, and spiritual ascent, which
suggests something of the ecstatic movement by which love impels the person onward, or rather which
very force love is. Note the triad of faith, hope, and love (1 Cor 13:3). Note also Maximoss use of
something like hysteron proteron (a rhetorical device that reverses the natural order of events), so that
the verb and the noun follow the direct object. (I have translated the active verb as passive in order to
maintain the nouns in their original positions). The link between I.2 and I.3 is faith.

I.3:


**




*
.

I.3: He that has faith in the Lord fears

punishment; he that fears punishment
masters his **passions; he that masters
his passions patiently endures
hardships; he that patiently endures
hardships will have hope in God; hope
in God separates <the intellect> from
every earthly attachment; the intellect
thus separated will have love for Go

Having conducted us to the bottom of the ladder, Maximos does not leave us there, but in I.3
brings us back to the summit, this time giving us information about the actual role or function
of each virtue (note the shift from to ), so that we learn that our
attachments are sundered by the power of hope,* which separates the intellect from it
unhealthy attachments to earthly things, and which, as we have already seen in I.1 & I.2,
enables us to love God.

I.4: Knowledge
I.4:


*
.

I.4: He who loves God prefers

knowledge of Him to all things
brought into being by Him, and
through *desire ceaselessly adheres
to it.

Maximos now returns to the language and themes of I.1, and states that the knowledge of
God is pursued ceaselessly through desire (or longing, i.e., ). Note again the shift
from noun to participle. The focus is now on knowledge (not mentioned in I.2-3) and its
relation objects or beings, which is the link to I.5.

I.5: God and the cosmos

Having come back to the nexus of love, knowledge, and being, the mention of beings (and things
brought into being, and the way in which knowledge and love stand in relation to them), prompts a
turn to creation.

I.5:
,





.

I.5: If all things have come into
being by God and for God, then

God is superior to whatever has

come into being through Him; the
one who forsakes the superior by
devoting himself to inferior things
shows that he prefers before God
the things made by God.

I.5 stresses the superiority and excellence of God over all created realities, establishing a hierarchy of
values between the things of the world and God (which cannot be unrelated to the moral hierarchy of
I.2-3). Here, God and all that is sequent to Him are clearly distinguished, and the reader can
immediately see where he or she stands in this clear ordering of reality. I.5 is an antithesis to I.1, since
now we see the person who has forsaken what is superior and is engrossed in inferior things, which
reveals his preference for material things over God.

I.6: Cosmos and microcosm

The main point of I.5 is given an additional twist in I.6, for among the created things that we can value
more than God is our own body (as a kind of anti-microcosm); note that the point of view and primary
motivating factor is love, and not disdain or scorn for the material world or the body.

I.6:





.

I.6: He that has his mind fixed on

the love of God disdains all visible
things and even his own body as
something alien.

For Maximos, love for the body (the link between I.6 and I.7) is more or less identical with original sin
(cf. Letter 2), which means that love for God was the original condition of Adam before the fall. As we
are quickly coming to see, all the constituent elements of Maximos discourse figure in a larger chain
(or progression, or structure), and thus we are next told (I.7) that the body also has a place within this
framework.

I.7: If the soul is superior to the
body, and if God is incomparably
superior to the world He created,
he that prefers the body to the soul
and the world to the God who
created it differs in no way from
idolaters.

I.7-I.9: Idolatry

I.7:

,



.

A reversal of I.6, working with the same scale of values. Maximos elsewhere states that idols are not
naturally inherent in visible things, but are from the devil, who gives them idolized forms (eidolopoioumena), for the purpose of deception (QD 30). Operative here is the root meaning of eidolon, i.e.,
image, which comes from eidos, and denotes a phantom, or any insubstantial form or a merely
reflected image; according to Epicurus, it is the film given off by any object and conveying an
impression to the eye. Consequently eidolon is the memory image, the noema (or mental
representation), which attaches itself both to the mind and the image, cf. II.31.




I.8:
-

,

.
I.8: He that separates his intellect
from love and devotion to God and
keeps it tied to any sensible thing is
the one who prefers the body to the
soul and things that are made to
God their creator.

I.9:
,

.

I.9: If the life of the intellect is the

illumination of knowledge and this
is born of love for God, then it is
well said that there is nothing
greater than love (cf. 1 Cor 13:13).

This general theme of I.7 is repeated in .8, although from within, or from above, which is to say
that, whereas .7 spoke simply of a preference for material things, .8 describes the distraction of
the intellect from the love of God, due to attachment to a sensible object (cf. I.1); these
distractions/attractions are both related to physiological and psychological states (i.e., sensation,
consciousness, etc.), but they are also moral, since they represent a particular stance within the moral
order, and they are often a rejection of that order. Every distraction is therefore a kind of fall, a
movement away from the prosedreia of the intellect in God. .9 continues the theme of the intellect,
showing us the opposite side of the situation described in .8. Here, knowledge is the light of the
intellect, and this light is generated by love, which means nothing is greater than love.

I.10-12: Ecstasy
I.10: *
**,

-
.
*** -
,
,

,


-
.

I.11:

,

I.10: When in the *eros of its love

for God the intellect **goes out of
itself, then it has no perception at
all either of itself or of any beings.
For being illumined by the divine
and ***infinite light, it remains
insensible to all that that has been
brought into being by Him, just as
the eye of the senses does not
perceive the stars when the sun has
risen.
,
* .
I.11: All the virtues assist the
intellect in the pursuit of divine
eros, but than them all does pure

prayer. By it the intellect is given

wings to go ahead to God and

*becomes outside of all beings.

I.12:
-
-

,
-



,

, -


.

I.12: When through love the

intellect is ravished by divine
knowledge and, being outside of
beings, has a perception of divine
infinity, then, according to the
divine Isaiah, it is struck and comes
to an awareness of its own
lowliness, and says with conviction
the words of the prophet: Woe is
me, because I am pierced at heart,
because, being a man and having
unclean lips, I live in the midst of a
people with unclean lips, and the king
the Lord Sabaoth I have seen with my
eyes.

I.10-12 bring this first cluster of sentences to its climax, and eros is now mentioned for the first time in
this work. The phrase: the eros of agape (Polycarp Sherwood: the burning love of charity;
George Berthold: the full ardor of love; Philokalia: the intensity of love for God) is slightly
unusual: as far as I know, it appears only in the Macarian homilies (a minor source for Maximos). At
this level, the intellect is said to become insensitive to, or without feeling (aisthesis) for created
things, but this is a purely experiential description, and not a moral or psychological one: i.e., it is not
insensitivity to ones neighbor, but rather the liberation of the intellect from the deception of senseperception and sensible objects. This understanding of the text is supported by the metaphor Maximos
uses, which is physiological and empirical: the eye no longer sees the stars after the sun has risen.
I.11 provides more information about factors that contribute to the acquisition of divine eros,
especially the virtues and pure prayer (cf. I.49; II.6-7; III.44; IV.51), which lead the intellect
ecstatically to stand outside of beings. For Evagrios, pure prayer is imageless prayer, which is the
intellects highest form of intellection. This is followed by the ekdemia of the intellect (cf. II.28; III.20),
which is a direct rejection of the Evagrian model.

I.13-20: Love in action

Here begins a new set of themes, concerned with concrete behavior. Having touched on the various
underlying philosophical foundations, Maximos now turns to ethics. Thus: I.13 speaks of love for all;
I.14 might not, at first glance, seem to fit the pattern, but the vices mentioned here (sensuality and
hatred) are ultimately social diseases, which becomes clear in I.15, where Maximos states that these
lower vices are a sign of estrangement from divine love, while I.16 reveals that these teachings are
simply the ethical commandments of Christ and the Gospel, i.e., the commandment to love one
another. (In the Ambigua, Maximos will develop this further, so that the virtues become an actual
incarnation or embodiment of the divine in the virtuous man.) This is followed by I.17-19, passages
which are modeled on the Beatitudes (and thus ethical teachings), and recapitulate earlier themes
(universality of love, non-attachment, transcendence of intellect, etc.); I.20 does something similar, but
in more detail, returning to the theme of idolatry.