Ross 1

Taylor C. Ross
NAPS 2014

Aesthetic Revelation and Hermeneutic Responsibility:

Liturgical Deification in Maximus the Confessor’s Mystagogia

In his now classic introduction to the Confessor’s life and thought, Polycarp Sherwood

suggested, “The Word of God is the connatural food of the soul; that the soul is fed is, for

Maximus, paramount whether this be by the Scripture, which is the word of God, whether by

contemplation, whether by the Sacrament, whether by compagination in the body of Christ—it

matters only that the soul is fed.”1 Sherwood was certainly right to highlight the fluidity with

which Maximus imagined the Logos to incarnate itself for human intake, a topic treated at length

in recent scholarship on the Confessor.2 Yet, Sherwood’s remark unduly ignores the distinct

modes in and through which Maximus imagines the Christian agent may find the Logos at play.

Though the Logos is certainly the spiritual food on which a person is invited to feast in each

given Christian practice, the particularities of these various methods are not unimportant for

Maximus. Sherwood’s characterization risks implicitly, but nevertheless improperly, assuming

Maximus imagines the soul to be nourished by some reductive commodity that may ultimately

be abstracted from the distinct practices in and through which it is communicated. Such a view

also obscures the fact that, for Maximus, the actual performance of these practices is itself an

integral component of spiritual nourishment.

To temper this initial critique of Sherwood’s characterization, I would like to highlight

another remark, also from his introduction, that will provide something of a focusing

hermeneutical backdrop for this essay: “Neither theological nor philosophical speculation simply

                                                                                                               
1  Polycarp
Sherwood, introduction to St. Maximus the Confessor: The Ascetic Life, The Four Centuries on Charity,
See especially, Torstein Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford
2

University Press, 2008).

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as a development of truth has any place in St. Maximus. He considers everything in its actual,

existent state, that is, as saturated with the unique end of creation—deification.”3 In this vain,

Paul Blowers has devoted significant attention to the importance of Scripture as one of these loci

of divine revelation for the Confessor and the salient ways in which the “spiritual topography” of

the biblical text reflects and is reflected by the contours of the natural world. Recently, borrowing

an illuminating idiom from Jean-Luc Marion, Blowers has characterized scriptural revelation in

Maximus’s understanding as a kind of “saturated phenomenon,” the sacred text replete with an

excess of the Logos’s deifying presence, yielding an interminable hermeneutic possibility for the

interpreter. It is, on Blowers’ construal moreover, the concrete performance of this polyvalent

exegetical task that reveals the Christic Word at play within the text of scripture, a performance

that in turn becomes a kind of “interpretive dance” whereby the exegete is personally engaged by

the effusive presence of the Logos who remains, nevertheless, ineluctably unbound by the words

of scripture themselves.4 In this essay, I would like to extend this line of thinking to consider the

church’s liturgy as an equally viable locus of “saturating” divine revelation. For Maximus, the

liturgical celebration, like the exegesis of scripture, comprises an indispensable component of

proper Christian progress precisely because it occupies a distinct matrix of revelatory encounter.

I would, therefore, like to situate Maximus’s commentary on the Divine Liturgy, the Mystagogia,

alongside Ambiguum 105 and Ambiguum 376 as a kind of hermeneutical treatise in proper theoria.7

                                                                                                               
3  Sherwood,
introduction to St. Maximus the Confessor, 28.  
Paul M. Blowers, “The Interpretive Dance: Concealment, Disclosure, and Deferral of Meaning in
4

Maximus the Confessor’s Hermeneutical Theology” in Knowing the Purpose of Creation Through the Resurrection: Proceedings
of the Symposium on St. Maximus the Confessor (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press Publishing House, 2013). I think many of
the conclusions Peter Martens deduces vis-à-vis Origen’s regard for the spiritually edifying qualities of the
performance of scriptural exegesis could be ably applied to Maximus. That is to say, it is the concrete performance
of the interpretive act that is for both Origen and Maximus the spiritual good of engagement the biblical text—not
merely the hermeneutical conclusions such engagement yields. Cf. Peter W. Martens, Origen and Scripture: The Contours
of the Exegetical Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5 Cf. Ambiguum 10 (PG 91:1133A-1137C).
6 Cf. Ambiguum 37 (PG 91:1289D-1297B).
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However, whereas these sections from the Ambigua address contemplation of the variegated logoi

in nature (θεωρία φυσική) and scripture (θεωρία γραφική) respectively, in the Mystagogia Maximus

is concerned to demonstrate the church’s liturgy as an immersive iconic performance of the

economy of salvation, which presents for the liturgical agent oppurtunity to contemplate the

providential logoi of divine revelation. The Mystagogia, indeed the liturgy itself is, for Maximus, a

pedagogy in eliciting and instilling a certain contemplative-vision (θεωρία) by which the

communicant may apprehend the intelligible structures of both the liturgical rites and, by

extension, the whole economically ordered cosmos. This essay will proceed in two sections. First,

I will engage the text of the Mystagogia, demonstrating, in view of his larger corpus, Maximus’s

nuanced understanding of the “liturgical image” and the hermeneutic responsibility of its

beholder. Second, I will, following Blowers’ cue and borrowing insights from Jean-Luc Marion,

reconsider Maximus’s understanding of liturgy as a “saturated” icon of divine revelation in order

to highlight its transformative, deifying capacity for the liturgical communicant.8

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
7 For a helpful comparison of these texts from the Ambigua and the contemplation of nature and scripture

Maximus describes therein, see Paul M. Blowers, “The World in the Mirror of Holy Scripture: Maximus the
Confessor’s Short Hermeneutical Treatise in Ambiguum ad Joannem 37” in Dominico Eloquio—In Lordly Eloquence:
Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. Paul M. Blowers, Angela Russell Christman, David G.
Hunter, and Robin Darling Young (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2002), 408-
426.
8  As is well known, Maximus’s sacramental theology has been something of an enduring aporia for scholars

of this greatest of Byzantine theologians. Before moving to the text of the Mystagogia, I would be remiss not to
acknowledge recent studies that have certainly worked to further breach the impasse that Maximus’s lack of a full
sacramental exposition poses. Nikolaos Loudovikos’ recent monograph, A Eucharistic Ontology, is one of these fresh
attempts to reckon specifically with Maximus’s Eucharistic theology.8 Loudovikos places Maximus’s understanding
of the Eucharist in the context of his broader cosmology and eschatology, suggesting that the Confessor’s entire
conception of ontology is at heart Eucharistic, a free exchange of gift from Trinitarian Creator to a created “Other”
in dialogical reciprocity. The great accomplishment of Loudovikos’s work is his presentation of a Maximian
sacramental theology that goes beyond a mere catalog and commentary of the various Eucharistic texts throughout
his corpus and instead offers an integrative account demonstrating the centrality of the Eucharist in Maximus’s
broader theological vision. In this regard, Loudovikos is indebted to and builds upon earlier strides made by Lars
Thunberg in his perceptive attention to the place and value of “symbol and mystery” in Maximus’s theology.
Though his profound achievement in this regard is certainly not diminished, Loudovikos provides only scant
attention to the broader liturgical context in which the Eucharistic event takes place.
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Mystagogia: Pedagogy in θεωρία

That Maximus is concerned with a particular “manner of seeing,” he makes clear in the

introduction of the Mystagogia. Speaking of a “blessed old man (τῷ μακαρίῳ γέροντι),”9 Maximus

writes, he “had rendered himself free from the bonds of matter and its fantasies (τῶν τῆς ὕλης

δεσμῶν και τῶν κατ᾽αὐτὴν φαντασιῶν ἐλεύθερον ἑαυτὸν καταστήσας) by the abundance of

virtue and very long and knowing familiarity in divine realities (τὰ θεῖα χρονωτέρας),” and

“could thus see what others do not see (δυνάμενον εὐθέως ὁρᾷν τὰ τοῖς πολλοῖς μὴ ὁρώμενα).”10

Maximus’s connection here, between contemplations (οἱ νοηθέντοι) and the ability to see rightly

(ὁρᾷν), is a theme that runs like a thread throughout the commentary. When he moves to

enumerate the symbolic polyvalences of the church he describes these interpretive images as

corresponding to certain “level[s] of contemplation (θεωρίας ἐπιβολὴν)” apprehended by

accompanying “points of view (τρόπον θεωρίας).11 In his incisive study of the treatise, V.M.

Zhivov also noticed a certain visionary quality of the Mystagogia. In his estimation, Maximus aims

to give an account of the “nature of the ‘liturgical image’.”12 Maximus is concerned not with a

merely conceptual grasp of the liturgical display but is rather intent on a distinct contemplative-

vision, which is neither stunted by the materiality of the rites nor entirely dismissive of their

phenomenal display.
                                                                                                               
9 Balthasar takes this “blessed old man” to be a “literary fiction” to whom the teaching of this treatise is

ascribed. Cf. Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 336. Others, such as George Berthold, have suggested this τῷ μακαρίῳ γέροντι
may perhaps be Sophronius of Jerusalem, Maximus’s superior at the monastery in Carthage. Cf. Maximus the
Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), n215.
10 Myst. Pro.; PG 91, 661C. All quotations from the Mystagogia are taken from George Berthold, ed. and

trans., Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). I have also included the Greek text
where pertinent. These references from J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca are by volume, column, and section (e.g. PG
91, 498A).
11 Myst. 1, 2, 4; PG 91, 664D-672D.
12 V.M. Zhivov, “The Mystagogy of Maximus the Confessor and the Development of the Byzantine Theory

of the Image,” trans. Ann Shukman, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 31:4 (1987), 351. On the concept of the
“liturgical image,” Zhivov also points toward René Bornert’s important study of Byzantine liturgical commentaries,
Les commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Archives de l’Orient chrétien,1966).
   Ross 5

Such is especially the case in Myst. 2, wherein Maximus describes how the church is “a

figure and image (τύπον και εἰκόνα) of the entire world composed of visible and invisible essences

(ὁρατῶν και ἀοράτων οὐσιῶν)” by contemplating the architectural structure of the building itself,

For while it is one house in its construction (Ὥσπερ γἀρ αὐτη κατἀ τἠν οἰκοδομήν
εἵς οἶκος ὑπάρχουσα) it admits of a certain diversity in disposition by its plan (τοῦ
σχήματος) being divided into an area (τόπον) exclusively assigned to priests and
ministers, which we call a sanctuary (ἱερατεῖον), and one accessible to all the
faithful, which we call a nave (ναόν). Still it is one in its basic reality (μία ἐστι κατὰ
τήν ὑπόστασιν) without being divided into its parts (συνδιαιρουμένη τοῖς ἑαυτῆς
μέρεσι) by reason of the differences between them, but rather by their relationship
to the unity (ἀναφορᾷ) it frees these parts from the differences arising from their
names.13

Immediately striking here is Maximus’s close attention to the physical, material contours of the

church. The imagistic quality of the church’s symbolic intimation toward divine realities, here its

structural mirroring of the cosmos, is intimately caught up in its phenomenal presentation. This

is clearly so, for Maximus, because of the deep and intrinsic interpenetration of sensible and

intelligible throughout creation. Maximus demonstrates this unified commingling by a further

contemplation of the church’s architectural order,

In this way (Οὕτω καὶ) [in the same manner as the church is composed of nave
and sanctuary] the entire world of beings produced by God in creation (ὁ ἐκ Θεοῦ
κατἀ γένεσιν παρηγμένος σύμπας τῶν ὄντων κόσμος) is divided into a spiritual
world filled with intelligible and incorporeal essences (νοερῶν καἰ ἀσομάτων
οὐσιῶν) and into this sensible (αἰσθητὸν) and bodily (σωματικὸν) world which is
ingeniously woven together (συνυφασμένον) of many forms (εἰδῶν) and natures
(φύσεων). This is like another sort of Church not of human construction
(ἀχειροποίητος) which is wisely revealed (ὑποφαίνεται) in the church which is
humanly made (χειροποίήτου).14

The church here bears witness to intelligible realities precisely by its aesthetic deployment, such

that its material ordering does not merely signal an abstracted meaning towards which it gestures

but is rather itself intrinsic to the realization of this reality. Maximus insists sensible beholding is

                                                                                                               
13 Myst. 2; PG 91 668D
14 Myst. 2; PG 91 669A
   Ross 6

an essential component of contemplation precisely because, as Balthasar suggests, “he

understands the limitation of pure thought, which of its own power embraces its object only

through abstract concepts, not on the basis of experience.”15 We might also here rejoin the quote

from Sherwood with which we began: Maximus is contemplating the church and its liturgy in its

“actual, existent state,” aesthetically and symbolically “saturated” with divine meaning.16

As in the person of Christ and the cosmos at large, so too in the church’s constitution and

liturgical performance, the sensible and the intelligible are united yet unmixed such that “all the

principles of things (οἱ τῶν ὀντῶν λόγοι) both are and subsist as one.”17 In the liturgical image,

Maximus finds the unifying realities of God’s ordering of the cosmos, the differentiated λόγοι of

God’s saving economy of salvation held forth for the eye to behold. He spends a considerable

portion of the Mystagogia elaborating the polyvalent meanings presented by these iconic rites and

in each of these liturgical movements finds an historical moment, some past and some future,

recalling and proclaiming “the whole providential history of God’s salvation.”18 Yet, as we noted,

these “divine realities (τὰ θεῖα χρονωτέρας),” the differentiated λόγοι of God’s saving economy,

may only be apprehended by a certain contemplative-vision (θεωρία). Maximus’s staunch

allegiance to Chalcedonian Christology led him to affirm the enduring necessity of human

freedom in the theandric person of Christ and, by extension, every creature that subsists in and

through him. For the liturgical communicant—like the scriptural exegete—such recieprocity

means an abiding interpretive responsibility in the sacramental encounter, an obligation to

                                                                                                               
Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 285.
15

This marked emphasis on the physical structure of the church itself and concomitant conviction that the
16

cosmos comprises a unified reality of sensible and intelligible spheres was, as Balthasar also notes, a patently
Maximian “point of departure.” By beginning his exposition of the liturgy in this way Maximus moves past the
spiritualizing proclivities of Origen, for whom such visible-contemplation “would have been unthinkable.” Balthasar,
Cosmic Liturgy, 318. As Balthasar further suggests, Maximus’s vision of the cosmos stands in stark contrast to the kind
of cosmology “found in Origen, who understands the ‘spiritual senses,’ on the one hand, as the (‘normal’)
development of a living faith, but who considers spiritual and physical senses, on the other hand, as irreconcilable:
where the spiritual eye is open, the physical eye must close.” Ibid, 285.
17 Myst. 5; PG 91 681B.
18 Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, 323.
   Ross 7

properly view the iconic rites by contemplating the λόγοι evinced in and through their

phenomenal presentation. “True contemplation (θεωρίαν...ἀληθὲς)” is not, according to

Maximus, inhibited by “the wandering of the senses in form and shape (τῆς ἐν εἴδει καὶ σχήματι)

on the basis of appearance (κατὰ τήν πόσοψιν)” nor does it approach the phenomenal world

according to “the mere surface of sensible things (ἐπιφάνειαν τῶν αἰσθητῶν).” True theoria,

rather, sees “the principles of beings (ὄντων λόγους) and the marvelous and grand mystery of

divine Providence” imaged forth by the liturgical icon.19 There is, in Maximus’s estimation, a

distinct level of hermeneutic intentionality required of the rightly ordered beholder.20  The

Mystaogia is a text devoted to aiding its readers develop such a hermaneutic. Yet, in the final

analysis, just as each person must develop the virtues and dispositions of Christ and allow them to

be incarnate in their own selves, so too proper contemplative-seeing, true θεωρία must be

embodied and deployed by each beholder of the liturgical image.

The Beholding Icon: Liturgy as “Saturated Phenomenon”

This requisite intentionality was, for Maximus, grounded in his Christology. In the person

of Christ neither human nature nor creaturely will are overwhelmed by the divine but rather

integrally maintained and allowed a fundamental role in his personal activity. Extended across

the cosmos by virtue of the λόγοι doctrine, this same theandric reciprocity operative in the

incarnate Logos becomes an undergirding principle of the whole created order and the

soteriological cornerstone on which God’s grand economy of salvation is established. The

church’s liturgy, therefore, as iconic rehearsal of this gracious ordering of history too abides by

                                                                                                               
Myst 23; PG 91, 697 C. 19

Maximus devotes much of chapter five, the longest section of the treatise, to a complex and meticulous
20

exposition of how precisely a person may rightly order themselves, by synthesizing the tripartite faculties of the soul
together with the body, in order to properly see and embody the Logos. Cf. Myst 5; 672D-684A.
   Ross 8

this divinely willed law of thandric reciprocity. Precisely because of this cooperative principle,

however, there is also, according to Maximus, an accompanying transfigurative quality of proper

liturgical contemplation for the communicant. In a markedly important passage Maximus notes

this mutual self-transcendent movement,

For being all in all, the God who transcends all in infinte measure will be seen
(ὁραθήσεται) by those who are pure in understanding (τὴν διάνοιαν) when the
mind in contemplative recollection of the principles of beings (ὁ νοῦς τοὺς τῶν
ὄντων θεωρητικῶς ἀναλεγόμενος λόγους) will end up with God as cause (ἀιτίαν),
principle (ἀρχὴν), and end (τέλος) of all, the creation and beginning of all things
and eternal ground of the circuit of things. It is in this way (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν
τρόπον) that the holy Church of God will be shown to be working for us the same
effects as God, in the same way as the image reflects its archetype (τὰ αὐτὰ τῷ θεῷ
περὶ ἡμᾶς ὡς ἀρχετῦπῳ εἰκὼν ἐνεργοῦσα δειχθήσεται).21

Here, Maximus again reprises the familiar contemplation of the λόγοι motif and connects it with

the church’s status as icon. Yet, in a remarkable turn, Maximus suggests the church, with its

liturgical celebration implied, accomplishes an effect on its beholders precisely because by this

iconic form, manifesting the affective power of its archetype (ἀρχετῦπος), rejoining the look of its

beholder with a reciprocal gaze.

To consider this affective aspect of the liturgical image in Maximus’s understanding, we

might borrow Jean-Luc Marion’s fecund notion of the icon as “saturated phenomenon.”22 The

icon is, for Marion, “defined by an origin without original: an origin itself infinite, which pours

itself out or gives itself through [its] infinite depth.”23 In contrast to this infinite depth of the icon,

there stands the idol. The beholder only ever finds herself reflected by the idol, according to the

                                                                                                               
Myst. 1; PG 91, 665BC. 21

Marion develops his notion of the icon in several places. Cf. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans.
22

Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A. Smith
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), and especially, God Without Being, 2nd ed., trans. Thomas A. Carlson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7-52, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and
Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 54-81, 104-127. For a helpful introduction to
Marion’s use of the term more broadly see, Robyn Horner, Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction (Hampshire,
England: Ashgate, 2005), 61-65.
23 Marion, God Without Being, 20.
   Ross 9

fixed intentions with which she beholds it, and she thereby conscripts the feigned deity

represented by the idol solely to the visible plane. 24 It is the beholder alone who constitutes the

idol by a misguided intentionality; there is simply no room in the idol for the invisible to manifest

itself. We have from the beginning noticed Maximus’s acute attention in the Mystagogia to similar

questions of aesthetic hermeneutics. He too was warily cognizant of the conscripting gaze of

those who see according to “the mere surface of sensible things (ἐπιφάνειαν τῶν αἰσθητῶν).”25

Recall, for Maximus, true contemplative-seeing, rightly ordered θεωρία, discovers the

intellgible λόγοι evinced in and through the liturgical icon. Indeed, we may properly characterize

this realization of the invisible, for Maximus, as a kind of discovery because, as he suggests in the

crucial passage quoted above from Mystagogia 23, the ecclesial icon emits a certain ἐνεργεία of its

own, rejoining the beholder with an already-present affective divine gaze. So too for Marion: “If

a man, by his gaze, renders the idol possible, in reverent contemplation of the icon, on the

contrary, the gaze of the invisible, in person, aims at man.”26 Marion’s characterization retains an

integral element of intentionality, such that “reverent contemplation” is requisite, yet he more

acutely draws out the remarkable way in which the true icon, no longer conscripted only to the

realm of the visible, envisages its beholder from its infinite depth. These “beholding images,” for

Marion moreover, overwhelm the beholder, such that,

What I see of them, if I see anything on them that is, does not result from the
constitution I would assign to them in the visible, but from the effect they produce on me.
And, in fact this happens in reverse so that my look is submerged, in a counter-
intentional manner. Then I am no longer the transcendental I but rather the
witness, constituted by what happens to him or her.27

                                                                                                               
24 Marion, God Without Being, 11-12.
25 Myst 23; PG 91, 697 C.
26 Marion, God Without Being, 19. Emphasis mine.
27 Marion, In Excess, 113. Emphasis mine.
   Ross 10

So saturated with an excess of prior intuition is the icon, according to Marion, that it subverts

and overrides any intentionality with which its beholder might seek to apprehend it. We find a

strikingly similar notion in Mystagogia 24 when Maximus exhorts his readers to frequent the liturgy,

…because of the grace of the Holy Spirit which is always invisibly present, but in
a special way (ἰδιοτρόπως...μάλιστα) at the time of the holy synaxis. This grace
transforms and changes (μεταποιοῦσάν τε καὶ μετασκεθάζουσαν) each person who
is found there and in fact remolds (μεταπλάττουσαν) him in proportion to what is
more divine in him and leads him to what is revealed (τὸ δηλούμενον) through the
mysteries which are celebrated, even if he does not himself feel this (κἂν αὐτὸς μὴ
αἰσθάνται) because he is still among those who are children in Christ, unable to
see (ὁρᾷν ἀδυνατεἰ) either into the depths of the reality or the grace operating in it,
which is revealed (δηλουμένην) through each of the divine symbols of salvation
being accomplished.28

The church’s iconic liturgy, the holy synaxis, is for Maximus a truly “saturating gift,” shaping

and molding its participant beholders quite apart from their own intentions and sense

(αἰσθάνται). That God’s revelatory presence through the Holy Spirit “gives itself” to be received

by the liturgical communicant yet does not necessarily “show itself”29 to be perceived is because,

for Maximus, divine revelation “defies any and all attempts to compress it linguistically,”

“conceptually,” and as we have seen, visually.30 In his own words, the Confessor writes, “The

wonderful grandeur of God’s infinity is without quantity or parts, and completely without

dimension, and offers no grip to take hold of it and to know what it is in its essence.”31 There remains, for

the Confessor, always an excess of the unseen Logos that escapes constitution even by the

mysteries themselves. And yet it is precisely this plenary abundance of divine saturation in the

liturgical icon that demands its regular and repeated contemplation. Thus, Maximus can exhort

his readers once more,

                                                                                                               
Myst. 24; PG 91, 704A. 28

Marion, In Excess, 30. 29

30 Paul M. Blowers, “The Interpretive Dance: Concealment, Disclosure, and Deferral of Meaning in

Maximus the Confessor’s Hermeneutical Theology” in Knowing the Purpose of Creation Through the Resurrection: Proceedings
of the Symposium on St. Maximus the Confessor (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press Publishing House, 2013), 1.
31 Myst. 5; PG 91, 677A. Emphasis mine.
   Ross 11

Let us, then, not stray from the holy Church of God which comprehends in the
sacred order of the divine symbols which are celebrated such great mysteries of
our salvation. Through them, in making each of us who conducts himself worthily
as best he can in Christ, it brings to light (φανέρωσιν ἄγει) the grace of adoption
(χάρισμα τῆς υἱσθεσίας) which was given (τὸ δοθὲν) through holy baptism in the
Holy Spirit and which makes us perfect in Christ.32

It is, according to Maximus, only through ritual contemplation of the holy mysteries that the

initial grace given in baptism is fully realized.33 Here, again, Maximus’s Chalcedonian

convictions lead him to insist upon a theandric reciprocity that renders the baptizand both active

and passive, receiving the grace of new birth yet continually constituting the implications of this gift

through contemplation and praxis. The baptized one is, to borrow another insight from Marion,

l’adonné—the gifted one, who is indeed “characterized by reception” yet “does not receive itself

once and for all (at birth) but does not cease to receive itself anew in the event of each given.”

Liturgy, as iconic performance of God’s gracious economy of salvation and as an utterly

saturated phenomenon of God’s revelation, demands, for Maximus a truly “infinite

hermeneutic.”34

                                                                                                               
Myst. 24; PG 91, 712A. 32

On the general place of baptism in Maximus’s thought see, Blowers, introduction to On the Cosmic Mystery
33

of Jesus Christ, 38-43. Cf. Also Maximus’s Ad Thallasium 6 and Ambiguum 42.
34 Marion, In Excess, 127.