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“Christ plays in ten thousand places”

The relationship of logoi and Logos in Plotinus,


Maximus and Beyond
Abstract

A brief exploration of the relationship between the ‘ideas’ or principles of all existing things

as they are held in the divine intellect, and the Logos itself. I shall be pointing out that

Balthasar’s assumption that pagan Neo-Platonism is pantheistic is misleading, and that

Plotinus’s system is closer to Maximus than has been recognized by recent commentators.

Issues about ‘Creation’, ‘the Fall’ and ‘the Incarnation’ make some difficulties for this

proposal, which I acknowledge and attempt to deconstruct.

A Preliminary Rant

My own acquaintance with Maximus is tangential at best. Berthold’s selection of his writings 1

has sat on my shelves for many years, and I have had occasion to quote from them, but

without investigating Maximus’s own philosophy at any length. I have read most of Lars

Thunberg’s study2, and Balthasar’s3, and Andrew Louth’s introduction to selected texts of

Maximus4. I have learnt a lot from Tollefsen’s study of Maximus’s Christocentric

Cosmology5, and from Toronen6, but I have not read Polycarp Sherwood’s examination of the

Ambigua7, nor Cooper’s account of The Body in St.Maximus the Confessor8. Such articles that

I have located through JSTOR have not, so far, proved profitable 9. So I came to the

colloquium from which this volume issues very poorly prepared. My only excuse was that I

1
Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, tr. George C.Berthold SPCK: London 1985
2
Lars Thunberg Microcosm and Mediator: the theological anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, tr.
Lars Thunberg & A.M.Allchin (C.W.K.Gleerup: Lund 1965).
3
Hans Urs von Balthasar Cosmic Liturgy: the Universe according to Maximus the Confessor, tr. Brian
E.Daley S.J. (Ignatius Press: San Francisco 2003; 1st published 1988 3rd ed).
4
Andrew Louth Maximus the Confessor (Routledge: London 1996).
5
T.T.Tollefsen The Christocentric Cosmology of St.Maximus the Confessor (Oxford University Press:
New York 2008).
6
Melchisedec Törönen Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Clarendon
Press: Oxford 2007)
7
Polycarp Sherwood The Early Ambigua (Herder: Rome 1955).
8
Adam G.Cooper The Body in St.Maximus the Confessor (Oxford University Press: New York 2005).
9
Except perhaps Christopher C.Knight ‘Divine Action: a Neo-Byzantine Model’ in International
Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58.2005, pp.181–199.
have found Maximus and his thought at least intriguing, and that I could offer some few

comments especially on Balthasar’s approach to the pagan literature, and seek to explain that

Maximus is not after all that far from Plotinus. This is not to say that Maximus did not have

his own theological and political concerns, founded in his century and in his church. Even if,

as I believe, the philosophical vocabulary and conceptual framework that he employed was

plainly, almost uncontroversially, Neo-Platonic, the questions that he sought to answer were

not Plotinus’s – or not directly so. The causes to which he gave his life, and for which he paid,

were first of all that the incarnate Word had two wills as well as two natures, and second that

theological – and by extension academic – intelligence should be unconstrained by political or

imperial dictat. I shall not aim to consider either of these causes – and so, in a sense, I shall be

quite unfair to Maximus, who deserves far better of the philosophical as well as the

theological community!

So to begin from Balthasar: here too I have to admit considerable ignorance. I have rarely

managed, till now, to read more than a few paragraphs of this well-respected theologian, and

even in this case I am wholly ignorant of what criticisms theologians or historians have

mounted against his study – except to acknowledge Andrew Louth’s observation that the first

edition of Balthasar’s study identified ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’ with ‘the East’, and that later

editions pushed the division (between East and West) still further east. Once again, my only

contribution must be from the pagan side – and within limits for the pagan side!

According to Balthasar, ‘the pantheistic dress of Neo-Platonism’ does not quite obscure the

Christian eye of Erigena (p.29), the voice of Maximus in the West. ‘The tension between East

and West is an inseparable dimension of the Confessor’s thought’ (p44), and Balthasar goes

on to characterize that tension as follows: the ‘Eastern’ side ‘is a way of renouncing the world

– for this transitory, spatio-temporal, destiny-determined world is surely not God! It is a way

of stripping off form, in order to find the infinite Absolute in a state of formlessness. The

world, compared with God, is unreality. … In contrast to such thinking stand the powerful

forces of the Bible, Greece, and Rome. In the Old and New Testaments, God and the creature
stand in an irreducible relationship of confrontation. … Greece reflects on this mystery of

God and the world in Stoic and Aristotelian terms, taking seriously the nature of the

individual being, in its lasting structure of meaning, and finding there a revelation of the

divine Reason’ (p.45-6).

And a few lines later: ‘there is the polarity of Eastern and Western styles of thought. Aristotle

has no Eastern counterpart; he represents an irreversible step forward in human culture, from

mythos (narrative thought) to logos (analytical thought). … Next is the polarity between the

impersonal religious thought of the East and the personal categories of biblical revelation.

Here the contrast is between a religion of nature and a religion of self-communication and

grace’. Origen, Evagrius and the ‘Eastern Church’ all show signs, for Balthasar, of an

‘Eastern’ predisposition, whereby ‘the full reality of the creature is abandoned for the sake of

its union with what is above nature’ (p.48). Maximus, he argues, found a way to

accommodate both the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ ways. ‘Evagrius comes off best of all. … One

needed only to add to his seemingly Gnostic “passionlessness” (apatheia) the charity (agape)

of the Sermon on the Mount and to remove the pantheistic flavour from his conception of

“knowledge of the Trinity” by combining it with the Cappadocian and Areopagite ideas of

God’ (p.49). In this effort Pseudo-Dionysius ‘was of inestimable value’, because he ‘pointed

to the indissoluble autonomy of the finite world. … Nothing could be more Western, nothing

points more clearly back, beyond Proclus and Plotinus, to decisively Greek, anti-Asiatic

sources. Pseudo-Dionysius remains, with Chalcedon and Augustine, the foundation stone of

the Western spirit, which can only breathe in an atmosphere of space and freedom’ (p.49).

It may already be evident that this is all very peculiar, and unfortunately redolent of one of the

oldest of Western myths: the dichotomy between West and East! Words like ‘pantheistic’,

apathy, ‘Gnostic’, ‘nature’, ‘freedom’, ‘analytical thought’ and ‘myth’, all used without

examination or clear definition, signal a failure of analysis in favour of resort to narrative! It

is simply not true that Asia is indifferent to analysis, or that there has never been an Indian or

Chinese Aristotle (that is, a polymath with an analytical but also synthetic intelligence). It is
simply not true – it is actually quite offensive to suggest - that Asiatics would all surrender

their individuality to a formless eternal, or that Westerners (Europeans) can only breathe in

freedom! In claiming that the ‘Eastern, Asiatic ideal’ undervalues natural goals by absorbing

them into the ultimate supernatural one (p.152), Balthasar demonstrates an odd ignorance

both of ‘Asiatic’ thought, and of the pagan Neo-Platonism that he supposes to be infected by

it: odd also in that he goes on to say, after Maximus, that ‘in the Logos, all the individual

ideas and goals of creatures meet; therefore all of them, if they seek their own reality, must

love him, and must encounter each other in his love. That is why Christ is the original idea,

the underlying figure of God’s plan for the world, why all the individual lines originate

themselves concentrically around him.’ I shall return to that last image, which is itself

essentially Plotinian.

What is even odder is that the Neo-Platonic tradition, in Proclus or Plotinus, is conceived to

be Eastern, un-Greek, ‘pantheistic’ and so on, while the very same tradition, in Pseudo-

Dionysius, is quintessentially Western – though that text, very much more than either of the

others, is openly and confessedly mythological! Balthasar grants Pseudo-Dionysius ‘a certain

preeminence in Maximus’ intellectual ancestry’ (p.58), and goes on to provide a lyrical

account of the Dionysian vision which is entirely Plotinian: if this sense of the world – ‘of

existence as liturgical event, as adoration, as celebratory service, as hidden but holy dance’ –

is ‘the golden background of Maximus’ mental picture of creation’ (p.60), how exactly is this

supposed to differ from Plotinus’ vision? And what is it that Maximus abandons in the

Dionysian picture that ‘comes explicitly from Proclus and Plotinus, what gives him his Neo-

Platonic coloring’? The examples that Balthasar provides don’t really work, resting as they do

on misunderstandings of Plotinus (who expressly denounces those who think that this

material world is intrinsically defective, or a punishment for sin: as Balthasar himself

acknowledges on p.83). And if Maximus’ Christology ‘corrects Neo-Platonic mysticism’ by

‘bridging the endless chasm between God and the creature without a confusion of natures’

(p.73), this is only because Balthasar misjudges Neo-Platonists! Even he occasionally and
rather grudgingly observes that, for example, ‘even in Plotinus’ (p.65) there are traces of

‘existential and personal thinking’ of a kind that he had previously confined to Christians,

distinguishing hypostasis and nature. Some better acquaintance with Plotinus might multiply

such concessions.

In objecting to Balthasar’s characterization of the Neo-Platonic sources (and especially of

Plotinus) I don’t mean to suggest that Maximus, or Christianity in general, contributed

nothing novel to the tradition. It would be strange if they had not done so – just as Porphyry,

Iamblichus, Damascius, Proclus and other pagan philosophers also made individual

contributions, and often contradicted their predecessors. In arguing – very plausibly - that

even Aristotle was a Platonist Lloyd Gerson did not suggest that he merely recited his

master’s words by rote and never made a contribution, even a decisive change of direction, of

his own10. He would not have been a genuine Platonist if he had not done so! So with

Maximus: in arguing – not very controversially, perhaps - that he was a Neo-Platonist, and

that Plotinus especially would have found much to approve in him, I don’t deny that there

may be differences. The problem is to locate them. I have similar qualms even about

Tollefsen’s much better informed account: in saying that Maximus manages a Christian

alternative to Neo-Platonist metaphysics, he leaves me very uncertain what exactly the

alternative consists in. Of course, Christ features in Maximus in a way that he does not in

Plotinus, but is it therefore certain that the Logos features in any very different way? Maybe

so.

Why Plotinus was not a Pantheist

The word that Balthasar most often conjoins with ‘Neo-Platonist’ is ‘pantheist’, and the

charge against both pagan and Christian heretics is that they failed to understand the gulf that

separates creature and creator: both the relative autonomy of creatures, and their inescapable

subordination11. The idea that the worlds exist as successive ‘emanations’ from the One,
10
Lloyd Gerson Aristotle and Other Platonists (Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY 2004).
11
The same charge is made by Elizabeth Theokritoff in ‘Creator and Creation’: Cambridge Companion
to Orthodox Christian Theology, edds., Mary B.Cunningham & Elizabeth Theokritoff (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge 2008), pp.63-77.
Balthasar supposes, amounts to a denial of that dichotomy. At the same time the thought is

attributed to Origen and to his pagan teachers that the material creation is a consequence of a

primordial Fall into multiplicity, a Fall perennially repeated in an endless cycle of exile and

return. Multiplicity, individuality, creatureliness is a mistake, or even a mistaken view of what

is really and eternally at One. God is the only reality, whether this is taken to mean that

creatures are hardly more than figments or that they are inextricably part of the divine.

Whether it is helpful to call this doctrine ‘pantheism’ may be doubted 12, but I shall not deny

that some philosophers have thought it was correct. The wise man, so the Stoics tell us, has

the mind of God, and understands whatever happens as due to the unconquerable will of God.

During the conflagration there is not even the appearance of any other agency, but even in that

other phase of the cycle – the one that we now occupy – there is no independent cause distinct

from the single power that animates all things. ‘God is the world itself and the universal

pervasiveness of its mind’.13 God-and-Nature eternally unfolds the pattern that we dimly see

(and it is of course a necessary element of that pattern that our sight is dim). ‘God’ or ‘Zeus’ is

the name of the single power, but it may be convenient here-now to distinguish different

moments and locations of that power, under many different divine names.

But this is expressly and openly something that Plotinus denies. Precisely because the One is

no particular thing, not even the singular totality of all particular things, it must follow that

that totality is not the One.

It is certainly none of the things of which it is origin; it is of such a kind, though

nothing can be predicated of it, not being, not substance, not life, as to be above all of

these things. But if you grasp it by taking away being from it, you will be filled with

wonder. And throwing yourself upon it and coming to rest within it, understand it more

12
I examined the concept some years ago, in ‘Pantheism’: David E.Cooper & Joy A.Palmer, edds.,
Spirit of the Environment (Routledge: London 1998), pp.42-56, and concluded that it was, at least,
ambiguous.
13
Cicero On the nature of the gods 1.39: A.A.Long & D.Sedley The Hellenistic Philosophers
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1987), 54B: vol.1, p.323.
and more intimately, knowing it by intuition and seeing its greatness by the things

which exist after it and through it.14

Again, if there were only one agent or agency in the world, we would not exist at all (but we

do). It is true that we have fallen into this world, but we were individuals even before the Fall,

and our presence here is not simply a punishment. ‘When the soul is without body it is in

absolute control of itself and is free, and outside the causation of the physical universe; but

when it is brought into body it is no longer in all ways in control, as it forms part of an order

with other things’.15 On the one hand, we have fallen, out of a desire to have things our own

individual way, and not be ‘together’; on the other, by involving ourselves in this world we

are required to cooperate with the will of others, to endure what they decree. Creation and

Fall, so to speak, are conceptually distinct, even though we fell even as we began to be 16. The

material world is not an error, nor a mere seeming – though there is a sense in which the

phenomenal qualities of that world are, as it were, just painted on. Like most other ancient

philosophers, of whatever school, Plotinus urges us to disregard the trials and fancies of this

mortal life, but he also insists that our lives are up to us:

It would not be right for a god to fight in person for the unwarlike; the law says that

those who fight bravely, not those who pray, are to come safe out of the wars; for in just

the same way it is not those who pray but those who look after their land who are to get

in a harvest, and those who do not look after their health are not to be healthy; and we

are not to be vexed if the bad get larger harvests or their farming generally goes better.

Then again, it is ridiculous for people to do everything else in life according to their

own ideas, even if they are not doing it in the way which the gods like, and then be

merely saved by the gods, without even doing the things which the gods command

them to save themselves.17

14
Ennead III.8 [30].10, 28-35 (Plotinus: Enneads, tr. A.H.Armstrong (Loeb Classical Library:
Heinemann 1966-88) vol.3, p.397). All Plotinian quotations are taken from Armstrong’s translation.
15
Ennead III.1 [3]. 8, 9-12.
16
Maximus Questions to Thalassius 61, cited by Peter Bouteneff ‘Christ and Salvation’: Cunningham
& Theokritoff op.cit., pp.93-106: p.94.
17
Ennead III.2 [47]., 36-46 (Armstrong vol.3, pp.71-3).
As Armstrong remarks ‘an intelligent Christian would have no difficulty agreeing with this’,

though maybe there is a lot more to be said for grace – even by Plotinus - than Armstrong

reckons18.

Again: Plotinus reserves his chief scorn for those who think themselves the equal of the

heavens and despise the world laid out for us by our sister-soul 19. There are logoi by which

the world is governed, but this is not enough to make the whole world-system necessary.

They are contained in the one Logos, which is the Intellect, but they are not therefore identical

with that whole Intellect. Nor is the Intellect – and here there is indeed a disagreement with

orthodox, Chalcedonian Christianity – identical with the One. Everything that exists at all

does so in virtue of the One, but nothing that exists identically is that One. Or is that a

difference? After all, Chalcedonian Christianity does distinguish One and Logos: each is just

as much God as the other – and the same, in practice, is true for Plotinus: ‘God’ as easily

refers to the Intellect as to the One, or even to Soul Herself (which is not, remember, quite the

same as the World Soul). The relationship is neither identity nor non-identity! I don’t mean to

insist, by the way, that this Plotinian triad is just the same as the Trinity (though it is closer

than one might first suppose): there is actually a better analogue of the Trinity in Plotinus’s

work. The One itself is Love, and therefore a Trinity in Unity: it is ‘lovable and love and love

of himself (erasmion kai eros ho autos kai autou eros)’20. Nor do I mean to deny that Plotinus

thought that everything depended on the One, that it is not far from any one of us, and even

that we are ourselves, one day, ‘to be gods’: but of course Maximus and other Christians think

the same. In that sense, all are ‘pantheists’. And maybe there is even something to be said

about the relationship of Soul Herself and the World Soul that may cast some light on

Christian notions of the Incarnation: I shall return to that suggestion.

18
The god will come when he is called for – but we must prepare the way: see Enneads V.8 [31].9. See
also John Dillon ‘Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination’ (J.P.Mackey ed Religious Imagination,
Edinburgh University Press 1986, pp.55-64), reprinted in John Dillon The Golden Chain (Variorum
Press: Aldershot 1990), $24: pp.58f
19
Ennead II.9 [33].5
20
Enneads VI.8 [39].15.
According to Balthasar (p.116-8), Maximus distinguished the divine ideas, ‘the basic outlines,

in God, of his plans for the world, the preliminary sketch of the creature within the Spirit of

God’, from the ‘created “universals”’ that are the immanent principles of created being. ‘The

concentration of the ideas of the world in the Creator does not mean the dissolution of the

world into God’ (p.119). The divine essences are not co-eternal with God (p.152). Nor does

He know them as we – or angels – might: they are no more than His intentions for the world.

‘God knows the very things which are, as His own wills, because He has created all by will’ 21.

As Kallistos Ware has put it, each thing’s logos is ‘God’s intention for that thing, its inner

essence, that which makes it distinctively itself and at the same time draws it toward the

divine realm.’22 And this too is not so far away from Plotinus: as Lloyd Gerson has pointed

out23, the mere fact that Plotinus uses metaphors of sunlight or overflowing fountains – as

Christian theologians have also done – does not imply that he supposed that the One had no

choice in the matter. As Tollefsen correctly observes, ‘Plotinus’s philosophical teaching is

more like a doctrine of creation than a doctrine of emanation.’ 24 Of course it is also true that

the One doesn’t need, as it were, to make up its mind or choose between a succession of

tempting options, any more, on Maximus’s account, than Christ’s human will is a gnomic

will, one dependent on unreliable judgment and careful deliberation 25! In fact, the One can’t

be supposed to create the Intellect: for creation to be possible, even a hypothesized creation of

the ‘intelligible’, the ideas of them must already be. 26

Plotinus is especially outraged or amused by the ‘Gnostic’ idea that this world here was

created by a fallen god: if he was fallen how had he access to the divine template he was set

to imitate? If he had access to it, how was he fallen? This world here is laid out in the first

21
Thunberg op.cit., p.68, after Maximus, Ambiguorum Liber 7; PG 91, 1085b.
22
Kallistos Ware ‘God Immanent yet Transcendent: The Divine Energies according to St.Gregory
Palamas’ in Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (eds.), In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our
Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2004) p.160, cited by Knight op.cit., p.183.
23
Lloyd P. Gerson ‘Plotinus's Metaphysics: Emanation or Creation?’ The Review of Metaphysics 46,
1993.
24
Tollefsen op.cit., p.62.
25
See Andrew Louth xxx
26
see Ennead V.9 [5].7
instance – though we are not to understand that this is a chronological or historical account –

by the world-soul’s imaging of the divine intellect. What exists in the divine intellect as an

unbroken and simultaneous whole exists in the soul in the mode we experience as time and

space: other, lesser souls take their place here-now and are mostly so entranced as to forget

their real home, and to imagine that they are really and truly divorced from each other and the

Intellect. Our return depends on our learning to turn round again and look towards the One,

by which and in which all things exist, and which is reflected in a fragmentary, successive

way in this world-here. We do not thereby surrender our real self, but find it, when, as it were,

a god tugs us by the hair and turns us round 27– a notion, by the way, that subverts the

common distinction whereby pagan philosophers are supposed to imagine that we make our

own way back to the divine while Christians expect divine assistance (though it is true that

pagans expected a little effort on our part, and doubted that a death-bed repentance would be

acceptable or efficacious).

Making My Way to Maximus

But what are we to make of this? The principles by which we act and suffer and are here-now

are not, as they are for the Stoics, the veritable laws of God. Nous is King, and we can be

kings when we live in accord with it28 – but though there is something there in Nous by which

we live, which is in some sense our eternal being, we are still only copies of that form, and

copies ‘with wills of their own’. So we can distinguish the embedded principles, the manifest

forms of ourselves and this world here, from the eternal order which we honour by imitating.

Even in eternity, so to speak, there is a difference between the ideal form that is an aspect of

the divine Intellect and the copy. In eternity we are or shall be joined in the ‘dance of

immortal love’, coordinated by our devotion to our leader in that dance 29.

27
Ennead VI.5 [23].7, 9f. The reference is to an episode in Homer’s Iliad (I.197f), in which Athena (the
goddess of good sense) recalls Achilles from a murderous rage. And note also Porphyry’s testimony:
‘it seems that the gods often set [Plotinus] straight when he was going on a crooked course “sending
down a solid shaft of light”, which means that he wrote what he wrote under their inspection and
supervision’ (Porphyry Life of Plotinus 23 tr. Armstrong).
28
Ennead V.3 [49].3, 46ff
29
Ennead VI.9 [9].8.34-45
It is not an explicitly Plotinian thought, but it is still one, as far as I can tell, consistent with

his exposition, that there are some aspects even of our life in eternity that don’t have to be as

they are. They may be variations on an eternal, necessary theme, but indeed they aren’t

precisely co-eternal or consubstantial with the Intellect. On the other hand, there are some

aspects of that Intellect which could hardly be other than they are. In other words, there are

some things that we can say are made, and others that are begotten, simply in the sense that

the latter alone reveal what the One must be, and the former only what can be made in

imitation of that order. ‘When God, the Sun of righteousness, appears to the mind, then all the

true logoi of intelligible and sensible things will also appear together with him’, 30 but those

intelligible and sensible things have their own lesser being.

Can there be anything, any real entity, that manages to be both the template and a contingent

copy? Can the divine Intellect, in other words, ever be incarnate? Theologians routinely insist

that no such possibility can emerge in pagan Platonism, and it is indeed true that when Stoics,

for example, speak of the wise as having the mind of God, and as being the equals of Zeus

himself, they did not mean to say that any particular sage was God. The bodily being is one

thing and the intellect another. What one such bodily being can be, so can another, without

their thereby being identically, numerically one. Christian theologians would have found that

claim quite easy to explain, as many moderns also find it easier to think: the man Jesus was

simply, at best, especially in tune with the divine Intellect. That doesn’t make him God.

Do crownings, clothings

Make that Creator which was creature?

Multiply gifts upon his head,

And what, when all’s done, shall be said

But – the more gifted he, I ween!

That one’s made Christ, this other’s Pilate,

30
Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings, tr. George C.Berthold (SPCK: London 1985), p.84 after PG
91, 1156AB.
And This might be all That has been.31

There are possible worlds, that is, where it is Pilate who had the mind of God, and Jesus was

an atheistical jobbing carpenter. The orthodox answer, and of course it was Maximus’s

answer, is that there is no such possibility: it is the single entity called Jesus who is

simultaneously man and God, one entity with two wills and natures. What he is as divine

Intellect is necessary and eternal. What he is as human is contingent and historical. But there

is only one entity involved, and – like God – he exists in all possible worlds. Does it follow

that he is incarnate in all possible worlds (not necessarily with the same human features), or is

his incarnation itself only an occasional possibility? Maximus seems to have answered that

‘ultimate unification of the world in itself and with God is the ultimate motivating cause for

the Incarnation and as such the first idea of the Creator, existing in advance of all creation’

(Balthasar, p.272). That is, the Incarnation is not simply a response to human sin, but the

original point and centre of the created universe.

This is bound to sound un-Plotinian – but perhaps it is less un-Plotinian than it sounds, even

though Plotinus himself does not endorse it. The particular way that I have expressed the

issue may be significant. In speaking of ‘possible worlds’ have I suggested that all such

worlds are real, that the infinite possibilities of creation are all realized somewhere (very

much in the style of modern physics, with its talk of the multiverse)? Tollefsen has suggested

that it is here that we can see a real distinction between pagan and Christian metaphysics: for

the pagan Neo-Platonist all the ideas contained in the divine Intellect are mirrored in

phenomenal reality (though not necessarily all at the same time, nor in the same region). For

the Christian only some are realized here, the ones somehow selected to be companions and

associates of the Incarnate Logos32. Maybe so, though it does not seem that there are explicit

statements of either possibility in the available texts 33. My question is: would Plotinus have

definitely rejected the thought attributed to Maximus? And my answer is that he would not.

31
Robert Browning ‘Christmas Eve’ $16 (1850), in Collected Poems (OUP: London 1912) p.51.
32
Tollefsen op.cit., pp.88-91
33
Plotinus Ennead V.9 [5].13 raises the question whether only the forms of things in the sense-world
also exist There, in eternity, but does not, as far as I can see, answer his own question.
To put the point another way: there is no reason for Plotinus to suppose that all the souls who

dance around the One (so to speak) have descended into phenomena to assist in the grand

creative act that mirrors the divine. Nor does he have to suppose that all have fallen far. The

phenomenal world is only a partial mirror, a partial selection from the infinite, and there is no

need to suppose that every Idea is imitated here. Not all souls, even if they enter here, come

further ‘down’ than the stars. This is not to say that those Ideas that are not imitated here have

been held back, as not deserving of phenomenal reality! So maybe there is an interesting

change between the pagan and the Christian thought. This world here is a selection – but for

that very reason, so the pagan may suppose, it is an incomplete, an imperfect copy; those

Ideas, those souls, that have not entered here are immeasurably our superiors. But if the

Christians are correct, it is rather the other way round: it is we who have somehow dared to

enter who are to be the true companions of the Logos. It is the Incarnate Logos – incarnate by

Maximus’s account in the ‘natural order’, in Scripture and finally as the man Jesus – which is

to be the focus of all endeavour, not simply a God with whom we are to be acquainted just by

intellect. Once again, I am not altogether persuaded that even this thought is completely non-

Plotinian, but it may be a likelier candidate than most. Note that I am not suggesting that

Maximus differed from pagan Neo-Platonists in holding, in Tollefsen’s summary, that ‘Christ

as the Logos is not a universal at all, but is the personal divine center of all creation’ 34,

because I don’t think that the Neo-Platonic Logos is a universal either (and neither are the

logoi it contains – as even Balthasar realized!). Paradeigms aren’t universals. My own – very

tentative – suggestion is rather that for Maximus the divine centre is made manifest within the

phenomenal world, that this is why there is a phenomenal world at all, and that what is not

thus manifest (in the natural order, in Scripture and in the Incarnate Christ) is of less

significance for us than – maybe – Plotinus would have thought. On the one hand, Plotinus

would have been wrong to suppose (as he supposes of other sects in his treatise Against the

Gnostics: Ennead II. 9 [33]) that Christians despised this world here: on the contrary, it is in

this world here that the centre of creation is to be known. On the other hand, he would have

34
Tollefsen op.cit., p.92.
been right to think that Christians reckoned animal humanity of more importance than the

stars above us: those stars, as it were, are the signs and habitation of souls too delicate to risk

contamination. The angels’ fall, so tradition tells us, began in Satan’s outrage that he could be

expected to bow down before an animal35!

Christ’s Play

And so to my title, drawn from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem 36:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father, through the features of men’s faces.

Andrew Louth quotes the poem too, citing it in connection with Maximus’s examination of a

remark of Gregory Nazienzen: ‘The high Word plays in every kind of form, mixing, as He
35
‘We created you and then formed you and then We said to the Angels, "Prostrate before Adam" and
they prostrated except for Iblis. He was not among those who prostrated. God said, "What prevented
you from prostrating when I commanded you?" He (Iblis) replied, "I am better than him. You created
me from fire and You created him from clay". God said, "Descend from heaven. It is not for you to be
arrogant in it. So get out! You are one of the abased." (Koran Surah 7 (al-A`raf), 11–13). See also Life
of Adam and Eve aka Apocalypse of Moses, chs.13-14.
36
Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems, ed. W.H.Gardner & N.H.Mackenzie (Oxford University Press:
London 1970), p.90. Gardner (ibid. p.281, quoting W.H.Gardner Gerard Manley Hopkins: a study of
poetic idiosyncracy in relation to poetic tradition (19944-9), vol.1, p.27 ) reports that ‘the whole sonnet
is a poetic statement of the Scotist concept that individual substances, according to the metaphysical
richness of their being, make up one vast hierarchy with God as their summit’.
wills, with His world here and there’ 37. I am sure he can comment better than I on quite what

is going on, in Gregory, Maximus and Hopkins. My own use of the poem is only as a prompt,

in trying to clarify the relationship of Logos, logoi and the Incarnate God.

The One, Plotinus tells us, is ‘the productive power of all things’ 38, dunamis panton. That is to

say both that everything depends on it, and that the power with which anything exists and

spreads itself is at least an image of the One, whose nature it is ‘always to be generous’ 39.The

One is the power by which anything exists at all, and is to be seen, if at all, in the dynamic

existence of whatever it is that does exist. I emphasise, even if only punningly, the dynamism

of this view of things: being is always a sort of doing, though the kind of doing that we

ourselves mostly manage falls short of the continuing grace that is the One. God is love: that

is, a continual giving. Pedantically, that ongoing life can be described as Soul or as Being

rather than the One incomprehensible that is the origin of Soul and Being, but in practice

there is no distinction. So far, so Plotinian.

That One, therefore, since it has no otherness is always present, and we are present to it

when we have no otherness; and the One does not desire us, so as to be around us, but

we desire it, so that we are around it. And we are always around it but do not always

look to it; it is like a choral dance: in the order of its singing the choir keeps round its

conductor but may sometimes turn away, so that he is out of their sight, but when it

turns back to him it sings beautifully and is truly with him; so we too are always around

him - and if we were not, we should be totally dissolved and no longer exist - but not

always turned to him; but when we do look to him, then we are at our goal and at rest

and do not sing out of tune as we truly dance our god-inspired dance around him. 40

What do we change by seeing or saying that it is Christ who plays in everything? To be is

always to be, or to be beginning to be, something, in virtue of some single call to being. And

37
Louth op.cit., pp.163f, in connection with Difficulties 71 (PG 37.624)
38
Ennead III.8 [30].10; see Eric D.Perl ‘The Power of All Things’ in American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 71.1997, 301-13.
39
Ennead V.4 [7].1, 34-6
40
Ennead VI.9 [9].8, 34-45.
being something is always, for us, to be a member of the whole: failing in that, we fail in

being at all. But where are we to look? In the pagan cosmos we can be guided only by

memories and imagination, looking towards the ordered beauty of the stars, or mathematics,

or such images of virtues as we can internalize. But perhaps there is a problem: on the one

hand, there is nowhere short of the whole world to serve as a guiding image for each and all

of us, but on the other, that whole world, though we speak of it as if it were wholly unified, a

single beautiful cosmos, does not in fact exist save in the fragmented, barely sociable mirror

of the many souls seemingly caught up in it. Without soul there is only darkness 41. If we are to

believe that there is indeed a single, unified cosmos, it must be that this cosmos is contained

in a single soul. If there is to be a way of seeing things right, there must be an Intellect indeed

that contains and decrees right answers42, but if there is no equivalent single Soul then the

phenomenal world is always far astray. Our experience is always delusory by comparison, and

delusory in multiple, transient ways. If we are to believe not only that there are right answers,

but that we can discover them, it must at least be possible for Zeus himself to be incarnate43,

for there to be someone, somewhere, who has not only the Mind of God, but His actual life.

For Plotinus, that incarnation was in the World Soul herself: at once our elder sister and the

fullest possible expression of Soul Herself. But maybe there has to be a more particularized

embodiment, and one that can be grasped from within the pagan synthesis. That man – each

man - is a microcosm of the larger cosmos is not to be understood as saying that the cosmos

has arms or legs or eyes. What good would such limbs or organs be? The point is rather that

for each of us there is an experienced world, our world, our being, that is a copy or mirror

image of Reality. But how could we ever know that any of these copies were even partially

correct unless there was someone, somewhere, whose experienced world just was the real

world, whose experience and not just his intellectual insight, provided the model for us all,

someone who is indeed the centre? And the orthodox Christian claim, turning from all the
41
See Ennead V.1 [10].2, 26-8.
42
See my ‘A Plotinian Account of Intellect’ in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71.1997,
pp.421-32.
43
See Enneads V.8 [31].1.
easy answers, has been that there is such a one. The template for human, and indeed for all

animate life, is the man Jesus: it is his life that provides the model, and the power, for us to

live by, not because he was moulded to resemble the One’s life (that would merely

reintroduce the problem) and might, as before, have lived as an atheistical, jobbing carpenter,

but because the One’s productive power took shape, from the beginning, as that very

individual. Nor is it that the eternal Word took on a pre-existent human or animal nature, as a

cloak on its identity: to be human, to be alive at all, is to be little like that actual, historical

individual – or like enough, at any rate, to be able to join, as it were, his party. It is in Jesus

that God invented human nature! It is there, in Christ’s world, so Maximus tells us, that all

divisions and differences are overcome. It is a notion endorsed elsewhere in the Orthodox

tradition, and largely – though not entirely – forgotten in ‘the West’.

Rather than seeing Jesus Christ as a trinitarian person who irrupted into linear history

2,000 years ago, the patristic and apostolic perspective is that of Jesus Christ as the

foundation of all history (‘by whom all things were made’), the centre of creation, and

the image of God (Heb.1.3; Col.1.15), according to whose image we are made – and

not just as a ‘pre-existent Logos’, but eternally as the crucified one, the ‘Lamb slain

from the foundation of the world’ (cf. Rev.13.8), destined before the foundation of the

world but made manifest at the end of the times for your sake (I Peter 18.20). 44

This is of course an extraordinarily grand claim, both metaphysically and ethically. It is

hardly surprising that even many fellow-travelers have preferred some more intellectualist

approach, choosing to see the Logos as embodied, at best, within a book or a theory or an

architectural marvel, but as remaining essentially distinct from all its representations in the

phenomenal world. It is not the part of a jobbing philosopher to show that Christian

orthodoxy is correct, nor to pretend to any special insight into how exactly to live with an eye

to the Incarnate Logos rather than just to our own best theory of the divine reality (however

we may identify that ‘best’). It is, I suppose, my part to try at least to get some idea of what

44
Bouteneff op.cit., p.96. See also my God’s World and the Great Awakening (Clarendon Press:
Oxford 1991), pp.131-5.
disagreements there may be about the one true path to excellence. And as Maximus also

said45, with more courage than, fortunately for me, I need now display: if I am wrong, refute

me!

45
Maximus xxxx

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