Creation is Incarnation

An Overview of Jordan Daniel Wood's Reading of Maximus the Confessor

Most Christians are comfortable saying Christ is in all things. But we rarely reckon with what that actually means. How can we look at a tree, a rock, and even the very words we use (which, of course, are not reducible to the physical) as containing (not, of course, limiting) and being contained by the Word? We soften it into pious metaphor or moral sentiment. Creation “points” to Christ, we say, as if Christ were merely one object among others, even if the greatest. We leave untouched our instinctive dualism between nature and grace, creation and Incarnation, world and Word.

This is, at least, the bold claim of Jordan Daniel Wood, who I consider a theological companion despite our (public) differences (specifically on the question of “confident universalism”). For Wood, St. Maximus the Confessor does not allow the comfort of any simple dualism between God and creation. With Maximus, Christ is not simply related to creation—Christ is creation’s inner hypostatic truth and foundation. Wood states it bluntly: Maximus “divines a still deeper hypostatic (not natural) identity between Word and world that actually generates natural difference.”¹ Creation is, eschatologically and ultimately speaking, the Word’s personal existence.

Maximus is not content with analogy and participation, the traditional (especially Thomistic) categories for explaining creation’s likeness to God. He surpasses analogy by fulfilling it. Creation is not merely “like” God—it is the Word’s own activity of being Himself as many without abandoning unity. As Wood interprets Maximus: “the Word’s protological procession as many logoi is the very condition for the possibility of participation itself.”

Maximus refuses to let us draw lines where God has drawn none. If Christ truly unites God and man “without confusion” and “without separation,” then there can be no field of existence where He is only analogically present. Christ’s hypostasis is the ontological root of every creature. There is no neutral zone, no “purely natural” order. Every creature is the Word extended as a concrete way-of-being in the world. And that means every creature you meet—atoms, angels, earthworms, princes—exists because the Son wills to exist in it and as its meaning.