The Mystery of Creation

Saint Maximus on the three ways Christ is the meaning of all

Aug 04, 2024

Saint Maximus had a habit of articulating his theology in patterns of three. This is to be expected, as triune patterns are quite useful for describing the creation of the Triune God. One such pattern can be found in the life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Incarnate Word of God, who became flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary, died for our sins and rose from the grave. In these three stages of His divine-human life, Christ reveals, in His personhood, the meaning of everything:

The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word contains in itself the meaning of all the symbols and all the enigmas of Scripture, as well as the hidden meaning of all sensible and intelligible creation. But he, who knows the mystery of the Cross and the Tomb, knows also the essential principle of all things. Finally, he who penetrates yet further and finds himself initiated into the mystery of the Resurrection, apprehends the end for which God created all things from the beginning.

1. The Incarnation

The Incarnation of the Word, the hypostatic union, is the “cosmic mystery of Jesus Christ.” This is because, for Maximus, both the creation and Holy Scripture are an “incarnation of the Word,” His “taking body” in creation. The paradox is that it is precisely in taking body that the world is created in Christ, as the world cannot be conceived prior to God’s kenosis. For Maximus, the kenotic power of God is identical to His “incarnational” power, which is in turn identical to His creative power. Creation, from the very beginning, is incarnation. Nate informs me that the Hebrew term for “beginning” is arche, which is used for Christ Himself! As Saint Paul teaches, all things in heaven and earth are created “in” Him:

The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. (Colossians 1:15)

God the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Son is his “image,” the One who fully expresses the infinite qualities of the Father’s divine nature. Because Christ is, eternally, the One in whom God expresses and shares His life, it's “in” Christ that He shares this life with the world. God does not change, and by creating, the Father doesn’t establish some new mode of existing and expressing Himself, as if He expresses Himself in creation in one way and in Christ in the other. No, creation is nothing other than God bringing forth creatures “in” Christ; it is the Father freely exercising His will in and through the Son as He eternally does by nature. Perhaps we have also stumbled across a deeper meaning of Man’s creation “in” the image of God…

In any case, the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word is the truth of all created beings and of the symbolic patterns in Scripture because they all express the kenotic life shared exclusively in the person of Christ. The “meaning” of created realities is nothing other than their participation in the life of God, their “ontological content” being the union of contingent/created and divine natures in the person of Christ.

2. The Crucifixion

Now, if you’re not content with merely the hidden meaning of all creation—and as a spiritual being whose end is infinite communion with God, you are not—then you ought to look to the Cross and the Tomb. These reveal the “essential principle” of everything, otherwise translated as their “logoi.” Admittedly, the doctrine of the “logoi” in Maximus remains the most unclear for me, so I preface all my thoughts with this limitation.

The “essential principle” of all things is the power/knowledge/operation of God, which, in light of St. Dumitru’s (and other 20th century theologians, such as Bulgakov and Zizioulas) reflections on Maximus and patristic theology in general, we cannot conceive abstracted from God’s personal character. To be a person is to exist in the mode of care, of intentional and active investment towards other persons. As the fullness of personal existence, the fullness of love, God has the infinite power to condescend to finite realities—this is the kenotic/incarnational/creative power of God.

But it is also the salvific power of God, His capacity to enter into every “nook and cranny” of a fractured world. As Maximus will explain, it is precisely by subjecting Himself to all the consequences of human disorder that Christ “reorders” the world from within, aligning them with their logoi. What are the logoi, though? I would suggest that the ontological “content” of the logoi are the particular ways God conceives of creatures in communion with Him. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos, one of the world’s foremost Maximus scholars, agrees with this interpretation: “…the logoi are not ideal individualities with their own motive force, but specific volitional manifestations of divine Love.”1 Since the only “purpose” of creation is to participate in the life of God, the multiplicity of the logoi expresses the infinite power of God to freely diffuse His life in the creation of particular beings, along with the infinite wisdom of God to determine and secure their end in Him. The Cross uniquely expresses this capacity of God to both enter into and redeem every particularity, even those which fall away from the source of life and become subject to the power of death. To be even more clear, since the logoi simply are the ways in which God pre-eternally grasps His power and will to bring creatures into communion with Him, the Cross is the revelation of these logoi in being the actual realization of this will in the person of Christ, the Logos.

3. The Resurrection

Maximus emphasizes that the Cross destroys the power of death, and this victory is revealed in Christ’s resurrection from the grave. In subjecting Himself to every evil on the Cross (and in the Church’s living out of His cruciform life),2 Christ gives these evil acts a new end rather than death. Now, death is not a prison but a bridge. This bridge is the person of Christ who takes death in Himself to destroy it, in whom created and uncreated natures exist in perfect communion. The entire purpose of creation is to attain its final and eternal rest in God, what Maximus will refer to as the state of “ever-moving rest,” which we attain in the Final Resurrection. It is “ever-moving” because it is alive and transparent as the fullness of personal existence.

When Christ says He has “eternal life,” He is not simply declaring that He has the ability to keep us in existence for an infinite duration. Rather, the eternal life of God is the fullness of personal existence in which death has no power. In the Resurrection, this life triumphs over the powers of separation that bring death because the Holy Spirit, who eternally unites the Father and the Son, facilitates the life-giving union between creation and Creator. This is why St. Paul says in 1 Timothy 3:16 that Christ was “justified” in the Spirit. In the Resurrection, we see the “end” of all created beings, the reason why God was willing to sacrifice Himself on the Cross, the very purpose of creation. This is, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov teaches us, nothing less than the “acquisition of the Holy Spirit,” by whose operation we are united to the death and resurrection of Christ and share in His eternal life.

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