St. Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts (review)

In St. Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts, Despina D. Prassas provides a translation with introduction and annotation of José Declerck's critical edition of the Confessor's Quaestiones et Dubia (hereafter QD), found in volume ten of the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca and originally published in 1982. It is the first English translation of the text and is, therefore, a welcome addition to the literature on Maximus.

Prassas begins her introduction with a brief account of the rather unclear details of Maximus's life. She tends to give more weight to the Greek vita tradition, which reports a Constantinopolitan milieu for Maximus's upbringing and education, than to the earlier Syriac life, which was published by Sebastian Brock in 1973, and which claims that Maximus was born in Palestine and received his spiritual formation among "Origenists" in a monastery there. Readers will also want to be aware of the recent and compelling argument for a Palestinian and Alexandrian context for Maximus's early formation made by Christian Boudignon in "Maxime le Confesseur etait-il Constantinopolitain?" (in B. Janssens, B. Roosen, and P. Van Deun, eds., Philomathestatos: Studies in Greek and Byzantine Texts Presented to Jacques Noret for his Sixty-Fifth Birthday [2004]).

The Syriac life seeks to taint the image of Maximus with its charge of "Origenism," and this question, because most scholars place the composition of the QD before Maximus's involvement in the christological polemics of his day, is indeed the primary doctrinal-historical issue Prassas considers relevant to the QD. She acknowledges the obvious and undeniable influence of Origen and Evagrius—and especially Didymus the Blind in the QD—on Maximus, but notes that there is only one direct reference to Origen's doctrine in the QD, in question 19, which treats Gregory of Nyssa's use of the term apokatastasis ("restoration"). Prassas writes, "it is not entirely clear whether Maximus's explanation is precisely the same as Origen's" and therefore she rejects the claims of the Syriac life regarding Maximus's intellectual formation (13). This does not seem to be a very strong argument. The QD are so thoroughly Origenian (if not "Origenist") in inspiration that to say the question on apokatastasis is "the only direct reference to any teaching of Origen in the QD" is to focus too narrowly upon the sixth-century anathemas. Nor does such a statement appreciate what was most likely the heart of an intellectually oriented—i.e. Origenian or Evagrian—monastic life, which Prassas herself ably describes in the core of her introduction to the content of the QD: the theoretical contemplation of the inner meaning of Scripture and its application to the ascetical practices of the monks (see 21-37).

While Prassas rightly tries to avoid systematizing the diverse questions of the QD, she does offer some rubrics for orienting the reader to the content of the translation. Within the general scope of the work—teaching on the ascetic life—Prassas identifies a number of "principles," or components of the general intellectual "framework" of the QD, such as principles of "(biblical) interpretation, theological anthropology, anagogy, and typology" (22). She identifies typical "monastic topoi" found in the QD: "the passions, the virtues, and evil," as well as "theoria" and "praxis." Finally, Prassas discerns certain "tools" used by Maximus for the conveying of his teaching: "allegory, typology, etymology, number symbolism or arithmology, military terminology, anthropomorphosis," and so on.

Regarding the translation itself, which is the most important contribution of the work, it is clear that Prassas has chosen to render Maximus's Greek in an English idiom that corresponds as far as possible to Maximus's own style and syntax. This is helpful in certain ways and indeed makes it easy to follow along with Declerck's edition. However, the English is rather rough in places, occasionally ungrammatical, and sometimes hard to follow on its own terms. In addition, while the translation is a helpful tool...