The Body in St. Maximus the Confessor: Holy Flesh, Wholly Deified (review)

"For the Word of God, who is God, wills always and in everything to bring about the mystery of his embodiment" (Maximus, Ambiguum 7). Cooper's monograph, a revision of his University of Durham dissertation, is a commentary on the implications of this locus classicus in the writings of Maximus the Confessor. The author begins with the premise that the broader patristic tradition was profoundly committed to an incarnational theology in which "the external and material dimensions of the cosmos become charged with efficacious, performative potency precisely and exclusively in their subordinate relation to the 'internal', spiritual sphere." Cooper subsequently demonstrates how Maximus championed this principle in his epistemology, cosmology, Christology, ecclesiology, and spiritual anthropology.

In the adjacent material economies of creation, Scripture, and the incarnate Christ, God's revelation operates pedagogically through the dialectic of concealment and measured disclosure. Cooper appropriately focuses on the text of Ambiguum 10, where Maximus, in sympathy with Origen, makes Christ's transfiguration the paradigm of God's overarching strategy simultaneously to exclude access to the divine essence while dispensing proportionate "economic" knowledge and grace. The goal is deification (the\o\sis) construed as a transfiguration of embodied creatures, such that each becomes "an agent of divine manifestation in the ordered totality of his corporeal human nature."

Cooper further develops this "theophanic" theme in commenting at length on the seventh Ambiguum, Maximus's most celebrated criticism of the Origenist cosmology and eschatology. As Polycarp Sherwood showed long ago, Maximus refuted the Origenist vision of the punitive embodiment and recovery of fallen spiritual beings by outlining a new cosmic scheme wherein souls, co-created with bodies in a mutual and natural relation, move progressively toward eschatological perfection and eternal repose in God. Like Gregory of Nyssa, moreover, Maximus considered the passible body, stunted by the fall, to be integrated providentially into the divine plan as an instrument not only for the soul's rehabilitation but for the transformation of human nature in its created fullness. The author masterfully illuminates the instrumentality of the body in the process of deification, arguing that "that most contingent and mutable object of creation—the human body—when ennobled by deification, has been selected by God in his own good counsel as the primary means of his self-demonstration in the cosmos, and thus the high point of creation's access to him."

Cooper rightly gives privileged place to the christological basis of this mystery of deification. The dignifying and deification of the body is but the flipside of the commensurate and simultaneous incarnation of the Son, who, beyond his historical appearance in Jesus Christ, is always at work embodying himself in the church and in individual believers. Cooper offers fresh insight into the properly kenotic aspect of incarnation in which Maximus, in scrupulous theopaschite formulations, probes the depths of the passibility and human sufferings that have been assumed into the composite hypostasis of Christ and thus into the life of the Father. Precisely the carnal frailty of Christ is potent and salvific, and "through passibility" he reveals his divine power, erases human corruptibility, "puts death to death," and opens up the new and eschatological mode (tropos) of embodied human existence.

Cooper further explores the ecclesial dimension of the deification of the body. The body of the church, authentically instantiating the body of Christ himself through its liturgy, sacraments, and priesthood, is the locus deificandi, with Christ as the high priestly mediator of gracious transformation. Here again is a medium of "incarnation," the Logos's penetration of the "sacred space" of the church, confluent with his prospective penetration of the cosmos as a whole—becoming "all to all" (1 Cor 9.22; 15.28). At last there is also, as Cooper reflects in his final chapter, the dynamic wherein the new tropos of embodied humanity, inaugurated by the incarnate Son, is registered in the spiritual and ascetical life of the individual believer. Though provisional...