The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor (review)

Although the ancient christological debates culminate in the work of St. Maximus the Confessor, until now there has been no monograph devoted specifically to Maximus's Christology. This work neatly fills that gap and in doing so provides a helpful introduction to some of the knottier issues of patristic theology.

The book begins with a review of the debates leading up to and following the Council of Chalcedon. Bathrellos treats this familiar material well, correcting where necessary what he sees as inaccuracies in the prevailing scholarship. He defends the two Leontioi (Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of Jerusalem) against charges that they were less than orthodox, observing that Leontius of Byzantium explicitly affirms a human will in Christ and that both authors attribute to Christ a human as well as a divine energy.

The second chapter examines Monothelitism. Bathrellos takes issue with those scholars (such as Tixeront and Jugie) who have argued that the Monothelites did not actually mean to deny a human will in Christ but merely saw Christ's human will as wholly passive with respect to his divine will. The issue is tricky because the Monothelites did not distinguish, as did Maximus, between the faculty of will, its exercise, and its object, so their precise meaning is often hard to determine. Nonetheless, Bathrellos thinks it is clear that Patriarch Sergius meant to deny a human faculty of will in Christ and that the same is true of Pope Honorius inasmuch as he endorsed Sergius's views without qualification. (As Bathrellos observes, the fathers of the Sixth Ecumenical Council "took for granted that [Honorius] was a heretic and anathametized him, as they also took for granted that to be a pope and a heretic at the same time does not constitute a contradiction in terms" [79].) As for the sources of Monothelitism, Bathrellos sees them as lying partly in the Monophysitism but partly also in a revival of the Apollinarian notion that a truly human will in Christ would necessarily be in conflict with his divine will.

The remaining chapters treat Maximus's own Christology. Maximus builds on the work of the Leontioi in affirming both that the single personal subject present in the Incarnation is the Logos and that at the level of nature ("what," rather than "who") this single personal subject is composite. The attempt to work out this position in detail gives rise to a number of interesting questions. Bathrellos argues that Maximus denies human inclination (gno\me\) and choice (prohairesis) in Christ not in order to exclude the actual exercise of Christ's human will but because he sees these terms as implying ignorance, deliberation, and the capacity for evil. Scripture often speaks of Christ's will as being thwarted, and this is, for Maximus, a clear sign that his human will is at work. The question then is how, given that two faculties of will are active, they necessarily converge in a single decision. Should we think of them as working more or less in parallel (Tixeront) or, instead, of the human will as subordinate to the divine will (Jugie)? Bathrellos argues that neither of these views is adequate and that precisely because the human will is that of the Logos, it is moved directly by the Logos (and not by the divine will per se) without any violation of human self-determination.

The author also discusses at length monoenergist formulas such as the "new theandric energy" spoken of by Dionysius the Areopagite. Notoriously, Maximus originally was willing to give such formulas an orthodox reading but then rejected them. Bathrellos argues that the shift was a result of the need to conciliate the hard-line Dyothelites of Italy and Sicily and did not represent a real change in Maximus's thinking. Although this is probably correct, I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the underlying theological issues...