Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World by Paul M. Blowers (review)

Paul M. Blowers is one of the world's leading experts on the Byzantine saint and philosopher Maximus the Confessor (580–662). He is also internationally known as a sophisticated historian, textual interpreter, and expert on early Christian exegesis. This present book brings together all those skills as he looks back over many decades of his own research and that of other leading Maximian interpreters, to give us this considerable overview of Maximus and how he stands in the light of modern scholarly labors. In this regard there have been several "greats" in that field since the middle of the 20^th century (Epifanovich, Sherwood, Von Balthasar, Thunberg). Maximus has undergone a remarkable re-discovery in modern times and has emerged from it as one of the most profound and far reaching intellectuals of the Byzantine Christian tradition: someone who should have ranked from earliest times as a major "Father of the Church" but whose works were somewhat sidelined from the dominant scholastic traditions of the early middle ages. This was partly because they were too difficult (they remain often obscure) and partly because they were seen to be predominantly concerned with ascetical theology or with the specific issue of the Will of Christ. These are both scholastic categories which heavily over-imposed themselves on him and misrepresented the saint's own deeply holistic program that envisioned a conception of the Word of God's permeation of the entire cosmos to transfigure it, most especially in the priestly consciousness of the believer.

The monograph is helpfully structured into four main parts. The first, in two sections (9–63 and 64–100), discusses Maximus' historical location. There is a very helpful and succinct life (the discovery of a Syriac Vita in recent years that contradicts the better known Greek Vita in large ways set a cat among pigeons here). Some treatments have since then chosen which version to follow as and when it suited, but Blowers masterfully charts a comprehensive path and his version of the Vita thus becomes a "go-to" place for any student wishing to gain an account of the man in his complicated historical environment. The second section of the introduction goes over the ground in a slightly different way to thicken the perspective. Blowers considers why Maximus wrote in the first place. What was the role of writing for a man of his time and condition? Certainly controversy comes into this, but it is as a lifetime monastic practitioner that Blowers situates his protagonist. He was a teacher of the inner life where deep anthropological ideas are intimately related to the Incarnation of the Divine Logos in time and space. The Incarnation is considered not only as a massively transfigurative force for the human person who becomes built up in the image and likeness of the Lord through faithful disciple-ship, but also a transforming energy for the fundamental roots of the Cosmos, the Word being present in all things. The Human thus stands as a priest of this sacramental transfiguration, giving voice and consciousness to the illumination of all things under God, including voiceless materiality. Ascetical theology thus becomes, in Maximus' understanding, far more than a by-water of greater theological ideas, but rather the core grundschrift of the written endeavor.

Part Two of the book (101–198) presents master themes of Maximian theology under three headings. The first is the cosmological scope of the divine plan for the world. Maximus takes Irenaeus' and Origen's cosmic theology to new dimensions. He stresses the unfolding plan and history of the world as an ascentive force of eros, from God to humankind and from the human mind and soul back to God. This eros is a passionate energy of freedom that gives definition and meaning to persons. Its ascentive nature is such that it can be called a veritable "deification" (theiopoiesis) wherein the...