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

Several key works on Maximus the Confessor (d. 662), the great synthesist of the early Byzantine tradition, have been published this millennium, including those by Philipp Renczes (2003); Demetrios Bathrellos (2004); Pascal Mueller-Jourdan (2005); Adam Cooper (2005); Melchisedec Törönen (2007); Torstein Tollefsen (2008); Cyril Hovorun (2008), and the conference proceedings edited by Maxim Vasiljević (2013). All of these are theological in focus, except for Mueller-Jourdan, who takes as his foundation the philosophical tradition to which Maximus belongs. The essayists in the recently published Oxford Handbook of Maximus the Confessor [OHMC] (2015) aim to give a theological and philosophical introduction to Maximus, locating the debates into which he entered in their historical context, during one of the most troubled periods of Byzantine history, the mid-seventh century. Phil Booth’s (2014) study of the impact of John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and the rest of the Eukratas monastic circle has been particularly formative. Nevertheless, this latest volume by Paul Blowers, whose work over the past twenty-five years has made him a respected scholar of Maximus and his Christological contribution, is a welcome addition to previous scholarship. Several as-yet unpublished works, such as Marek Jankowiak’s 2009 PhD thesis, have also been taken into account in this overview of Maximus’s dyothelite Christology and how that played out in his commentaries on the liturgy, scripture, the monastic life, and on difficult texts by earlier church fathers.

Blowers states in the Introduction that his goal is to provide for students of Maximus “a fuller account of the complexities in his thought as a theologian” (5), and this goal has been amply fulfilled in the nine chapters that follow. The four-part structure balances historical context with theological discussion. Part I on backgrounds deals with the historical setting (Chapter One) and with contemporary, early Byzantine, theological literature (Chapter Two). In the lengthy first chapter, Blowers’s arguments are soundly based on the available literary evidence, even where that is mutually contradictory (as in the case of the Greek and Syriac Lives of Maximus, the one overly encomiastic, and the other unrestrainedly vitriolic). Blowers draws from the best of existing scholarship, including his own past work on Maximus. A particularly useful element of this contextualisation is a summary of the flourishing of Byzantine apocalyptic literature and how it was used in the context of the Persian and Arab invasions to manipulate attitudes towards the emperor and his doctrinal inclinations.

Chapter One may not introduce anything new to what has already been written recently on Maximus’s life and times (e.g. the chapters by Phil Booth and Marek Jankowiak, Pauline Allen, Walter Kaegi, and Cyril Hovorun in OHMC), but it does put it all together in the one place and in one comprehensive narrative. The internal scholarly debates over the minutiae of Maximus’s provenance and peregrinations in that chapter will not be of general interest to those concerned with Maximus’s theology of cosmic transformation, which is the worthy focus of chapters Three to Nine. Chapter Two has an important section on the literary genres used by Maximus, which should be read alongside Peter van Deun’s essay in OHMC.

Three chapters make up Part II, which investigates the “cosmic landscapes” (99) of Maximus’s thought, with an emphasis on his doctrine of deification (theosis) and his constructive but critical engagement with Origenism. The first section of Chapter Three, on “A neo-Irenaean perspective” (102–9), tracing the modified recapitulation theology of Irenaeus of Lyons, was a standout.

In Part III, Blowers examines Maximus’s vision for the transfigured creation in three dense but very well thought-out chapters. Chapter Eight on love, desire, and virtue was one of the volume’s strongest points and presents Maximus’s view of human striving for God as central to his signature theory of the gnomic will and his optimistic vision for the possibility for human...