Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (review)

It was the late Benedictine scholar Polycarp Sherwood, of St. Meinrad’s abbey in rural southern Indiana, who broke wide open the historical and theological study of Maximus the Confessor’s writings in the 1950s. But it was the Swedish scholar Lars Thunberg, in the first edition of Microcosm and Mediator(1965), who took Maximian research to a new level of critical analysis. This second edition of Thunberg’s work, the major revisions of which appear mainly in the updated introduction, notes, and bibliography, has as its organizing principle the theological anthropology of Maximus; but this book is rich in insights into his christology, cosmology, soteriology, eschatology, asceticism, and ethics as well. In fact the only major dimension of Maximus’s thought not substantially treated here is his trinitarian theology, although the book includes a brilliant short treatment of the function of apophatic theology in the Confessor’s work.

Thunberg’s basic judgments concerning the overall structure of Maximus’s thought are still as valid now as when Microcosm and Mediatorfirst appeared three decades ago. He asserts succinctly “that Maximus’ anthropology holds the key to his theology as a whole, and that this anthropology, in its turn, is a fruit of the Confessor’s personal reflection on the Christological convictions of the Council of Chalcedon, as they were further demonstrated and explained through the Council of Constantinople in 553” (19). Thunberg’s achievement has been to demonstrate how the Neo-Chalcedonian perspective of a “theandric” communion of natures, negotiated hypostaticallyand perichoreticallyin Jesus Christ, frames Maximus’s entire vision of the partnership between Creator and cosmos (on the macrocosmic level), and more specifically between God and the human microcosm. The properly polemical (viz., anti-Origenist) character of Maximus’s thought—his thorough rehabilitation of cosmic unity-in-diversity; his profoundly incarnationalchristocentrism—is rightly highlighted. Where Thunberg’s study excels, however, is in detailing how Maximus’ anthropology is, in the truest sense, constructively theologicalanthropology and the fruit of his integrative synthesis.

Thunberg begins with Maximus’s construal of the primary structures of human nature, that nature which is a microcosm of the purposeful unity-in-diversity in the created order. Maximus does envision a “natural” state of humanity, at least in terms of the antecedent principle ( logos) which assures the basic integrity of human nature and volition over and beyond the disastrous consequences of the fall. But the “natural state” of humanity, as it were, is less a static or ideal condition than a created vocationset before collective humankind, as created in the image of God, freely and “rationally” to mediate for all of creation, to perform the “cosmic liturgy” through theandric communion with the Creator. Meanwhile, as a realist about human history and about the reality of the fall, Maximus spends little time on Adam’s pristine or natural state, stipulating that he abused his freedom “at the instant of his creation” ( Ambiguum61), thereby implicating his human posterity and tragically frustrating the natural destiny of humankind.

As Thunberg reveals, human nature (ontologically) and human asceticism (existentially) together constitute the theater, or microcosm, in which the drama of redemption from the fall and, simultaneously, the vindication of humanity’s cosmic vocation, leading to deification, unfolds. Within this scheme of things, the practice of virtue (including the cosmic virtue of love) in the imitation of Christ serves to reintegrate human nature and thus reestablish the microcosm. The disintegration brought about by manifold passions is reversed, such that the differentiated passible faculties ( epithymiaand thymia) are once more reoriented to their intended goal. Within the spiritual life properly speaking ( bios praktikosand bios theôrêtikos), Maximus envisions humanity embracing and actively performing the various “mediations” to which it is called, and thus participating with Christ in bridging the chasm between male and female, between paradise and the inhabited world, between heaven and earth, between sensible and intelligible creation, and, finally, between God and his creation...