Light on Creation

Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate

on the Origin of the World

edited by
Geert Roskam and Joseph Verheyden

Mohr Siebeck
E-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission.
Geert Roskam, born 1973, PhD in Classics 2001, is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty
of Arts KU Leuven.
Joseph Verheyden, born 1957, DTheol KU Leuven 1987, is currently Professor of New
Testament Studies at the KU Leuven.

ISBN 978-3-16-154314-2
ISSN 1436-3003 (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum)

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 Table of Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V

I. The Middle- and Neoplatonic Tradition

Mauro Bonazzi
Middle Platonists on the Eternity of the Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Sarah Klitenic Wear

The Position and Function of the Demiurge in Syrianus’s Cosmos . . . . . . . . 17

Lorenzo Ferroni
Proclus, in Timaeum, II, 340.14–341.24 Diehl. Some Textual Remarks . . . . 31

Gerd Van Riel

How Can the Perceptible World be Perceptible?
Proclus on the Causes of Perceptibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

II. The Christian Tradition

David C. DeMarco
Basil of Caesarea’s Exegesis of the Heavens in Homiliae in hexaemeron 3 . . . 63

Volker Henning Drecoll

The Use of Scripture in Basil’s Homilies in Hexaemeron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Samuel Pomeroy
Representing the Jews: John Chrysostom’s Use of Exegetical and
Theological Traditions for Gen 1:26a (In Gen. hom. 8) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

David L. Dusenbury
Judaic Authority in Nemesius of Emesa’s De natura hominis (390 CE) . . . . . 127

Benjamin Gleede
Christian Apologetics or Confessional Polemics?
Context and Motivation of Philoponus’ De opificio mundi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

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X Table of Contents

Paul M. Blowers
From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being: Creation ex nihilo
in the Cosmology and Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Clement Kuehn
Christ Hero. An Epic Commentary on Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Dimitrios Zaganas
The Debate on Gen 1:1–3 According to Anastasius Sinaita’s Hexaemeron . . . 225

III. Some Other Voices

Gregory E. Sterling
“The Most Perfect Work”: The Role of Matter in Philo of Alexandria . . . . . . 243

Claudio Moreschini
Calcidius between Creatio Ex Nihilo and Platonism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Gerard P. Luttikhuizen
Gnostic Views on the Origin and the Nature of the Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

Index of Modern Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289

Index of Ancient Texts and Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Index of Biblical References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being
Creation ex nihilo in the Cosmology and
Soteriology of Maximus the Confessor

Paul M. Blowers

In approaching the functions of the principle of creation ex nihilo in Maximus the

Confessor (580–662), I am starting from two premises. First, we are dealing with
a synthetic theologian who had not composed his own Hexaemeral commentary,
and who presupposed much from the earlier interpretive tradition, no longer
fixated on the need to defend the coherence of the doctrine. Not that creation ex
nihilo had at last been fully settled philosophically and theologically. Only fifty
years before Maximus was born, Justinian had to close down the Neoplatonic
school in Athens because of the resilience of pagan (especially Proclean) cosmol-
ogy, while in Alexandria Philoponus found himself battling Neoplatonists and
Aristotelians alike on the eternity of the world.1 Nor had creation ex nihilo been
thoroughly “domesticated” within Christian culture – though we see an attempt
to do so in Maximus’s contemporary, the Byzantine poet laureate George of Pis-
idia, who in one of his great epics, the Hexaemeron, draws on the doctrine of the
Creator’s command of the world’s disorderly elements (and with it the Christian
victory over pagan cosmology) as the prime analogy for the reordering of uni-
versal political and military chaos by the heroic Emperor Heraclius.2 Maximus,
moreover, lived on the cusp of a whole new age of Byzantine scholasticism in
which quasi-secularizing philosophers would subject the time-honored cos-
mological and metaphysical claims of the theologians to refreshed Aristotelian
and Neoplatonic standards. But Maximus was thoroughly secure that creation
ex nihilo was idiomatic for a Christian cosmology, which in turn freed him, I
shall argue, to exploit its latent meanings and to take the principle in some new
directions of his own, remaining confident that he had the sanction of his pre-

1
 On these developments, see Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and
Alexandria (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 111–203; Richard Sorabji,
Time, Creation and the Continuum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 197–9; Frans
A. J. de Haas, John Philoponus’s New Definition of Prime Matter: Aspects of Its Background in
Neoplatonism and the Ancient Commentary Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1997); J. A. S. Evans, The
Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power (London: Routledge, 1996), 67–71, 249.
2 For discussion with citations, see Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and

Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 134–5.

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170 Paul M. Blowers

cursors, Irenaeus, Athanasius, and especially the Cappadocians and Dionysius

the Areopagite.
My second premise is that well before Maximus’s time, Christian reconstruc-
tions of creation ex nihilo had developed hermeneutically and theologically in
a progressive “spiral” of logos and mythos: logos being the pursuit of a rationally
defensible explanation of the origins and constitution of creation on the basis of
the primarily narrative, mythopoeic, doxological, and confessional discourse of
creation within Genesis 1 and other definitive biblical creation texts; and mythos
being the cultivation, in line with that logos, of an enriched trinitarian and
christocentric metanarrative integrating the protological, soteriological, and tel-
eological (or eschatological) dimensions of Christian understanding of creation.
Creation ex nihilo had never been a purely philosophical, apologetical, or polem-
ical proposal, or an issue only for the theologians and metaphysicians. In patristic
usage its purpose was also to enhance Christian imagination of the beginning
and end of the world by recasting and “re-mythologizing” biblical witnesses to
the triune Creator who both inaugurated  – and was working to sustain – his
covenant with the contingent and now “groaning” creation.

I. Maximus and the Polyvalence of Creation ex nihilo

1. First Principles of Creation ex nihilo in Maximus

Traditional teaching on creation ex nihilo resonates fairly consistently in Max-
imus, especially in works from his early and middle career before he was em-
broiled in the monothelete controversy. I shall not dwell on these resonances
at length but they are first principles for his own speculations. He reiterates, for
example, the axiom, going all the way back to the Shepherd of Hermas and repeat-
ed by numerous patristic authors, that the Creator who formed the world from
nothing contains but is not contained by the universe he has made,3 in addition

3
 Capita theologica et oeconomica 1.6 (PG 90:1085A–B). Earlier, cf. Shepherd of Hermas
26.1–2 (Mandate 1.1–2, Holmes, 504, 505); 91.5 (Parable 9.14.5, Holmes, 648); Theophilus of
Antioch, Ad Autolycum 1.5; 2.3 (Grant, 6–8, 24); Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 2.1.1 (SC 294:26);
2.30.9 (SC 294:320); 4.20.2 (SC 100:628); Origen, De principiis 1.3.3 (SC 252:146–8); Tertullian,
Adversus Marcionem 1.15.2–3, ed. Ernest Evans (Oxford: OUP, 1972), 38; Athanasius, De in-
carnatione 3, ed. Robert Thomson (Oxford: OUP, 1971), 140; Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate
1.5–6 (SC 443:212–16); Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 4.5 (PG 33:460A–B); Gregory Nazianzen,
Poemata arcana 5 (De providentia), ed. Claudio Moreschini, trans. D. A. Sykes (Oxford: OUP,
1997), 22, ll. 2–3, suggesting that the Creator “bears the universe within (ἐντός) himself while
being himself above (ὕπερθεν) it all”; Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus 5.8 (PTS
33:186–7). See also William Schoedel, ‘Enclosing, not Enclosed: The Early Christian Doctrine
of God’, in William Schoedel – Robert Wilken (eds.), Early Christian Literature and the Clas-
sical Intellectual Tradition (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979), 75–86.

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 171

to containing the logoi of all creatures.4 This is the “closed-world” cosmological

paradigm that early Christian thinkers opposed to the “infinite universe” mod-
els they observed in pre‑ and post-Socratic Greek thought.5 Maximus adds his
own nuances, claiming, in the register of theologia, that because the Creator is
beyond being (and essence6), he cannot be named the “beginning, middle, and
end” of all that is since he is not constrained by the category of relation (ἡ σκετικὴ
κατηγορία).7 In other words, the Creator cannot be defined merely as a circum-
scribing boundary of the creation. And yet Maximus simultaneously affirms, in
the register of oikonomia, that God, as active in relation to the passive creation,
is indeed “beginning” as Creator, “middle” as Provider, and “end” as the goal to
which creation aspires.8 In other words, God not only contains the creation on-
tologically, he also contains and superintends, in his benevolence, all its internal
dynamics of movement, interaction, and teleological progress.
Elsewhere Maximus appropriates early doctrinal emphases familiar from Ire-
naeus and other pre-Nicene sources, including the principle that creation ex
nihilo is an act of sheer divine freedom, with no necessity imposed on the Cre-
ator,9 other than the internal constraint of his own love and philanthropia. God
is “moved” to create, he says, in the restricted sense of his generosity in granting
both being and well-being to creatures.10 So too creation ex nihilo is ipso facto
an act of divine providence, a divine investment in the wholeness and goodness
of the world that the infinite Creator transcends, circumscribes, and nurtures, a
world that constitutes in itself a complex theophany.11 In the same vein, Maxi-
mus echoes the early rejection of Greek theories of the eternal preexistence of
matter,12 but there is no sustained criticism since he sees the issue as settled. Con-
versely, however, he develops in tremendous depth the principle that the logoi
of created beings do preexist in God (the Logos) and give form to “what is not.”

 4 Ambigua ad Johannem 7 (PG 91:1080A).

 5 See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 20–4.
 6 Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C); Quaestiones ad Thalassium 35 (CCSG 7:239),

describing the Logos as one who, though beyond essence and Creator of all things, “bore in
himself, along with incomprehensible intuitions of his proper divinity, the natural principles
(λόγοι) of all phenomenal and intelligible beings.” Also Q. Thal. 64 (CCSG 22:237); Expositio
orationis dominicae (CCSG 23:42, 47); and Ambigua ad Thomam 1 (CCSG 48:7); 5 (CCSG 48:20,
21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29).
 7 Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.2 (PG 90:1084A); 1.7 (1085B). Cf. Amb. Jo. 17 (PG 91:1229D–1232C);

18 (1232C–1233C).
 8 Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.10 (1085D–1088A); cf. Dionysius, De divinis nominibus 5.8 (PTS

33:187).
 9 Amb. Jo. 10 (PG 91:1188A–C); 42 (1329C–D). In the Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91:340D),

Maximus posits that if Pyrrhus accepts the idea that the energeia in Christ was a function only of
his hypostasis, then as pre-incarnate God he must have been under compulsion when he created
the world (τετυράννηται … δημιουγήσας).
10
 Amb. Jo. 10 (PG 91:1204D–1205A).
11 Amb. Jo. 10 (PG 91:1188B–1193C).
12
  E. g. Amb. Jo. 10 (PG 91:1184A–B).

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172 Paul M. Blowers

Given his keen attention to Cappadocian cosmology in its service to trinitarian

theology, creation ex nihilo also becomes for Maximus virtually synonymous
with the strict ontological and epistemic divide – the διάστημα and διαίρεσις –
that separates uncreated and created reality.13 As in the Cappadocians and espe-
cially Gregory of Nyssa, furthermore, the diastêma constitutes not only the basis
of a strict cognitive and linguistic apophaticism, but also, positively, the Creator’s
own bridge, as it were, into the creation, and the frontier that both induces
creatures’ progressive movement toward God and conditions and delimits that
movement.14 Indeed, the vocation of the human creature is precisely to partici-
pate in Christ’s mediation of the various divisions within the creation and of the
ultimate polarity between Creator and creation.15
In the monothelete controversy, Maximus further applies the strict divide
between uncreated and created reality christologically, as when he refutes the
position assumed by the Sinaite bishop Theodore of Pharan (ca. 570–ca. 635).
Theodore, like Maximus, sought to establish the true meaning of Dionysius the
Areopagite’s “one theandric energy” in Christ. Posturing himself as a neo-Chal-
cedonian moderate on Christ’s volition and activity, Theodore had grounded the
single energy of Christ in his hypostasis rather than in his two natures. Maximus’s
counter-argument, which shows up in his Disputation with Pyrrhus, the deposed
Patriarch of Constantinople, is precisely that a single energy functioning solely
from Christ’s hypostasis would violate the distinction between his uncreated and
created natures.16

2. The “Nothing” from which the Creator Creates

With the exception perhaps of Gregory of Nyssa’s Hexaemeron, Maximus does
not reveal an extensive knowledge of patristic Hexaemeral commentary. Though
he is aware of certain classic exegetical problems in the early chapters of Gene-
sis,17 he does not dwell on textual issues that exercised Hexaemeral commenta-
tors like Philo, Origen, Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine. This especially holds true
for the mysterious text of Genesis 1:2, which challenged Christian interpreters
both to expound the “void” or “abyss” out of which God formed the world, and
the identity of the “spirit” hovering over it.

13  E. g.Amb. Jo. 41 (PG 91:1304D–1305A).

14
 Maximus declares God as “adiastemic” (ἀδιάστατον) in Amb. Jo. 17 (PG 91:1232B); cf.
Mystagogia 5 (CCSG 69:25). On diastêma as designating spatio-temporal extension, see Amb. Jo.
10 (PG 91:1157A); 15 (1217C); 17 (1132A); 41 (1305C, 1308A); 42 (1345B, 1348D); 67 (1397B).
15 Amb. Jo. 41 (PG 91:1305B–1308C).
16
 Disp. Pyrr. (PG 91:341A). See also Antoine Lévy, Le créé et l’incréé: Maxime le Confesseur
et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 2006), 67–9.
17 E. g. the divine plural in Gen 1:26 and 11:7 (Q. Thal. 28, 44), anthropomorphism (Q. Thal.

28), the precise meaning of the two trees of paradise (Q. Thal. 43), the divine “rest” (Q. Thal. 2).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 173

That said, Maximus nonetheless added his own voice to a long tradition of
philosophical and theological speculation on the “nothing” from which God
created the cosmos. Various interpretive options were in play from early on in the
commentary tradition. Tied exegetically to the “void” in Genesis 1:2, the “noth-
ing” could be, strictly speaking, the pure ontological vacuum from which God
first produced matter before forming it into a universe – a perspective taken by
early apologists like Theophilus of Antioch in defiance not only of pagan notions
of the preexistence of matter but to uphold divine omnipotence against prover-
bial philosophical claims that “nothing comes from nothing.”18 Justin, Clement
of Alexandria, and Tertullian’s Christian Platonist opponent Hermogenes, all
opted for a seemingly opposite view by affirming, from a philosophically “liter-
al” reading of Genesis 1:2, that the nothingness was a preexistent substratum of
formless matter at the Creator’s disposal when he fashioned heaven and earth. It
was possible, however, still to equate the nothing with formless matter that had
been antecedently and miraculously produced by the Creator – an option osten-
sibly embraced by Ephrem the Syrian in his prose Commentary on Genesis con-
troverting Bardaisan’s teaching on the preexistence of the elements. The liability
of this option was ascribing to God the creation of an originally chaotic state of
things, a deficiency of order. Already Tertullian had anticipated this problem,
citing Isaiah’s claim that the Creator did not create “in vain” (Isa 45:18) as proof
that the matter created ex nihilo was not intrinsically formless but only apparently
so until divinely appointed light illumined it.19 Closer to Maximus and one of his
most cherished authorities, Gregory Nazianzen, likewise maintained in his poem
Περὶ κοσμοῦ that God created matter already with form,20 but this did not stop
Gregory from asserting as well that matter carried with it a vestigial chaos (τὸ
ἄτακτον) always needing to be tamed and reordered. I shall return to this point
later because it takes on considerable importance for Maximus.
The doctrine of creation ex nihilo, of course, was not bound up exclusively
with polemics against pagan cosmology or with defining the precise ontological
matrix of the orderly cosmos on the basis of the mysterious primeval image in
Genesis 1:2. The fact was hardly lost on patristic interpreters that the mythos of
a primordial nothingness or resurgent chaos in the early chapters of Genesis was
a theme recurrent in the Bible and developed well beyond the primeval history.
Irenaeus is exemplary here, realizing that Gnostic cosmogonies had to be com-
batted at the level of mythos and not just logos. He cited Genesis 1:2 only once,
in a polemical aside and without theological commentary on the void. There is

18 Lucretius, DRN 1,156–9. On the pervasiveness of this axiom in pagan cosmology, see

Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 193–252, 307–18.
19
 Contra Hermogenem 29.1–6; 33.1 (SC 439:140–50).
20 Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata arcana 4 (De mundo) (Moreschini, 16); cf. Maximus, Amb.

Jo. 67 (PG 91:1397A).

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174 Paul M. Blowers

nothing much on nothingness in Irenaeus, though as Jacques Fantino rightly

observes, he seems not to have embraced Theophilus’s two-staged creation ex
nihilo, believing instead that the creation of matter and its formation into a world
were one and the same act of the omnipotent Creator.21
More important to my purposes here, Irenaeus reads creation ex nihilo in a
strongly teleological rather than protological key. Indeed, because he reads it
rather purely as a prelude to the narratives of the creation, fall, and redemption
of humanity, and even more basically from the perspective of the “recapitulation”
(ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of all things in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, creation ex ni-
hilo takes its true meaning only in terms of creation’s historical “becoming” and
eschatological outcome. In Athanasius this perspective is further intensified, with
the notion of primordial nothingness now reintroduced in terms of the utterly
contingent existence of the world, its ontological poverty and vulnerability apart
from an immanently sustaining grace. Creation, says Athanasius, was God’s act
of granting creatures “the strength to come into existence,”22 for which reason
the human fall and sin itself effectively constitute a relapse into nothingness.23 In
Irenaeus and Athanasius we thus see creation taking on a soteriological meaning
from the outset. Nothingness now becomes the enduringly potential oblivion of
the cosmos perennially conquered by the condescension of the Savior: first in
creating, then in a host of epiphanies, and climactically in dying for the creation.
In creating, God not only produces and shapes matter and bodies, he already
saves them from nonbeing, from unfulfilled potential. To grant existence itself is
to grant creatures the hope of having a progressively graced future. As Gregory
of Nyssa adds, the power of the Creator-Logos is “creative of what is, inventive
of what is not, sustaining of what has come into being, and foreseeing of what
is yet to be.”24 Notably here, the “what is not” (τὰ μὴ ὄντα) has taken on a fully
teleological meaning, signaling the potentiality belonging to the Logos’s creative
resourcefulness.25 It informs “what is yet to be” (τὰ μελλόντα).
What Maximus inherited from these major forbears was effectively a dialectics
of logos and mythos concerning creation ex nihilo. On the one hand, the inter-
pretive tradition had tried to explain Genesis 1:2, negatively either as a pure on-
tological void, or a state of formlessness awaiting order, or more positively as the
nascent state of formed matter awaiting architectural development into a cosmos.

21 See Adversus haereses 2.10.4 (SC 294:90); and Jacques Fantino, La théologie d’Irénée:

Lecture des Écritures en réponse à l’exégèse gnostique: Une approche trinitaire (Paris: Les Éditions
du Cerf, 1994), 276–9.
22 Contra gentes 41 (Thomson, 112–14).
23 Contra gentes 3–5 (Thomson, 8–14); De incarnatione 4–6 (Thomson, 142–8).
24
 Oratio catechetica (GNO 3/4:16, ll. 20–2): ποιητικὴ τῶν ὄντων, ἡ εὐρητικὴ τῶν μὴ ὄντων,
ἡ συνεκτικὴ τῶν γεγονότων, ἡ προορατικὴ τῶν μελλόντων.
25 Obviously Gregory’s choice of terms – “what is not” (τὰ μὴ ὄντα), as opposed to “what

[absolutely] has no existence” (τὰ οὐκ ὄντα) – is quite deliberate.

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 175

On the other hand, the tradition sought to cultivate a mythos of creation which
insinuated the origins of the world into the larger providential economy of the
redemption and transformation of creation, and which did interpretive justice to
biblical imagery of a Creator who nurtures and sustains his vulnerable creation,
who even fights and suffers for it.
But before I address Maximus’s unique contributions to this dialectical tra-
dition, there is one more significant meaning of the “nothing” from which God
created the world that Maximus not only acknowledged but embraced. It is the
highly nuanced equation of ex nihilo and ex Deo. In a more or less philosophically
innocent sense, Irenaeus stated that God drew matter, and the very substance
and form of things, “from himself ” (a semetipso) by willing the creation into
being.26 He leaves the precise ontological dynamics of this a mystery. Much later,
Gregory of Nyssa tries to fill this gap by proposing that matter has no existence
apart from divinely willed “qualities” (ποιότητα); and though advising restraint
on overspeculating about the origins of matter, 27 he allows the possibility that
there was a mysterious substratum (ὑποκείμενον) “in” God tantamount to God’s
ineffable intellection of those qualities that give matter its being.28 Creation could
be ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ in this narrow sense.
Closer to Maximus, and far more influential, was Dionysius the Areopagite’s
dialectical identification of creation ex nihilo with creation ex Deo. This is the
writer who, in the same passage, asserts that God has brought the universe into
being out of his sheer goodness, and that “the Divine who transcends being is the
being of all that is.” 29 To this seemingly adventurous language, often mistaken
by later critics as emanationist, Dionysius adds the crucial caveat that God is
creatures’ being only in the sense of their relative participation in him, and that
the God who “is all things in all (1 Cor 15:28) is no-thing among any existent.”30
Maximus himself appropriates exactly this apophatic nuance in the prologue to
his Mystagogia in extolling the Creator …
… who is and who becomes all for all beings (1 Cor 9:22), through whom everything is
and becomes but who by himself never is nor becomes in any way anything that ever is
or becomes in any manner. In this way he can in no way be associated by nature with any
being and thus because of his superbeing is fittingly referred to as nonbeing. For since it
is necessary that we understand correctly the difference between God and creatures, then
the affirmation of superbeing must be the negation of beings, and the affirmation of beings
must be the negation of superbeing. In fact both names, being and nonbeing, are to be
reverently applied to him although not at all properly. In one sense they are both proper

26 Adv. haer. 2.30.9 (SC 294:318); 4.20.1 (SC 100:626).

27 Cf. Apologia in Hexaemeron 7 (GNO 4/1:15–16); De hominis opificio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C);

De anima et resurrectione (GNO 3/3:93–4).

28
 De hominis opificio 24 (PG 44:212D–213C).
29 De caelesti hierarchia 4.1 (PTS 36:20); cf. Ep. 8.1 (PTS 36:173–4).
30
 De divinis nominibus 7.3 (PTS 33:198).

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176 Paul M. Blowers

to him, one affirming the being of God as cause of being, the other completely denying in
him the being which all being have, based on his preeminence as cause.31

This juxtaposing of apophatic and kataphatic perspectives, of God’s radical

transcendence of essence itself and his extraversion out of himself to be of, in,
with, and for his creation, is more than a propriety of theological language. For
Maximus it sets in dramatic relief the being – and not only being (τὸ εἶναι) but
“well-being” (τὸ εὖ εἶναι) and “eternal well-being” (τὸ ἀεὶ εὖ εἶναι)32 – which
come to creatures as sheer gift, from a Giver who can be praised and worshipped
but not truly conceived or known.

II. Maximus on the Logos and Mythos of Creation ex nihilo

1. Making Something of Nothing: Logos and Logoi

Even a cursory survey of secondary studies of Maximus’s cosmology indicates
that the object of greatest focus has been his doctrine of the logoi – and rightly
so. His theory of logoi is the tissue that interconnects his teachings on creation,
Christology, salvation, and eschatology. And it is hermeneutically and epistemo-
logically instrumental, insofar as Maximus subtly coordinates between the logoi
as causal and purposive “principles” of all created things, the logoi as the spiritual
meanings of scriptural revelation, and the logoi constituting the powers of reason
and intuition in human beings.33
The risk in interpreting Maximus’s doctrine of the logoi is to take too nar-
row an approach, to fail to see all its overlapping functions and nuances in his
thought. And yet at bottom there is one crucial underlying and unifying factor,
which is the Logos’s own sourcing of, and immanence in, the diversity of logoi.
Vladimir Lossky was insistent that Maximus and the other Greek Fathers had
thoroughly distanced themselves from Augustine’s eternal rationes immanent in
the divine essence (or mind), which provide exemplary paradigms of all created
things in the manner of the Platonic forms. He sharply contrasted this with the
occasional definition in Dionysius and Maximus of the logoi as θελήματα, pure

31 Mystagogia, prooemium (CCSG 69:9, ll. 106–19), trans. George Berthold, Maximus

Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985),
185 (altered). Cf. Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.4 (PG 90:1084B–C).
32
 Cf. Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1073C, 1084B); 42 (1325B–C, 1348D); 65 (1392A–B); Q. Thal.
2 (CCSG 7:51); 60 (CCSG 22:80); 64 (CCSG 22:235, 237); Capita de caritate 3.23–4 (PG
90:1024A–B).
33 On the logoi as causal or purposive principles of created things, see esp. Amb. Jo. 7 (PG

91:1077C–1085A); and as the spiritual “meanings” of Scripture, see esp. Amb. Jo. 37 (PG
91:1293A–C). Reason’s “analytical” function in relation to the logoi is suggested in Q. Thal. 60
(CCSG 22:77); but reason also aids the mind (νοῦς) in contemplating the logoi (e. g. Q. Thal.
49, CCSG 7:355–7).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 177

expressions of divine will.34 In my judgment it is a both / ​and, not an either / ​or.

Maximus does not entirely jettison the noetic dimension of the logoi in order to
define them exclusively in terms of divine intention and activity.
Evidence for this, I think, lies in his subtle but unmistakable reiteration of the
notion of a “simultaneous” or ideal creation preceding the actual one. Though he
does not dwell at length on the concept as do Philo, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa,
and Augustine, Maximus reinforces it when he states that the Creator-Logos
completed the logoi of creatures “all at once” (ἅπαξ), premeditating the plan of all
creation in a timeless instant.35 And he follows this up by reference to John 5:17,
Jesus’ rejoinder to his critics about working on the Sabbath. Maximus suggests
that in this text, Christ is intimating how the Father has always been “working”
in the cosmos to form, advance, and preserve his creatures, and Christ too (as
Logos) claims to have been working all along in the world as the Father’s princi-
pal agent together with the Spirit to bring that plan to fulfillment.36 In John 5:17,
then, Christ is describing the actualization of the creation that was simultane-
ously and potentially projected in the logoi.
Cosmologically, the logoi are the means by which the Logos – and Maximus
always has in mind the Logos as Christ in virtue of his multiple “incarnations”
or embodiments – brings order to the latent chaos of matter, encodes the natures
of diverse individual creatures, and projects their ultimate telos. The logoi in turn
sustain creatures’ inviolable natural constitution, but they also open them to a
horizon of interaction with the Creator and with one another under the diastemic
conditions of their history and life, where creatures move and behave according
to their own “modes of existence” (τρόποι ὑπάρξεως).37 There is a definite parallel
here with Augustine’s rationes seminales, but unlike Augustine in his De Genesi
ad litteram, Maximus does not detail the precise dynamics of the implanting of
the eternally preconceived logoi in the world. His most celebrated discussion, in
the seventh Ambiguum to John, where he is refuting and correcting the cosmol-
ogy of radical Origenists, treats the protology of the logoi only as a corollary of
his larger teleological and eschatological interests. Here he argues that rational
beings (λογικά) or souls do not preexist the material creation, but the logoi do
indeed preexist in the eternal Logos, and Maximus says, conversely, that the

34
 See Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London: James Clarke,
1957), 95. For the definition of the logoi as θελήματα, see Maximus, Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1085A–B);
Q. Thal. 13 (CCSG 7:95); cf. Dionysius, De divinis nominibus 5.8 (PTS 33:188).
35 Q. Thal. 2 (CCSG 7:51); cf. also Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1081A–B).
36 Q. Thal. 2 (CCSG 7:51). Maximus uses the formula here that “the Father approves this

work, the Son properly carries it out, and the Holy Spirit essentially completes both the Father’s
approval of it all and the Son’s execution of it …” Cf. Q. Thal. 60 (CCSG 22:79); Expositio ora-
tionis dominicae (CCSG 23:30).
37 On the inviolability of a creature’s nature (though not necessarily its “mode of existence”)

by virtue of its logos, see esp. Amb. Jo. 42 (PG 91:1341D–1345A).

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178 Paul M. Blowers

Logos is not only “in” the logoi but “is” the logoi to the extent the he embodies
himself in them.38
Because Maximus is not crystal clear on the precise ontology of the cosmic
logoi, scholars have scrambled to elucidate it. Are the logoi, some have asked,
equivalent to God’s “uncreated energies?” Are they created energies? Vladimir
Lossky and Torstein Tollefsen see them as God’s “creative energies,”39 while Vasil-
ios Karayiannis finds a two-staged immanence: “the logoi of beings are uncreated
as are the divine energies which are within the logoi of beings.”40 Lars Thunberg
rightly insists on a dialectical approach:
Are the logoi transcendent or immanent, are they created or uncreated? The answer must
be a double one. On the one hand Maximus affirms that the logoi are preexistent in God.
On the other hand, he also says that God brought them to their realization in concrete
creation, according to the general law of the continual presence of God and of the Logos.
In a certain way they are, thus, both transcendent and immanent. Yet, this immanence does
not invite us to conclude that they are created. As immanent they represent, and are, the
presence of the divine intention and principle of every single nature and species … As re-
alized in the existence of things, they materialize in the created order. Yet they are certainly
not themselves created or part of that created order in the sense that they are bound by its
material appearance or actual realization.41

In my judgment, however, Maximus’s lack of absolute clarity on the ontology of

the logoi is a function less of philosophical or theological reticence than of his
overriding emphasis on the freedom of Christ the Logos strategically to intervene
in the oikonomia, the live history of creatures’ progress and regress in the fulfill-
ment of the logoi with which they have been gifted. Maximus appropriates and
reworks Evagrius’s notion of the “logoi of providence and judgment” (λόγοι τῆς
προνοίας καὶ κρίσεως), hoping to rescue the idea from the Origenist framework
whereby “judgment” is the degradation of fallen spiritual beings into bodies, and
“providence” their divine redirection back to an original unity, so that both judg-
ment and providence express the singular divine intention to nurture – relation-
ally, and covenantally as it were – the unity and diversity of the whole creation.42
What is more, the Logos’s abiding work in the cosmos is not only preservative,
but a work of ever new creation and resourcefulness, of continuing relentlessly
to make “something” of the “nothing” out of which the world was formed and to
38 Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1081B–C).
39
 Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 95, 98; T. T. Tollefsen, The Christo-
centric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 170–1.
40
 ‘The Distinction between Essence and Energy according to Maximus the Confessor’, in
Constantinos Athanasopoulos  – Christoph Schneider (eds.), Divine Essence and Divine
Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy (Cambridge: James
Clarke, 2013), 251; see also V. Karayiannis, Maxime le Confesseur: essence et énergies de Dieu
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1993), 201–10.
41
 Man and the Cosmos: The Vision of St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 138.
42
 See esp. Amb. Jo. 10 (PG 91:1133D–1136A).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 179

which it is liable to lapse.43 Indeed, Maximus makes clear that ultimately there
is no understanding of the cosmological and ontological substructure of the
logoi, and the Logos’s governance thereof, without duly considering the Logos’s
identity and function as the very Wisdom of God, who manifests himself not
only from his immanence in the logoi but through his concrete demonstrations
and epiphanies in salvation history. Ambiguum 7, containing Maximus’s most
elaborate discussion of the logoi, is a commentary precisely on a statement of
Gregory Nazianzen regarding how the Wisdom of God can still be operative in
the midst of bodily suffering and the vagaries of carnal life.44 The Christian gospel
itself, Maximus well knew, is less about constructing an air-tight philosophical
cosmogony or cosmology than about witness to the Creator’s (= Christ’s) salvific
assumption of the contingencies and vicissitudes of his creation’s history. Salva-
tion in Christ and eschatology inevitably take precedence if scriptural revelation
is given privileged place in a doctrine of creation.

2. Maximus’s Refreshed Mythos of the “Recapitulation” of Creation

in Jesus Christ
I want to suggest here, then, that the great challenge before Maximus in cultivat-
ing his own ideas concerning creation ex nihilo was to find ways to insinuate logos
and mythos, or more precisely the perspectives of cosmology or ontology, on the
one hand, and the biblically-narrated oikonomia of creation and redemption on
the other.
In many respects, of course, Maximus remained confident that his major pre-
decessors had already begun successfully to do exactly this kind of insinuation of
perspectives. I have argued elsewhere that, beyond his most consistently authori-
tative sources, the Cappadocians and Dionysius, Maximus undertook a retrieval,
as it were, of Irenaeus and his doctrine of the recapitulation (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις)
of all things in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, which was Irenaeus’s own retriev-
al and reinterpretation of Pauline Christology and eschatology.45 In Irenaeus
Maximus found a model for privileging the perspective of oikonomia over that
of kosmogonia, by setting out the revelation of Jesus Christ as itself the original
“logic” of creation. Theologically speaking, creation ex nihilo was not the true
beginning of the world. Christ alone was the true ἀρχή in Genesis 1:1 (a point
reinforced by intervening commentators like Origen, Basil, and Ambrose), such
that creation itself was but one among other staging points on the way to the
full disclosure of the eternal Word. In Irenaeus’s striking phrase, “insofar as [the
Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be

43
 See esp. Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1080A).
44
 See Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1068D–1069A), quoting Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 14.7 (PG 35:865C).
45 See Paul Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the

World (Oxford: OUP, 2016), ch. 3.

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180 Paul M. Blowers

saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in
vain.”46 To the crucified Lamb (cf. Rev 5:3,9,12), the Word made flesh (John 1:14),
he also says, the Father originally opened up the “book” containing the secrets of
“heaven and earth” (Gen 1:1).47
In Maximus, this same christocentric and even cruciform logic of creation ex
nihilo comes into focus in three especially salient texts. In Ambiguum ad Johan-
nem 41, he sets this logic out in panoramic terms:
…[Christ] recapitulated in himself (cf. Eph 1:10), in a manner appropriate to God, all
things, showing that the whole creation is one, as if it were another human being, com-
pleted by the mutual coming together of all its members, inclining toward itself in the
wholeness of its existence, according to one, unique, simple, undefined, and unchangeable
idea: that it comes from nothing. Accordingly, all creation admits of one and the same, ab-
solutely undifferentiated principle (λόγον): that its existence is preceded by nonexistence.48

In Ad Thalassium 60, answering at length a query about the meaning of the

foreknowledge of Christ as a “pure and spotless lamb …[to be] manifested at
the end of time” (1 Peter 1:20), he spells out his own neo-Irenaean view, that the
incarnation of Jesus Christ is the recapitulation of all things, “a super-infinite plan
infinitely preexisting the ages,” with a view to which God created the very essenc-
es of all creatures.49 And in two of his Chapters on Theologia and Oikonomia, he
describes the intrinsic cruciformity of creation, and the divine intention for all
creatures, at the level of their very logoi, to manifest the cross and resurrection:
The mystery of the incarnation of the Logos holds the power of all the hidden logoi and
figures of Scripture as well as the knowledge of visible and intelligible creatures. Whoever
knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the logoi of these creatures. And
whoever has been initiated in the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose
(logos) for which God originally made all things.
All visible things require a cross, meaning the capacity of preempting the attraction to
them of those who engage them by sense experience. And all intelligible things need a bur-
ial, meaning the complete immobilization of those who engage them by intellect. For when
all activity and stimulus toward all (sensible and intelligible) things is suspended together
with all inclination to them, the Logos, who alone exists in and of himself, appears anew
as if rising from the dead, since he encompasses all those (created) things that come from
him, though none of them has any intrinsic connection to him at all by natural relation.
For he is the salvation of the saved by grace and not by nature.50

46 Adv. haer. 3.22.3 (SC 211:438).

47 Adv. haer. 4.20.2 (SC 100:628–30).
48 Amb. Jo. 41 (PG 91:1312A–B), trans. Nicholas Constas, On Difficulties in the Church Fa-

thers: The Ambigua of Maximos the Confessor, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), II, 115.
49 Q. Thal. 60 (CCSG 7:75–7).
50
 Cap. theol. et oecon. 1.66–67 (PG 90:1108A–B).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 181

These aphorisms are of course primarily instructions for contemplation and as-
ceticism, but their underlying assumption is that the deep structure of creation
elicits the eschatological gospel that awaits final consummation.
Here too we see, with respect to the logoi of creation, the same symbolic and
prophetic function that we find in Maximus’s treatment of the logoi of scriptural
revelation (sacred history). In Ad Thalassium 22 he indicates that the cosmic logoi
are (along with the “modes” of the virtues) “types” (τύποι) and “foreshadowings”
(προχαράγματα) of future supernatural benefits that in Christ have already be-
gun to be enjoyed because “the end of the ages has come upon us” (1 Cor 10:11).51
To say that the logoi are figurative or symbolic does not reduce them purely to
epistemic vectors toward the transcendent Logos (though they are that too),
since the logoi – the logoi together of creation and of Scripture, the two “books”
authored by the same Logos – are also real presences of the Word in virtue of
his “incarnation” or embodiment in them.52 Through the logoi, the Logos has
pre-evangelized all things and prepared them for the Christophany in which all
things are “recapitulated” according to their proportionate participation in the
work of Christ. Maximus frequently speaks of this ongoing work of recapitulation
as the “mystery of Christ,” within which the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is
perpetually culminating in the deification of humanity and the transformation
of all creatures.
And therefore whoever, by the exercise of wisdom, enables God to become incarnate
within him or her and, in fulfillment of this mystery, undergoes deification by grace, is
truly blessed, because that deification has no end. For he who bestows his grace on those
who are worthy of it is himself infinite in essence, and has the infinite and utterly limitless
power to deify humanity. Indeed, this divine power is not yet finished with those beings cre-
ated by it; rather, it is forever sustaining those – like us human beings – who have received
their existence from it. Without it they could not exist. This is why the text speaks of the
riches of his goodness (Eph 2:7), since God’s resplendent plan for our transformation unto
deification never ceases in its goodness toward us.53

3. Creatio ex nihilo et continua: The Logos’s Relentless and Enduring Action

in the World
Despite his robust confidence that the outworking of the mystery of Christ,
the recapitulation of God’s creative purposes, is already encoded in the logoi of
creation and Scripture, and despite his hopeful eschatology projecting that the
consummation of creation and the end of sacred history have already begun

51 Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:141–3).

52
 Amb. Jo. 7 (PG 91:1084C–D).
53
 Q. Thal. 22 (CCSG 7:143), trans. Paul Blowers, in Paul Blowers – Robert Wilken, On
the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 118.

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182 Paul M. Blowers

to transpire in the work of Christ,54 Maximus retains a fierce realism about the
labor of divine creation and recreation. As I noted, he retrieves from Irenaeus
a renewed commitment to the principle of recapitulation, but he also retrieves
from Athanasius and the Cappadocians (especially Gregory Nazianzen) a sobri-
ety about the vulnerability of the cosmos, and the conceptualizing of nonbeing
(nothingness) as a chaos that always threatens the order and thriving of created
beings – with creation itself being (at one level, and true to the biblical mythos)
an act of salvation from oblivion. Not far from his mind is Paul’s vision of a world
that still knows corruptibility and futility or vanity (Rom 8:19–23), which is both
a bane and a blessing, a birth pangs of the new creation.55 Indeed, the nothing-
ness or chaos underlying creaturely being effectively becomes the pure potenti-
ality or raw material of an ever new creation by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
When Christ spoke of “working still” along with the Father, he was speaking in
his own role as Creator, effecting a new integrity of creation, a new unity of its
universals and its particulars, and a new condition in which creatures that are by
nature moved by the Creator move on their own toward well-being.56
To make his point, Maximus exploited certain potent images from Gregory
Nazianzen to dramatize Christ’s (the Logos’s) enduring providential action of
disciplining and advancing creatures through the concrete experience of cor-
poreality, and of overcoming “nonbeing” in their pursuit of “well-being” and
ultimate “eternal well-being.” There are three especially salient images that depict
Christ’s deep involvement in pressing creatures toward such transformation and
deification. In Ambiguum 6, Maximus takes up Gregory’s image in Oration 14 of
the human body as the soul’s reluctant coworker (συνεργός) that drags it down
and binds it to the earth,57 and reworks it christologically into an image of the
Logos’s deep solidarity with humanity in virtue of his incarnation. The Word’s
self-abasement into a human womb goes hand in hand with his abasement into
the present condition (κατάστασις) of corporeal human life.58 He is hidden in the
womb of material existence waiting to be birthed.
Human beings … gazing through the womb of the material world, catch but a glimpse of
the Word who is concealed within created beings … For when compared to the ineffable
glory and splendor of the age to come, and to the kind of life that awaits us there, this
present life differs in no way from a womb swathed in darkness, in which, for the sake
of us who were infantile in mind, the infinitely perfect Word of God, lover of humanity,
became an infant.59

54
 For further analysis of this theme, see Paul Blowers, ‘Realized Eschatology in Maximus
the Confessor, Ad Thalassium 22’, in Elizabeth Livingstone (ed.), StPatr 32 (Leuven: Peeters,
1997), 258–63.
55 Cited by Maximus in Amb. Jo. 8 (PG 91:1104B).
56
 Q. Thal. 2 (CCSG 7:51).
57
 Or. 14.7 (PG 35:865B), apud Maximus, Amb. Jo. 6 (PG 91:1065B).
58 Amb. Jo. 6 (PG 91:1065C–1068B).
59
 Amb. Jo. 6 (1068B), trans. Constas, I, 73 (slightly altered).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 183

The point is that those devout souls who contemplate him there, in the heart of
the womb and in earthliness itself, and who ascetically overcome the material
flesh, emerge anew from that “womb” with Christ.60 The immediate target of
these instructions may have been monks but Maximus is really speaking of an
asceticism enjoined on all of rational creation.
In Ambiguum 8, Maximus capitalizes on another of Gregory’s images, also
from Oration 14, in a passage where he declares that it is not clear whether the
suffering of the poor and infirm comes from God “so long as matter bears with
it chaos (τὸ ἄτακτον), as in a flowing stream.”61 While his initial interest is theo-
dicy and the origins of bodily inequalities, anomalies, and infirmities, Maximus
quickly moves to the ways in which the Creator (the Logos) constructively uses
the latent chaos or disorder in corporeal existence (suffering, the passions, etc.)
as a redemptive buffeting for the sake of retraining humanity to its true vocation.
The Logos works precisely through this chaotic undercurrent in the “flowing
stream” of human existence to lead the faithful to a new order and stability. Bod-
ily life unfolds by an active / ​passive dialectic of “bearing up” and “being born
along” in the stream of materiality.62 It is an image for which Maximus finds
biblical substantiation in the prophet Jonah’s descent into the abyss, a typos of
humanity’s fall into chaos, “where it both bears, and is born along in, the unsta-
ble, helter-skelter delusion and confusion of material things.”63 Jonah, however,
is also for Maximus a type of Christ, and his descent into the abyss, into the
darkness of the deep, a prefiguration of Christ’s own incarnation and assumption
of this lingering chaos as a platform for his conquest of disorder and death, and
his renewal of creation.64
The final image, one of the most adventurous of all, appears in the very last
of Maximus’s Ambigua to John, where he engages Gregory’s colorful phrase, in
one of his Poemata moralia: “For the Logos on high plays in all sorts of forms,
mingling with his world here and there as he so desires.”65 Maximus’s interpreta-
tion of the image is extensive. Initially it recalls for him the Pauline image of the
“foolishness” of God (1 Cor 1:25) that is wiser than humanity and the weakness
of God that is stronger. Drawing on Dionysian apophaticism, he suggests that
60
 Amb. Jo. 6 (1068B–C).
61 Or. 14.30 (PG 35:897B), apud Maximus, Amb. Jo. 8 (PG 91:1101D).
62 Amb. Jo. 8 (PG 91:1105B). See my extended study of this text in Paul Blowers, ‘Bodily

Inequality, Material Chaos, and the Ethics of Equalization in Maximus the Confessor’, in Frances
Young et al. (eds.), StPatr 42 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 51–6.
63
 Q. Thal. 64 (CCSG 22:191,60–8).
64 Q. Thal. 64 (CCSG 22:195–7).
65 Gregory Nazianzen, Poemata theologica (moralia) 1.2.2 (PG 37:624A–625A), apud Max-

imus, Amb. 71 (PG 91:1408C): Παίζει γὰρ λόγος αἰπὺς ἐν εἴδεσι παντοδαποῖσι / ​Κιρνὰς, ὡς
ἐθέλει, κόσμον ἑόν ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα. I have essayed this image and Maximus’s interpretation of it
in Paul Blowers, ‘On the “Play” of Divine Providence in Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the
Confessor’, in Christopher Beeley (ed.), Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus: Essays on History,
Theology, and Culture (Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 183–201.

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184 Paul M. Blowers

this “foolishness” is a linguistic play or inversion intended precisely to evoke

the excess of divine wisdom. Probing deeper into the image, Maximus sees it as
suggestive of the Logos, in virtue of his incarnation, “playing” within the contin-
gencies of history:
This is also a paradox: that stability (στάσις) is seen as constantly flowing and being
borne away, an ever-moving flow providentially purposed by God for the improvement
(βελτιώσεως) of the beings governed within his economy, enabling those who are disci-
plined (παιδαγωγούμενους) through this stable flux to be wise, to hope always for transi-
tion to a better place, and to have faith in being deified by grace as the goal of this mystery
by inclining steadfastly toward God.66

What is more (and here Maximus draws on Dionysius), the playfulness of the
Logos conveys the “ecstasy” of the Creator, beguiled by his goodness and love
for the creation, in a state of abandon to interact with his creatures and to teach
them through the “playthings” of transitory existence the ways of and means to
a new world.67
Maximus, like his two-centuries-removed “teacher” Gregory, the master poet
and rhetorician, understood the power of evocative images to convey the hard
labor of the Creator in bringing about the new creation. At the end of the day,
Maximus too, like Gregory, sought to avoid depicting Christ’s involvement in
the world, his labor on behalf of the Father, as merely an abstract principle of
divine immanence.

III. Conclusion

My essay, while highlighting aspects of Maximus’s dependence on the variant

interpretations of creation ex nihilo in earlier patristic tradition, and eliciting
some of the functions of creation ex nihilo in his deeply integrated cosmology
and soteriology, hopefully has demonstrated that for Maximus, mythos was every
bit as crucial as logos (if not more so) in addressing this doctrine to Christian
audiences. He is clearly concerned for logos – the coherence of a Christian un-
derstanding of the origins and structure of the created universe, and echoes many
of the concerns of his predecessors such as the transcendence and freedom of
the Creator, the ontological status of matter, the diastemic chasm between Cre-
ator and creation, the definition of the nothingness or nonbeing out of which
God forms the cosmos, the interrelation between protology and teleology in
constructing a Christian cosmogony, and so on. His principal contribution in
this respect was his highly nuanced doctrine of the Logos-logoi relation as a way

66 Amb.
Jo. 71 (PG 91:1412B–C).
67
 Amb. Jo. 71 (1413B–1416D).

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 From Nonbeing to Eternal Well-Being 185

of tying together the Creator’s transcendence, immanence, and enduring “live”

activity in creation and new creation.
But Maximus’s greatest contribution, I would argue, lay in drawing out of
his cosmological logos a refreshed mythos of creation ex nihilo. His mythos of
creation was an imaginative retrieval of the Pauline and Irenaean doctrine of
the recapitulation of creation in Jesus Christ, a concerted effort to insinuate and
enrich Christian cosmology with more intensely christological, soteriological,
and eschatological perspectives. Indeed, his refreshed mythos of creation aimed
to show how Jesus Christ – as Creator, as Logos, as Wisdom, and as incarnate
Lord – was still at work both in the metaphysical bosom of the cosmos and in the
cultivation of the salvific and transformative effects of his death and resurrection.
For Maximus, Christ the Logos authors the “script,” as it were, both of creation
and of biblical revelation (sacred history), and his eschatological endeavor is that
of the lead character in an unfolding drama that began in his premeditation of
the logoi of all things and will end in his full self-disclosure in all things. Jesus
Christ alone leads creatures in the initial change from nonbeing to being in the
original creation, and in the transition from “being” to “well-being” to “eternal
well-being” that is the revelation of a new creation.

E-offprint of the author with publisher’s permission.