Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

2
THE SOURCES OF MAXIMUS’
THEOLOGY
Hans Urs von Balthasar prefaced his great study of the world-view of
St Maximus the Confessor with a quotation from Coleridge:
There is among us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every
possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion
that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as
well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every
rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other
man’s tank. 1
It is important to heed Balthasar’s warning, not because Maximus is
completely original, but precisely because his originality is that of a
mind that draws disparate things together in a profound and
compelling way. But he certainly has sources, and many of his ideas
can be traced back across the centuries, and not only across the
Christian centuries, for Maximus knew a good deal of classical
philosophy— in its later form that we dub ‘Neoplatonism’—so that
many of his ideas can be traced back to the great philosopher of the
fifth and fourth centuries BC, Plato, and even earlier. But he lived in
a civilization that valued tradition, that tended to think that history
was a process of degeneration and decay, rather than of progress, so
that consequently antiquity was a measure of truth. The ideal
condition would be to remain the same; any change was likely to be
corruption. But Paul Lemerle’s oft-quoted warning that ‘to represent
Byzantium as immutable over a period of eleven centuries is to fall
into a trap set by Byzantium itself’ 2 applies to Byzantine theology, as
much as to Byzantine political institutions. In both cases we need to
accustom ourselves to recognize originality in the attempt to preserve
an impression of permanence.