Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

20 INTRODUCTION
THE LITERARY FORMS OF HIS THEOLOGY
There are several manifestations of such conservatism in the theology
of Maximus. First of all, perhaps, there are the very literary forms in
which his theology is cast. He has two favoured forms. First, that of a
collection of paragraphs (or chapters, as they are usually called,
though they are normally quite short, sometimes no more than a
sentence or two). They are arranged in groups of one hundred —a
century, or in Greek, hekatontas—for instance, his four Centuries on
Love, or his two Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation. The genre
is monastic in origin, so far as the Christian tradition is concerned:
the great monastic theorist of the fourth century, Evagrius, composed
centuries, and there are later centuries from the fifth-century Bishop
of Photikê, Diadochus, whose work influenced Maximus, John of
Carpathos, who may have been Maximus’ contemporary, Nicetas
Stethatos, the eleventh-century disciple and biographer of St Symeon
the New Theologian and many others. 3 The reason for this
arrangement is twofold: first, practical, the brief chapters are
intended to convey understanding of aspects of the monk’s ascetic
struggle (or of the Christian faith) in an arresting and assimilable
fashion—they are to be read slowly and pondered, chapter by chapter;
second, symbolic, for the number one hundred is a symbol of perfection
or completeness (Evagrius provides a striking variant of this by
compiling ‘centuries’ that either, as in his Praktikos, conclude with a
collection of stories of the Desert Fathers, or, in his Gnostic Centuries,
contain only ninety chapters: in both cases suggesting symbolically
that theoretical instruction about the spiritual life cannot encompass
it, let alone be complete). In these ways, the century is presented as a
summary of traditional wisdom: in the case of centuries on the
spiritual life, a wisdom reaching back to the Desert Fathers of fourthcentury
Egypt, and often based on the collections of their sayings and
exploits, and beyond them to the great ascetics of the Scriptures,
notably the prophets Elijah and Elisha.
The second literary form in which Maximus’ theology is cast is that
of responses to questions raised with him by others. Sometimes this
reminds one of the classical tradition of scholia: comments, sometimes
quite lengthy, on difficult passages—originally in the great epic poems
of Homer. But this form also belongs—like the century, and perhaps
more fundamentally—to the tradition of monastic catechesis, to the
question-and-answer pattern that was followed in the instruction
given by a spiritual father to his disciples. Some monastic treatises
are cast directly in the form of questions and answers (the Greek term
for this kind of work is erôtapokriseis): early examples can be found in
the Macarian Homilies (e.g. nos. 12, 26 and 27 of the traditional