Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

THE SOURCES OF MAXIMUS’ THEOLOGY 23
goal of any Christian’s life. But sanctity is not simply a matter of
ascetic struggle: it is a response to God’s presence among us in the
Incarnation, a presence that can be experienced through the
Sacraments, pre-eminently the Eucharist. Hence the importance for
Maximus of the Sacraments: they are also part of tradition, part of the
continuing engagement with God, held out to us in the Scriptures. But
they have another importance, too, as Maximus makes clear in his
Mystagogia: for the ascetic struggle involved in responding to God is
not simply an individual matter, it is part of the process of overcoming
the divisions that have shattered the cosmos as a result of the Fall—
ascetic struggle has cosmic significance and this is made manifest in
the drama of the liturgy.
THE ASCETIC TRADITION
Something of what one might call the texture of tradition is becoming
apparent from all this. It will be useful to identify some of the threads
and colours of the pattern. Perhaps most fundamental is the ascetic
tradition into which Maximus had been initiated from the time he
sought the monastic habit. This was a tradition that the monks
themselves traced back to John the Baptist, and to the great figures of
the Old Testament—the prophets Elijah and Elisha, and beyond them,
Moses and the patriarchs. But more immediately it went back to the
Desert Fathers, the great figures of the fourth-century growth of
Christian monasticism in the years after the conversion of the
Emperor Constantine and the growing acceptability of the Church in
Mediterranean society. The collections of stories about the Desert
Fathers were primary reading in the monasteries. 7 Some of the
collections are arranged according to the names of the monastic
figures involved, alphabetically. 8 Others are arranged systematically,
in accordance with the lessons to be learnt from these stories
(and especially the sayings recorded). In these systematic collections
there can be discerned a structured understanding of the stages of the
spiritual life, and the principal architect of this theory of the spiritual
life was Evagrius. Maximus owed a great deal to the spirituality of
Evagrius, 9 who had lived in the fourth century, and eventually made
his way to the Egyptian desert where he spent the last fifteen years of
his life until his death in 399. He was a controversial figure: he sought
to interpret the spiritual life in categories (of largely Platonic
inspiration) derived from the ‘Christian Platonists of Alexandria’,
Clement (who had taught there at the end of the second century) and
Origen (who had taught, first at Alexandria, later at Caesarea in
Palestine, in the first half of the third century). This provoked the socalled
‘Origenist’ controversy (although in many respects Clement was