Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

MAXIMUS’ SPIRITUAL THEOLOGY 41
aim of ascetic struggle, but only so that, in their purified state, they
can be reincorporated in the whole human being, itself consumed by a
passionate love for God. It is not so much detachment, as sublimation:
When the human intellect is constantly with God, the desire
grows beyond all measure into an intense longing for God and
the incensiveness is completely transformed into divine love. For
by continual participation in the divine radiance his intellect
becomes totally filled with light; and when it has reintegrated its
passible aspect, it redirects this aspect towards God, as we have
said, filling it with an incomprehensible and intense longing for
Him and with unceasing love, thus drawing it entirely away from
worldly things to the divine.
(CC II.48)
The irrational parts of the soul are not cut off, when the intellect is
with God, rather they are sublimated: desire into divine erôs and the
incensive part into divine agapê. In this treatment of apatheia,
which distinguishes it utterly from any form of indifference, and sees
it as a state embracing the lower parts of the soul, we again detect an
affinity with Diadochus of Photikê who uses the arresting imagery of
the ‘fire of apatheia’. 16
THEOLOGY AND CONTEMPLATION
There is a similar radical rethinking of Evagrian material in
Maximus’ understanding of the experience of the intellect in its
transition from the state of natural contemplation that to tbeologia,
contemplation of God Himself. Both Maximus and Evagrius use the
notion of ‘mere thoughts’ (psila noêmata) to elucidate what is
involved. But though they use the same term, they use it in almost
completely different ways. For Evagrius ‘mere thoughts’ are what we
strive to escape from, whereas for Maximus they are the sign of the
beginnings of natural contemplation. This is, I think, because for
Evagrius the passage from natural contemplation to theologia is
defined almost entirely in terms of a growing simplification: mere
thoughts (that is, thoughts uncorrupted by passion) are the product of
apatheia, and characteristic of the stage of contemplation. But it is
their plurality that strikes Evagrius: their multiplicity distracts the
intellect from the simplicity of God. The intellect is to rise above ‘mere
thoughts’ to a single simple thought in which it knows God. Maximus’
treatment is different, because his main concern is the purification of
love. ‘Mere thoughts’ are the way in which we apprehend the world
around us, when we have attained the state of apatheia: ‘if the thoughts