Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

COSMIC THEOLOGY 65
immediately issues in movement, and it is the purpose of movement to
find rest: rest will be our final state. 11 This correction of Origenism is
much more far-reaching. In starting from rest, the Origenists
manifested their fundamental affinity with Neoplatonism, which saw
the whole of reality as subject to the circular sequence of restprocession-return.
Maximus is familiar with Neoplatonic thought, and
picks up several of their ideas (mainly through Denys and his first
editor John of Scythopolis, or so it appears), but his rejection of
Origenism in the terms we have seen entails also a fundamental
rebuttal of Neoplatonism, with its ideas of emanation and return. For
Maximus we are created by God with a view to finally resting in him:
it is this that undergirds his Christian metaphysic. 12
But the fact that Maximus revises Origenist (and Neoplatonic) ideas
of reality enables him to preserve much of the Origenist analysis of
the condition of created beings as a state of movement, without
conceding anything to their myth of an original state of rest. Adam in
paradise should have moved towards and around God, and in that
way found rest. Instead he moved away from God and towards beings
lower than himself, and condemned himself to continual movement,
leading to further movement, and not to an ultimate rest at all. 13 It is
in terms like this—essentially in terms of desire and longing
frustrated by being misdirected—that Maximus is fond of analysing
the human condition. Other elements of Origenism rethought in
Maximus’ theology concern the Origenist understanding of the cosmos
as a place where we discover our fallen state and learn to love God.
Much of this Maximus is keen to take over. The doctrine of the logoi of
created beings, the fundamental meaning in accordance with which
they have been created, is an idea developed by Origen: it is these
logoi that form the main object of natural contemplation. In Greek
there is an obviousness about the links of this doctrine that is
obscured in English, for logos means reason, meaning, or word, and is
the same word as that used for the Word of God, through whom the
universe was created and who became Incarnate. The logos of created
things is present to them in a way analogous to the presence of the
Logos (the Word) in Christ. The Greek word for ‘rational’, logikos, is
the adjective from logos: it suggests participation in the Logos. There
is also a kind of obviousness about the idea that rational beings,
logikoi, should be able to understand the logoi of creation, but that,
cut off from the Logos, because of the Fall, the logoi of creation are
now obscure to them. All of these links run through Maximus’
theology. But in Maximus’ thought the doctrine of the logoi takes on
an anti-Origenist turn, for his doctrine of the integrity of the logoi
consorts ill with the Origenist contention that the cosmos is essentially
fallen. Similarly, the doctrine of providence and judgment—as central