'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'I:

FROM COSMOS TO HIERARCHY IN DIONYSIOS THE AREOPAGITE

(SIXTH CENTURY) & MAxIMOS THE CONFESSOR (580-662)
Stephen C. HEADLEY
Contemporary man will have trouble seeing the logic of Saint Augustine's
(354-430) deduction: 'If all things were equal, nothing would exist'. What
is likely to be obscure is the unstated relation the bishop of Hippo pre-
swnes between the equality of modernity, a sort of imposed similitude,
and totality. In ancient Greek the term 'hierarchy', which describes the
construction of wholes, was invented a century after Saint Augustine's
death by a Syrian monk, who called himself Dionysios, in order to
describe the sacred order of relations of creatures to their Creator. Despite
the articulation of the one God through the relations of three Trinitarian
hypostases, the Christian God is always considered as united in the distinc-
tion of three persons.
2
The spectrum from totus, a whole, to nothing(ness)
I. 'Quia non essent omnia, si essent aequaLia ... ' (Sainr Augusrine, De diumis questionibus
octoginta tribus, question 41, linea 3).
2. Whar makes me. Chrisrian 'Son of God' rheism distincrive? A rapid juxcaposition of earlier
cheologies will bring our ifS specific characrer. Mosr primary religious expression is 'cosmo-
meisric', S[fucruring me world inrernally by insralling a muirirude of spirirs and divinities
(Assmann 2001). Monomeism is always a counrer-religion, juxraposed ro mese earlier
cosmo[heisms, creating social space in me 'inner self of man. For man [Q admir mac
me multimde of his idols is false gods is a painful experience, only accomplished by me
admission mac meir recognirion is sinful. 'The cosmic process loses ifS synergic character
ifir is conceived of as [he work of a single God.' (Assmann 2002: 230) The gods founded
societies 'and kingdoms, ofi:en only of a single ciry, bur nonemeless exercised power on an
earm mar was inseparable from namre and myth. Beginning in me founeenrh cenrUlY
before Chrisr, Mosaic monorheism used an entirely differenr scarting poinr, namely mar
man was creaced in me image of his Crearor. This was comemporaneous [Q me very dif-
ferenr inua-cosmic solar monorheism of Amenophis IV- Akhenaron. While Akhenacon
was uying ro engender a correcr undemanding of me world, Moses was insisring upon
fideliry co a new alliance established wirh a uanscendenr God mrough a reformularion
of me namre of individualiry and subjecriviry (Assmann 2002: 233) . Monomeism is
284 lA COHERENCE DES SOCl ETES
(nihilum) in Saint Augustine's maxim is today no longer commonly used
and therefore neither Dionysios' understanding of a hierarchy inherent
in creation nor Augustine's belief in a real personal, omnipotent Creator
is present in 'modern' minds to justifY Augustine's observation. The
virtue of difference, nowadays everywhere affirmed, has over the centu-
ries become a division favouring fragmentation and not convergence; in
the sixth-seventh century mindset, difference (o/a<popa) was what created
space for communion between persons. Such theology is no longer taken
seriously by social science, for which man has no 'society' with God.
Yet these concerns have not completely volatised in Western Europe. At
the heart of the nascent sociology of the late nineteenth century were the
issues of community and individual, i.e. locally expressed holisms versus
individuations (Milbank 1990, ch. 3-4). Daniel de Coppet was seriously
committed to understanding these issues in a historical perspective as one
could hear during many of his weekly seminars at the Ecole des hautes
etudes en sciences sociales in Paris. That these concepts (difference, hier-
archyand totality) had long held an important place in Western European
thought is reflected in their reappearance as soon as sociology went
searching for its methodological foundations. Although nowadays partially
determined by eighteenth-century political categories of the state, interde-
pendence and hierarchy have more ancient historical roots. To attribure the
nascent modern concept of person to Christianity as did Louis Dumont
(1983, ch. 1-2) opened a vast field of inquiry. Once beyond the level of
generalities, Bernard Meunier (2006) has recently shown how complex
the anthropological roots of prosoponlpersona (person) and vrcaaraaic;
(hypostasis or person) are. Here I will sharpen the focus by limiting myself
to two figures from the Eastern Mediterranean Christian world (Syrian
and Greek) who, in the sixth and seventh centuries, still belonged to the
period of late antiquity. We will see that the way in which the individual
normative; its God is jeal ous of the fidelity of the creatutes he creates. In this counter-
society man is liberated from the political pride of Pharaoh; by disti ngUi shing religion
from politics, a political theology ofiiberation from the servitude of Egypt is revealed in
an alliance with God. Here the strict prohibition of images underscores a fundamental
alliance, the accompaniment of the invisible God, that 'God is with us'. Any symbiotic
rel ationships of the mi cro- , macro- kind formerly proposed by a cosmotheism is for-
bidden. Monotheism resists polytheism and idolatry by proceeding 'as if God was not
given' (etiamsi daremus non esu Dew). The God of the Israeli tes, YHWH ehad, has his
own images, creatures, populating the earth in the form of men adhering to his alliance.
Morning and night, they proclaim their status in the great shema ('Hear 0 Israel: The
Lord our God is One .. .') (Deuteronmy 6: 4-9; II : 13-21; Numbets 15: 37-41).
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQlJAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
is subsumed into the 'hierarchic' faith stepping off from their experience
of the humanity of Christ. The similarity of Christ's hwnanity to ours
is expressed differently in Western and Eastern Christianity. The Eastern
Church hardly ever envisages Christ's humanity apart from his divinity.
Their approach requires a brief overview provided by this introduction.
The moderns, in order to understand human society, set aside cos-
mology and started afresh from the individual or from society as a whole.
In Marx, Tonnies, Durkheim and Weber, one feels that an inteHectual
revolution is taking place. Especially in Tonnies and Weber, the whole
to which one once belonged in Western Europe had become the nation
state of which they are individual citizens, furni shing them with rights
and certain obligations. After the seventeenth century, once the nation
had been presented as the true whole and God ushered off centre stage,
the state governed, with a new set of values, a 'genuine' totality, called
society, introduced as the backdrop against which all human action takes
place. We ought not to forget that the word 'society' at that time was a
neologism. From the seventeenth century onwards, the experience of
belonging to that earlier, vaster whole, God, as a member of a body of
which Christ was the head, was vanishing. Church came to be considered
by agnostics as just another institution establishing meaning in the social
landscape. In most European societies agnosticism and individualism cer-
tainly go hand in hand. In this sense they are treated as pseudo wholes
for the Christian God had more fully encompassed them. Without an
account of the rise and eclipse of Christianity, any description of these
realities is incomplete. Clearly something is left out, where neither the
kingdom, nor the nation state nor even society possess the encompassing
qualities that Christendom had exemplified.
Both society and the state, with their polities of varying scales, and
aided by the practice of evaluative indifference towards religions, derive
nation from a notion of totality initially present in Western Europe, due
to the Christian revelation (Milbank 1990: ch. I). Hence the need for
a true separation from this theology, achieved by abandoning the very
concept of an undivided whole. Biology, crowned with a naturalness,
and later driven by genetics, eventually replaced the earlier theology, but
they could not explain the basic issue of social bonds, hence the need for
a science of sociability. Where no un created divine energies penetrated
from God down through the cosmos to man, cosmology would hence-
forth have to become a different, more natural and neutral face than in
the one that included God. As the Creator was absent so also was any
structuring transcendence.
285
286 LA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
For the first time in Western Europe since the sixth century,
Christianity during the twentieth century lost the credibility needed to
bridge the gap from the personal self to the whole, the totality who is
God. That monotheistic link had fissured and needed restoration; this was
not the first time such a reconstruction loomed urgent. In the example
from the sixth and seventh centuries sketched out below, we will show
how an immensely influential cosmic holism of the sixth century was
revamped by a theologian (possibly a Syrian monk) who called him-
self Dionysios 'the Areopagite' after he had studied the terminology of
cosmology from Proclus (c. 410-485; head of the Neoplatonic school in
Athens, finally closed by Justinian in 529). Dionysios had set out to chris-
tianise the 'a-theistic cosmology' of the later Stoics.
3
IfDionysios turned to
the Neoplatonism ofProclus, retaining their terminology, he nevertheless
placed the Christian God in an impenetrable realm well beyond the ema-
nations of Stoic cosmology. A century later through the commentaries of
Maximos the Confessor (580-662) , Dionysios was then introduced into
mainstream Christian theology by this disciple, in a revised form.
This final period of late antiquity experienced a full-fledged spiritual
revolution which took the form of the doctrine of the incarnation of the
Word of God. What relationship to tOtality did Christianity propose?
If Christ incarnated a new relationship with mankind it was because
3. For the Stoics, God is simply one of the different forms of the real and hence cannot be
considered a Theos in the Christian sense of God. Both Hinduism and Islam ptoduced
variants of radical monism/ pantheism, where the being of God and man aJ"e funda-
mentally of one essence. But such 'unity in diversity' ontology can be taken to describe
totally distinct theological outlooks. Thus while al-Hal laj speaks of the uansposition of
roles (shath) wherein Allah enters into union with man, talking with a human tongue,
Ibn Arab] adopts a Neo-Platoni c quasi-pantheism. For the Hindu monists like SankaIa
and Ramanuja, from the outset there is only one being. In this sense their monism
is acosmic, for the uni verse has neirher macro nor micro dimensions. Later Western
European medieval. Chrisrian scholasric rheology is builr on rhe concepr of rhe 'analogy
of being' thar exisrs between the Creator and the creared. Being by itself is not being by
another; being is an analogical concept because it refers borh to the finite and the infinite
modes of existence, that of the creature and Creator. This has a more ancient Semitic
expression which we have just seen. A:; Saint Paul put it on the Areopagus in Athens, ' . .. In
Him, we live, we move and we are . .. ' (Acts 17: 28). Thus from the beginning, the expres-
sion of being in Christian cosmology was highl y personalised. Being was considered to be
derived from the inter-personal communion of God and man. Being is communion; this
is the distinctive characteristic of Christian theism. If an abyss separates the Creator from
the creature, he nonetheless lives ftom communion with his maker 'through whom all
things were made' . Earthquakes, tidal waves and human evil notwithstanding, cosmology
by definition expresses the benevolence of its Creator.
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
he encompassed humanity into his own relationship to his Father. Yet
the relationship of mankind and God in no way resembles an intra-
Trinitarian one since humanity is separated from the Word of God by
the abyss of creation. Christians are only sons of God by adoption. A
Christian becomes part of a whole through the relation of a creature with
the Creator. This whole implies, inter alia, a cosmology where the word
'transcendence'
4
also came to be used to indicate the bridge between the
created and un created, established by the incarnation of Jesus.
The central religious experience of Christians is one of being saved
from a universe riddled with mortality (and hence corruptibility, sin)
by being incorporated into Christ's resurrection from death. Salvation
is a performative in the sense that Christ accomplishes it. Thus Christ
says that he is the way, the truth and the life Oohn 14: 6). Creation is
revealed as a cosmology embodying this divine economy, a providential
plan which offers Christians a new mode of being (Tp6rroc, In
this article I am combining approaches to cosmology taken both from
the sociologist Louis Dumont and from patrology. As an anthropolo-
gist, I do not need to deconstruct the revealed truths of Christianity (see
Cannell 2006) . I am interested in the comparative sociology that a study
of early Christian cosmology permits. Even where I rely on patrologists
for their understanding of our two authors, by reading these fathers of
the Church I am seeking to understand their religious anthropology. In
fact, one cannot separate their theology from their anthropology.
After this general introduction to our subject, the topic of this article
can now be clearly set out. I will try to explain how the word 'hier-
archy' was used to describe the dynamics of the Christian relationship to
God and how this use later opened the floodgates to a certain individu-
alism. By this sixth century neologism, 'hierarchy', Dionysios meant the
outpouring of God's love for his creation, considered as a 'sacred order'
(apx1) of grace made adequate to each person. God's coming 'towards'
man is the precondition of any ascent towards He 'through whom all
things were made' . Studying the meaning of the Dionysian neologism
'hierarchy' enables us to perceive that it is totality, the Christian holism,
that structures personhood.
Like other words, for instance, cosmology (that ' beautiful, good' order),
or more recently, the notion of society, the word ' hierarchy' has different
meanings depending on the century of its use and the author employing it.
4. Today a new meaning for the word 'transcendence' has been added to its semantic field,
one that is pej orative, an imagined bridge leading towards an unknowable abyss.
287
288 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
While later Fathers of the Church also refered to the term 'hierarchy' in the
same sense as Dionysios, here we will refer exclusively to the Areopagite's
writings and their reconsideration in Saint Maximos' writings5 around
the rurn of the seventh century, approximately a century after Dionysios.
6
Contemporary usage starts with philosophical visions as opposed as Kant's
epistemology and Hegel's phenomenology and, after them, hierarchy is
then transposed into social science jargon before being hijacked by political
science where it has become a synonym for the systemic domination of
social stratification. For instance, when Donald E. Brown subtitles his 1988
book Hierarchy, History and Human Nature, The Social Origin of Historical
Consciousness, he is transposing the phenomena of social stratification onto
the idea of hierarchy (Brown 1988: 314-315). The justification for this very
modern usage of hierarchy is modern historiography, which, if nothing
else, confirms Louis Dumont's point that there is an intrinsic connection
between individualism and histOrical consciousness. As we will see below
theologians such as John Meyendorff and John Zizioulas will introduce
into the thought of Maxim os the Confessor dimensions of inter-subjective
consciousness that are likewise distinctly modern.
Hierarch: order as an adequati on of Divine compassion
In the Eastern Mediterranean, the notion of the world as an immense
cosmic play was at the centre of much StOic and Neo-Platonic religious
experience and thought. For sixth-century Christians, the most recent
and most influential intellectual exposition of the isomorphism between
society and the cosmos was that ofProclus. From this late Greek notion
of the well-ordered cosmos, Dionysios retained the vision of a harmo-
nious and indeed beautiful (in the sense of well-ordered) precision. On the
other hand, for this monk Christianity had revealed that the cosmos did
not emanate from God in ever-weaker circles of lesser being. Instead the
Lord of All creates the world out of nothing. Proclus had proposed a cos-
5 Translarions: Ponsoye: Ambigua 1994, Questions a Thalassios 1992, Lettres 1998;
Soriropoulos: Mystagogie; Touraille (Philokalia vo!. 1, 1995): Centuries sur l'amour,
Centuries sur ... l'incarnation.
6. Many excellenr srudies of their individual wrirings and aspecr:s of rheir rheology exisr.
We have exrensively borrowed from these: especially, Rene Roques (1983 [1954]) for
Dionysios and on rhe wrirings of Maximos, rhe works of Hans Urs von Balrhasar (J 947)
and Jean-Claude Larcher (1996).
' IF All THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
mology where in a logical dialectical process from the monad proceeded
three momenta: persistence (or identity); differentiating procession and
return (or union). Thus at each stage in the hierarchical descent, lower
hypostases
7
proceed from higher ones, whereas for Dionysios, at each dis-
tinct level there is a direct, unmediated and immediate relation to what is
beyond, the whole, that is God concerned by his creation and crearures.
Afrer the council of Chalcedon (451), Dionysios was for both the
Western and Eastern Church an important vectOr of a new vision of
existence and personhood. After the Fourth Ecumenical Council at
Chalcedon (45 I), 'being' previously classified by the Aristotelian tree of
Porphyry (c. 23 2-C. 303): essence, class, species, genus and individuals,
was in the process of being replaced by personhood (im6amaic;). The
grace of hierarchy is seen as the path of deification (8tomc;), through
which man comes to know God.
8
Dionysios was adapted by Maximos,
whose teaching on Christ shows how this dynamic hierarchy or ascent
takes place through and in Christ's personhood (hypostasis). Mankind's
adoption into Christ's mode of being is the foundation of hierarchy,
characterized.
The Christian Trinity brought creation and all mankind our of
nothing, endowing it with the will to know God expressed in its ascent
tOwards Him through this hierarchy. When Dionysios in the sixth cen-
tury coined the term hierarchy for the first time, it was to illustrate this
'sacred order'.9 He presents his vision in his four famous brief treatises:
7 Here rhe ancienr Greek rerm hypostasis meanr underlying realiry, whereas in Chrisrian
rheology the rerm came ro mean person(-hood).
8. For rhe neo-Plaronisrs procession and rerum (existlts et reditus) were timeless and unhis-
rorical. As Paul Rorem poinrs our (1996: ~ 3 5 ) , ' ... The uplifting is nor a=mplished by
the symbols [of the hierarchy] themselves, as if rhey possess any magical efficacy; ir occurs
in the process of inrerprering them ... ' Rorem calls this episremology one of unknowing.
Divine Names 13: 'The preference is for the way up through negarions, since this srands
the soul ourside everything which is correlarive with ir:s own finire narure ... beyond the
ourmosr boundaries of the world, the soul is broughr inro union wirh God Himself. . .'
While God's ecstasy rakes rhe form of an overflowing of His Goodness in a procession
rowards humaniry, mankind's ecsrasy rakes rhe form of a rerum ro God. Commenring
on rhe Divine Names, Secrion 7, Maximos the Confessor will wrire: 'The unknowing of
God ... is a knowledge which knows, in silence, thar God is unknown.'
9 I[ is imporranr ro nore rhar from rhe beginning, i.e. already in Dionysios' writing, rhe
meaning of rhe word ' hierarchy' moves rowards the norions of order (Tai;U;) and subor-
dina[ion with the accenr on srarus and puriry/power. Normative classificarions however
need nor have any sacred principle ar their inceprion. Nor in Dionysios was rhe opposire
of ' hierarchy' , 'anarchy' . .
289
290 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
!he Divine Names, !he Mystical!heology, !he Celestial Hierarchy and !he
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. 10
How then did Dionysios himself define hierarchy? In the third sec-
tion of !he Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysios provides six complementary
explanations which provide some clarification of what he means by his
neologism. The first definition merely claims that hierarchy is essentially
of divine and celestial origin.
(I) .. . What I must now do is explain what I mean by hierarchy and say what
advantage such hierarchy offers to those who are members of it. So, I hope that
my discourse will be guided by Christ ... the inspiration of what has been known
about hierarchy .... Keep these holy truths a secret in your hidden mind. Guard
their umty safe from the multiplicity of what is profane (Sources chretiennes [SC],
58: 86; Patrologica Graeca [PG) 145 b; trans. by Luibheid and Rorem 1987: IF).
(2) In my opinion a hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and an
activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine. And it is uplifted to the
imitation of God in ptoportion to the enlightenments divinely given to it .... The
goal (OK07fOC;) of hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God
and to be one with him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding
and action ... Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects,
to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed
of God himself It ensures that when its members have received this full and
divine splendour they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance
with God's will to beings further down the scale (SC 59: 87-88; PG 164d; trans.
ibid.:r53-I 54)
(3) If one talks then about hierarchy, what is meant is a certain perfect arrangement,
an image of the beauty of God which sacredly works out the mysteries of its own
enlightenment in the orders and levels of understanding of the hierarchy . . . (perfec-
tion) becomes what scripture calls a 'fellow workman of God' (I Cor. 3: 9; III John
8) ... Therefore when the hierardlic order lays it on some to be purified and on
others to do the purifYing, cause illumination; on some to receive illumination artd
on others to cause illumination . . . each will actually imitate God in the way suitable
to whatever role it has .... The beatitude of GO'd is something uncontaminated by
dissimilarity ... It is also the cause of every hierarchy artd yet it surpasses by fur every
sacred thing (Se 59: 90; PG 165 b-c; trarts. by Luibheid artd Rorem 1987: 198).
Elsewhere Dionysios says that hierarchy is:
(4) ... The common goal of every hierarchy consists of the continuous love of God
artd of things divine ... It consists of seeing things as they really are ... It consists
of an inspired participation in the one-like perfection and in the one itself, as fur
as is possible ... (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1,3; PG 376a; trans. by Luibheid artd
Rorem 1987: 198).
10. Dionysios is known to have written others, but none survive.
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
(5) When we talk of yearning, whether this be in God or in an angel, whether
in the mind or in the spirit or in nature we should think of a unifYing and co-
mingling power which moves the superior to provide for the subordinate, to be
in communion with peer and subordinate to return to the superior and the out-
standing (Divine Names IV, 15; PG 7I3a-b; trans. ibid. 1987: 83).
(6) I have set out in due order the many yearnings springing from the One and
I have explained the nature and the knowledge and power appropriate to the
yearnings within the world and beyond (Divine Names IV, 16; PG 713 b-c; trans.
ibid. 1987: 83) .
If we bring together these six explanations, we understand that: (I) a
member of this hierarchy, of this order, is one of a living aggregate. Christ
has articulated this hierarchy as a church, ecclesia, i.e. (2) this teleology
is befitting (eW1Tpmtc;); it makes each man participate in a holy order
(rMtc;) by imitating God according to the light and image which is in
each one of us. (3) To be part of the hierarchy is to cooperate with God
(see I Cor. 3: 9
11
) and this implies each person being purified as he/she
needs be. This is both a personal and a collective process where (4) the
unifying love of God, his Providence, being higher, helps the lower purifY
itself This capacity expresses both a received and given light at each level.
So in the EcclesiasticaL Hierarchy the meaning and the finality of this hier-
archy are explained as that of the 'sacramental', 'global' activity of purifi-
cation, illumination and perfectloning (Rogues 1983 [1954]: 279-280).
Deification can only take place if man by grace partakes of the uncre-
ated energies of the Trinity. Seraphima Konstantinovsky (2002: 22) pro-
vides a clarification of what Dionysios the Areopagite meant by hierarchy.
She writes that
... (W)hat hierarchies pass on to the lower levels is not being, but union with the
divine created energies and, in effect, deification. Now, since all levels of being
have been directly created by God artd there is therefore no emanation of being,
only direct communion with the creator can dei fY. Thus in Dionysian cosmology,
the ' higher' beings do not uplift the ' lower' ones to a union with themselves, but
rather to a direct union with their Creator.
The concept of hierarchy is a critical one for conceptualising transcend-
ence, worlds beyond our contemporary mind name of secularisation and
individualism. Hierarchy here does not imply domination, but in Christianity
11. The reference to Saint Paul's first epistle to me Corinthians (3: 9) involves a different metaphor
for an organic whole, mat of the buiJding or temple to which each Christian is incorporated
as a living srone; what me third episde oOohn (Verse 8) calls 'fellow workers for the truth'.
291
292 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
has the positive connotation of divine guidance, a sacred order infused into all
creation. Riou notes that the doctrine of these divine energies,
... about les schemas verticaux de participation et de causalite pour leur substiruer
le symbole d'une union synergique, sans emanation du superieur dans l'inferieur
ni assomption de I'inferieur dans le superieur, mais compenerration collaborante,
sans qu' il y ait fusion. (1973: 62.)12
On the other hand, John Meyendorffhas claimed (1969: 139, 147) that
the Dionysian concept of hierarchy is not without a certain individualistic
and anti-ecclesial bias. For Meyendorff, the Christian Eucharist has the
tendency to become for Dionysios a symbolic drama where only certain
well-initiated individuals actually penetrate the mystery. If for Dionysios'
hierarchy was meant' ... to express the simple idea that all beings are cre-
ated for union with God', this would explain Dionysios' reluctance to
resort to the Chalcedonian concept of personhood or hypostasis (Christ
has two natutes, human and divine in one person) due to 'sensible-intel-
ligible' dualism that his doctrine of hierarchy entails (Meyendorff 1969:
137,139,141,143). Dionysios says that 'Jesus', the Incarnate Lord, is the
head of every hierarchy (Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1,1 [372a]). Later when
Maximos the Confessor incorporates Dionysios into mainstream Christian
theology, he will emphasise the collective dimension of salvation through
Christ's incarnation by envisaging all hierarchy in terms of the relationship
of the human and divine accomplished in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Here ontology, the science of being, is replaced by a theology of existence
based on a vision of distinction in union.
Hierarchy as distinction (O/QKP/O/C;) uniting Man to God
l
3
Dionysios differs from Plato's understanding of union with God (the
mind's rising above the concerns of the body, Iheaetetus 176 a-b) and
Plotinus' (201-270) formulation of a fully divine man (led to the One by
knowing himself, Enneads V, 9, I). Dionysios insists that it is not through
the articulation of hierarchies involving the macro- and micro-cosmos,
but a double mediation through the angelic and ecclesiastical hierarchies
12. Following M. von Ivanka; see Sources chretiennes 59: 89, note 3.
13. According to Andrew Louth (1996: 130), ' hierarchy' isa word coined by Dionysios himsel
' IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXI ST'
that permit man to become fully deified in the one and only God (Divine
Names II,rr; trans. by Luibheid 1987= 66-67).
In his treatise On Divines Names (II.2), Dionysios writes that,
although 'the Word of God operates sometimes without, sometimes with
distinctions' (trans. by Luibhied 1987= 60), God is not a whole made
from the sum of his attributes. Dionysios began by claiming:
... All the Names appropriate to God are praised regarding the whole, entire, full,
complete divinity, rather than any part of it, and that they all refer indivisibly;
absolutely, unreservedly, and rotaiJy to God in his entirety (On Divines Names
11.1; [Cans. ibid. 1987: 58) .
This affirmation derives from the initial revelation of the name of God
to Moses (Exodus 3: 14) 'I am that I am (E/ryt! ascher Ehye)', from the
apophatic vision that Dionysios holds of the unity of the Trinity as that of a
Godhead beyond Deity whose subsistence is beyond being. In this chapter
Dionysios explains the relation of the three persons of the Trinity who are
not confused (11. 5; 641D), and yet linked by a sacred dance (xopita) of
movement ' beyond movement' joining the three persons of the Trinity in
the unity of the Godhead. Later in this same chapter of the Divine Names,
Dionysios writes about the difference between indifference (the Godhead
beyond Deity) and benign processions or differentiation (Olll:KPI(JtC;):
... Our theological tradition assertS that the unities [i.e. divine unity] are the
hidden and permanent, supreme foundations of a steadfasmess which is more
than ineffable and more than unknowable. They say that the differentiations
within the Godhead have to do with the benign precessions and revelation of
God . . . (II,4; PG 640d; trans. ibid. 1987: 61).
. .. The term 'divine differentiations' is given to the benevolent processions of the
supreme Godhead ... And it becomes differentiated in a unified way. It is multi-
plied and yet remains singular. It is dispensed to all without ceasing to be a unity
(If,IO; PG 649 b; trans. ibid. 1987: 66) .
Dionysios is notorious for avoiding any explanation of the union of
Christ's human and divine natures. However it is clear that these are not
Neo-Platonic emanations; the incarnation is related to that process by
which the One, the Good, is generously diffused, constituting a hierarchy
of beings categorised by their own capacity to reflect his light. The Word of
God comes out of the One and enters the world of man, that of diversity
and division. It is in this sense that for Dionysios hierarchy is created out of
distinctions. That the space of distinctions (ollx(JTl1fla) is good, creating the
possibility of communion, arises from Dionysios's positive evaluation of
difference (Oia<popa) in the cosmos. Even if division (Oiaip(Jlc;) leads to dis-
rance (OIlX(JTa(JtC;) and finally to decomposition (ola(JTCa(JtC;) into fragments,
293
294
lA COHERENCE DES SOCIETES
this vision (already clearly expressed by Gregory ofNyssa [c. 33
o
-
c
. 395])
of distinction in the sense of expansion in Dionysios, and even
more so in Maximos, is the expression of the movement of God's compas-
sionate condescension towards His creation. As priest Christ initiates our
human intelligence into understanding this providence (npovOLa).
It is easy, when reading Dionysios, to agree with Roques (19
8
3 [1954]:
28
4) that Dionysios has sacrificed direct personal contact between Christ
and mankind to this vision of hierarchical mediation, but does Dionysios
really attempt to incorporate the Neo-platonic cosmology and its hierar-
chic laws? The implications of the creation of the world and mankind ex
nihilo had of course been the subject of much thought on the part of the
fourth century Church fathers, John Chrysostom (347-407), Gregory of
Nazianzus (329-390) and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-
c
. 395) In particular,
Gregory of Nyssa had developed an understanding of man as an 'exten-
sion' in time having the 'dimension' of a temporal 'interval' (8UXIJTlJpa),
a specific kind of difference, a 'spacing' comprising movement. This 'dis-
tance' was opened by the category of 'when', of duration. In
this cosmology, time and space become those limitations on the world, yet
the categories of how a person is. Thus becoming is movement
either limited or circular movement. When can one measure the cosmos
in which mankind exists? The answer of Dionysios and Maximos will be,
during deification. One comes to know God's creation by discerning in all
matter the logoi of He who created it. Clearly this 'wordly' knowledge is
the result of a process of sanctification very different from our own world
view. The ,lOYOL of differentiated creation reflect together the purpose of
the Creator and these ,l0YOI, because they pre-existed in God, are held
together by His Logos. It will remain for Maximos the Confessor to insist
that these persons are participating members in the ensemble of ,lOYOI
which drive the economy of salvation coordinated by Christ's incarnation
in the flesh (Thunberg 1995 [1965]: 73-
80
).
Individualism in Dionysios
The sixth century world of the Greek fathers of the church is not that
inherited by the medieval West from Saint Augustine. As mentioned in
passing above, the veneration of the humanity of Christ, V1adimir Lossky
(19
6
7: 60) is almost foreign to Eastern Christianity. This follows on
from the formulations of the first council in Nicea (convoked in 3
2
5 by
the Emperor Constantine) and the Fourth Ecumenical Council held in
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
Chalcedon (45 I) culminating in the 'ineffable' distinctions between the
single nature of the Godhead and three persons in the Trinity. For, being
theological clarifications, these dogmas were also of the utmost importance
sociologically. They attempted to distinguish the Christian Oecumene
from the non-Christian one, initially the Persian, and later the Arab.
For Dionysios, knowing God apophatically (theological descrip-
tion of God in terms of what he is not) can never occur by knowing
Christ apart from the other two persons of the Trinity. The Ecumenical
Councils made it clear that, if God is one, the three persons of the one
God cannot be treated separately one from another. Dionysios in On the
Divine Names proposes that the only way to come to know the Triune
God is through grace and light, which he also calls natural energies
God's essence remains unknowable, but, as V1adimir Lossky
explains (1963: 100-101) his energies descend towards man ' ... out of
his nature .. .' to make this Creator known. These processions or mani-
festations reveal God as darkness (IJKo-rod. As the cause of all being, God
does not exist, since as the cause of all existence, he is above existence,
just as God is not unity but the cause of all unity.
If God brings everything together into a unity without confusion, if
'Perfect peace ranges totally through all things with the simple undiluted
presence of its unifying power' (Divine Names XI,2; Luibheid 1987: 122),
what of those who do not want such a peace? Dionysios replies:
'There are many things which take pleasure in being other, different, and distinct,
and they would never freely choose ro be at rest'. This is true, assuming that what
is meant here is that being other and being different refer to the individuality of
each thjng and to the fact that nothing tries to lose its individuality. Yet, as I will
try ro show, this situation is itself due to the desire for peace For every-
thing loves to be at peace with itself, to be at one, and never to move or fall away
from its own existence and from what it has. And perfect Peace is there as a gift,
guarding without confusion the individuality of each ... Yet there is nothing which
has rotally fallen away from unity. That which is completely unstable, unbounded,
un-established, undefined, has neither being nor place among the things that have
being (Divine Names XI,3 and 5, Loubheid 1987= 123).
Did Dionysios develop a theology of private personal holiness reserved
for an elite, where only the totally purified could be said to stand before
God? Unlike modern Orthodox commentators, however, Maximos the
Confessor, while correcting certain aspects of Dionysios' thought, never
criticized Dionysios for depicting Christ's presence in the world only
through hierarchical intermediaries, which would have compromised any
ecclesiological holism. Modern critics, who are not monks like Dionysios
295
296 LA COHERENCE DES SOCl ETES
and Maximos, and who have probably themselves been influenced by
modern European individualism, have found Dionysios lacking in a
sense of congregation. An Anglican Bishop, Westcott wrote in 189 I:
(Oionysios) fails indeed by neglecting ro take in the whole breadth of the
Gospel ... The whole view of life which he offers is essentiaJly individual and per-
sonal and subjective; the one man is the supreme object in whose progress his
interest is engaged. Though he gives a magnificent view of the mutuaJ coherence
of aJI the parrs of the moraJ and physical worlds, yet he turns with the deepest
satisfaction ro the solirary monk, isolated and self-absorbed, as the highest rype
of Christian energy ... And so it is that he is unable to see in their full beaury and
srrength those instincrs and faculties of man, by which he is impelled rowards
sociaJ combination ... (ci ted by Andrew Louth 1989: ch. 8).
Amongst modern theologians and church historians, John Meyendorff
and Alexander Schmemann shared Westcott's criticism of Dionysios.
As Orthodox churchmen they had to deal with the damage to liturgical
theology and ecclesiology caused by Dionysios' re-interpretation of the
Christian liturgy as mystagogy. They were alarmed about the individualistic
aspect ofDionysios' spirituality. Does Dionysios present liturgy as spectacle
in the costume of symbolism? Here Andrew Louth comes to Dionysios'
defence, saying that, although it is partially true that the sacraments become
spectacle, an 'ecclesial ballet', his vision of hierarchy, mutual inter-depend-
ence and dramatic movement in terms of the path of monastic purifica-
tion is a very organic part of his understanding of liturgy. Louth feels that
to attack Dionysios' mystagogy misunderstands what Dionysios meant by
hierarchy. 14 Indeed Seraphima Konstantinovsky (2002: 16-17) goes on to
say that they have substituted the modern understanding of hierarchy (see
note 2) for Dionysios' own comprehension of it. To attribute to the term
'hierarchy' not what Dionysios meant, but what we now mean by the term
'hierarchy', something independent of us in which we are forced to partici-
pate, is to read the present into the past. I 5 In fact says Louth (1989: 132),
the cosmos and its hierarchies reveal God to us only because we are a part of
these hierarchies. Louth counters that it is the modern idea of community
14. Tcironen (2007: 66---67), who srudied under Louth, also disputes mis. He claims mat, for
the Cappodocians, the subjectiviry of the mind is not a category of omology, and me inter-
subjeaiviry of the person is only a recent philosophical preoccupation. He cites as proof
de HaJJeux's well-known 1975 article which concludes ' ... what they [the Cappadociansl
denoted by the intra-divine KOlvwvia was the common nature and not the "dialogicaJ' inter-
personal relations' (1990 reprint: 265). Obviously to discuss Zizioulas' reburral of this attack
as it appears in his 2006 Communion and Otherness would require anomer whole article.
15. This is also Sistet Seraphima' s point (Konstaminovsky 2002: 16-17)
' IF All THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
and community worship that are really individualistic because the indi-
viduals that make up the community 'should' all do everything together. All
this is asking whether one goes to church to save the church or to be saved
by the communion which the church already constitutes.
Louth (1989: 133) writes 'the idea of a hierarchical society--even
though the word hierarchy is Deny's-is a more natural presupposition in
late antique society than any other: certainly more natural that our own
notions of "social contract" which only go back to the Enlightenment
(and which has hardly stood the test of even that short time)' (1989:
133). Here Louth invokes the analyses ofMary Douglas (1973: Ch.4)i
for this anthropologist societies with a strong grid of shared values and a
powerful system of group control carry with them a clear socio-cosmic
isomorphism. As Daniel de Coppet and Andre Iteanu stated at the outset
of a series of essays on the theme of the claims of the cosmos to whole-
ness: 'no higher values than those which characterise it may exist' (1995:
I). This leads them on to claim (1995: 3) that, ' In Europe, the assump-
tion of successive cosmologies, which all claimed universality, appears
as directly responsible for the degradation of the idea of society.' If the
cosmopolitan quality of the world oflate Mediterranean antiquity is ana-
lysed seriously, one must ask how were these diverse worlds interrelated?
The answer to this question would require a history of the appearance
of the very notion of society in modern northern European languages,
which is quite beyond the scope of this chapter.
Concretely, are these societies in the Eastern Mediterranean in the
sixth and seventh centuries seeing, living and experiencing themselves
through that whole who is God?' 6 Garth Fowden (1993) has shown that
for late antiquity the federating value of the new empires, the first and
second Byzantium and the first two caliphates in Damascus and Bagdhad,
was monotheism. They were commonwealths whose cultures, languages
and social networks were distinct, but who shared a common monothe-
istic deity, Allah or the Trinity. As proof, he proposes that we notice that
the armies of the first caliphate in Damascus were composed of a majority
of non-Arab soldiers. Religion, not ethnicity, was the binding factor.
Rerurning to Dionysios, Andrew Louth remarks (1989: 134) that
'Denys' vision is remarkable because, on the one hand, his understanding
of hierarchy makes possible a rich symbolic system in terms of which we
I. 6. Peter Brown in an essay on me holy Man (1971; reproduced in Lasocieteet le sacrt dam l'A1ltiquiti
tardive, 1985: 61) states that most of what we know of me daily lives of me peasantries of me
eastern end of me Mediterranean comes /Tom me sayings and lives of me asceticaJ fumers.
297
298 LA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
can understand God and the cosmos and our place within it, and, on the
other, he finds room within this strictly hierarchical society for an escape
from it, beyond it, by transcending symbols and realising directly one's
relationship with God as his creature, the creature of his love.' Here Louth
refers to Dionysios' negative or apophatic theology. One wants to ask here
whether this sixth century Syrian monk's attraction to the vocabulary of
neo-Platonism was due to his conscious admiration for Proclus' and the
Platonic tradition (Louth 1989: 11-' .. . the truths that Plato grasped
belong to Christ. . .'), or due to an understanding that the incarnation
of the Word of God, what is 'beyond being', must be mediated (Prod us'
principal preoccupation). Certainly the graded levels of reality, the hier-
archies as Dionysios called them, were articulated ritually, theurgically.
Finally for Dionysios, liturgy is more valuable than philosophical wisdom,
if one understands it as revealed mystery, i.e. the manifestation of God's
love for mankind revealed in Christ (Louth 1989: 28).
The nexus of this debate over the meditating capacities of hierarchy,
although it is a theological one hanging on the thread of faith, does
concern the relation of the cosmos to transcendence. In the treatise
Mystical Theology, Sections Three and Four define the transcendent as
the cause of all material and intelligible reality which itself is immate-
rial and unintelligible. Maximos the Confessor will transfer the centre
of the drama of salvation in Christ from that of the interrelations of the
different levels of the cosmos to that of the relation of the transcendent
to the human person conceived as a microcosm. Mediation, grace, the
outpouring of Divine Love, will retain their central value in the relation
of Christ, the Mediator, to the micro-cosmic man.
Maximos the Confessor's (580-662)
non-cosmological hierarchy
Milbank (1990: 62-65) has insisted that if Durkheim understands social
structure as following on from religion, it is because society only exists
through a symbolic self-representation. Shortly before Durkheim, Auguste
Comte wondered whether social change was not reflected in alternative
conceptions of the 'natural' order. In recent theories of the secularisation of
religion, social reality! 7 is not even located as the backdrop on which a reli-
17. Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary (I879: 171 5) indicates that until Augustine
(c. 430 AD), in prose the adjective for social, as its root indicates (sec-; sequor), indicates
' IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
gious revelation is written. For totally different reasons, this is also true of
Maximos the Confessor where change, described in terms of a progressive
rapprochement with God, is the contribution of monotheism to preserve
the health of the body social. Society's internal coherence is rooted in that
value provided by the wholeness of God. In the late Roman (Byzantine)
empire where monotheism was the empire's religion, the way people speak
and reason about the One belies their notion of person, hierarchy, and
transcendence. In this section we will look at how Maximos reinterprets
Dionysios' holism as a non-cosmological hierarchy during the seventh cen-
tury struggle with the heresy of monotheletism. 18
Initially, in the Ambigua, Maximos' book explaining the ambiguous
passages in Dionysios the Areopagite and Gregory of Nyssa, Maximos
explicitly agrees with Dionysios' definition of oneness and cites (Ambigua
41: 1313a) his predecessor with approval:
For nothing of what is universal and containing (others) and generic can be
divided into what is parrial and contained and particular ... For everything generic,
according to its own logos, is wholly present, indivisibly by mode of unity, to those
subordinate wholes, and the particular as a whole is considered as within a genus.
This capacity for encompassment often demonstrates features of
inversion. In the theistic revelation which Maximos contemplates (see
Ambigua 41; translated in Ponsoye 1994: 292-299), the role of God's
providence in each person's destiny precludes any individualism. Man's
role as mediator involves his using his God-given 'rational' (AOY/KOe;-)
nature to reunite to God the five divisions that characterise the universe.
a 'sharing, a fellow', while the more common noun societas was a fellowship, a union for
a common purpose. Benveniste (vol. 1,1969: 363-373) indicates that the western vari-
ants of Indo-European designated the people by *teutd; while at the eastern end of this
linguistic area the Indo-Iranian arya (people) derived from ari, meaning a person of my
people. The Greek and Latin poLis/civitas, were initially very different, but both came to
indicate the institution of the ensemble of citizens. Clearly society is a rather late notion,
and had difficulty separating itself out from a reAexive, of 'my' body social. See Seculdr
Theories on ReLigion: CUrI'ent Perspectives, edited by Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein,
Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000.
18. The belief in one and only one will/energy in Christ who has both a human and a divine
nature was propagated by the Emperor Heraclius who, in 624, was beginning to reconcile
the Monophysites in the eastern cnd of the Mediterranean. In 634 Heraclius prohibited
further discussion of the issue but finall y in 681 thanks, largely, to Maximos' opposition
(confession which COSt him his life) , the Sixth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople
proclaimed that two wills in Christ, divine and human, was the orthodox faith.
299
300 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
Maximos envisages this in five stages of reunion, which overlap and so are
not quite as distinct as in the five stages represented below:
- The reuniting of the creared and the uncreated.
- The establishmenr of a passionless relation between men and women; through
rhe purity of man's behaviour, earth is to be made one with paradise.
- Imitating the complete God-ward direction of the angels, the difference
between knowing and non-knowing is to be abolished.
- Men then reconciling the sensible and intelligible worlds.
- Finally, a life by grace through communion with God abolishing the rlifference
between God and man, yet still this deification involves no ontological identity
between the two.
How should we characterize this seventh-century Christian hierarchy
presented here? It is basically 'social'. The structure of man's relation to
God, that model of the whole (person) which pre-exists all creation, is
articulated by a divine relationship which founds man's intrinsic value.
'9
This value is grounded in the belief that man is created in God's image
such that he can indeed resemble his Creator through the praxis of the
truth revealed in himself. In terms of public behaviour, the hierarchical
threshold of the fundamental ritual of Christianity, the Eucharist, is a
form of commensality where the creature communes with his Creator.
This is explained in detail in Maximos' commentary on the 'divine' lit-
urgy, entitled Mystagogy (trans. by Sotiropoulos 2001).
In that commentary, Maximos the Confessor states (Mystagogy 7;
see Thunberg 1995 [1965J: 142-143) that mankind, reborn in Christ,
possesses a new mode of existence, shepherding himself and the cosmos
towards a transformation and recapitulation in Christ. There is a sense
in which Maximos' cosmology is a double inversion of the Neo-Platonic
Greek notion that the cosmos was a macrocosm vis-a.-vis society. If man is
understood to be the microcosm, then there are three poles in this hierar-
19. There is a vety large corpus of commenraty on rhe verse in Genesis I: 26 'Ler us make
man in our own image and likeness.' This passage is extraordinary because thtoughour
rhe Old Testamenr the accenr is unceasingly on rhe fact rhar 'man is dust and ashes
before God, ... thar he cannor srand before his holiness' (G. Kinel IT: 390). Made from
dusr from the earth ('afar min ha'adamah) and a breath oflife (rishllUlt haim) from God,
man's Elohim narure indicares rhar he is by nature from above, hence the image (tselem)
and resemblance (demur) to his Creator. In the New Testament rh is is raken up again,
especially in the episrles ofSr. Paul (1 Cor. I 5: 45; Col. 3: IQ) where the restorarion of the
rlivine likeness of creation with God is identical with being incorporated inro fellowship
with Chrisr. See G. Kinel IT: 38r-397.
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
chical transformation. This can be portrayed as taking place in three pro-
gressive oppositions. Here ( ::::) = is encompassed by; C = encompasses):
Microcosm ::::) macrocosm (the Greek 'pagan' conception)
Microcosm C macrocosm (the cosmology of Dionysios)
Mankind ::::) Trinity (for Maximos mankind orchestrates
a cosmic liturgy)
For Maximos, the microcosm, man, is the centre of the cosmos and
in that sense encompasses it. And if man is at the centre, this is because
the deification of man is a pre-condition for the transfiguration of the
(rest of the) world. Maximos' understanding of what is presented by
Dionysios the Areopagite (Divine Names XIII, 2) is couched in terms of
logical oppositions
2 0
:
The name 'One' means that God is uniquely all things through the transcend-
ence of the one unity and thar he is the cause of all without ever departing from
that oneness ... For multiplicity is not without participation in the One, but that
which is many in its parts is one as a whole.
The forty-first Ambigua of Maximos explains how man has to be born
twice over so that the destructive aspects of the division of being found in
him may be erased, so that the positive aspects of the dichotomy of body
and soul may play their role. Andrew Louth paraphrases this as follows:
. .. The human being has been created to hold together these divisions of being,
which are all reflected in the human constirution. The human person is therefore
to be regarded as a microcosm and bond of creacion, mediating between all the
divisions. But because of the Fall , the human person can no longer fulfil this func-
tion. Therefore, in the incarnation. God has recapirulated the cosmic role of human
beings and restored to them their primordial funcrion (Louth 1996: 155-156).
The key to this 'new' mediation is God's creation, man. The locus of
theology is not to be found in the processes of the intellect, but in the
inner structure of the mystery of creation, of an anthropology. To restore
man in his own image, this 'second God' (6 8Evrt:poC; etoc;), the 'Son of
man', reveals himself as both God and man. The hypostasis is not only the
place of resemblance to one's Creator, but also the proper place of respon-
sibility, sin and merit, in short what colours the relationship to God
(Meunier 2006: 300) . This vision of Christ comes to Maximos directly
ri-om the declarations of the Fourth Ecumencial Council of Chalcedon
(451). There he finds the terminology, the adjectives, to describe the
w. In rhe same rext Dionysios has more poeric expressions of the same reality as in 4: r 3: 'This
divine yearning brings ecsrasy so rhar rhc lovcr belongs not ro self bur to the beloved.'
301
302 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
relation of the twO natures of Christ, God and man: two natures free
from all separation as well as mixture in one person. This encompassing
is later called 'theandric'. The four privative adjectival terms (in italics in
the citation below), at the end of the Chalcedonian credo, are famous for
creating the conceptual foundation for an apophatic presentation of this
paradox, the mystery of the incarnation of the Son and Word of God.
Here is this extract of the credo confirmed by the council of Chalcedon
(Camelot I961: 140):
... Engendre du Pere avant les siecles en sa divinite mais aux derniers jours, pour
nous et pour notre salut, (engendre) de Marie la Vierge, la Theorokos, en son huma-
nite, en deux natures, sans confosion, ni changement, sans division, ni separation.
In the incarnate Christ, (without mixture, or confusion),
was one of the adjectives qualifYing this reciprocal compenetration
of human and divine nature in one person. This union in
the single person of Christ of two natures was not defined dogmatically by
the council in terms of essences, but in terms of modes (rponol) of exist-
ence and personhood For Maximos (see Meunier
2006: 302) a person is he who sets into motion the capacities of natures by
orienting them for better or for worse. Only by using one's liberty given
in nature does one have any real existence as a person for it manifests his/
her singularity. Thus Maximos' reflection on personal interiority, while
allowing for a psychological dimension, is metaphysical by definition. In
his fifteenth letter Maximos (trans. by Meunier 2006: 32-303) writes:
C'est ce que le discours de verite nous represente a prop os de !'economie (c'est-a-
dire de l'incarnation) divine: les proprietes par lesqueUes la chair differe et se separe
de nous sont ceUes par lesquelles elle possede l' identite avec le Logos selon l'hypos-
tase; et les proprietes par lesqueJJes le Logos differe du Pere et de I'Esprit et est defini
(separe, r'xrpopi(ofJf:Vod en tant que Fils SOnt celles par lesquelles iI garde, sauve,
l'unicite avec la chair selon l'hypostase, en n' en etant separe par aucune loi (logos).
Meunier (2006: 303) states that, applied to the twO wills (divine and
human) of Christ, this comprehension of the incarnation shows that
Maximos' understanding of person (hypostasis) integrates both the psy-
chologic;U and anthropological dimensions in a richer, more 'modern',
understanding of person than was known beforehand.
21. Balthasar (1947: 2J) admits that the subsequent Western European scholastic differentia-
tion of essence and existence is not present in Maximos who often uses the words 'being'
(dval); 'essence' (ovola); 'personal existence' and 'person hood'
almost interchangeably.
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
In his thirteenth letter (PG 91, 52 I c) Maximos takes over the so-called
universal law of conjunction
22
(couple, av(vyia) , or synthesis. In this
letter he applies this understanding of synthesis to the Incarnation and
demonstrates its generality:
Each rotality, and particularly which results in the synthesis of different ele-
ments, while keeping a perfect identity of its involves a differentiation
without confusion of the parts integrated. Thus it maintains without falsification
the particular and essential reason of each of its members. Inversely the pans,
while keeping in their synthesis their natural reason without mixtUre or diminu-
tion, maintain without any possible division the singular identity of their rotality
(Letter 13; PG 91,521 c).
This mysterious presence of the Whole in its partS is a synthesis that leads
directly to God, writes Balthasar (I947: 24; trans. by Stephen C. Headley):
If the members communicate only by the presence in them of the rotality that sur-
passes them, creatures also are only united by their transcendent identity in God: a
negative identity in that they all communicate i.n the nought of their origin and in
that property of not being God; positive identity due ro the faCt that the Crearor
sustains them all by his presence in them.
Dionysios' integration into Eastern Christian theology via Maximos'
reworking of his vision is said to mark the final victOry of Christianity
over Hellenism (Balthasar 1947: 15-18). On the other hand, Vladimir
Lossky (1963: I05) claims that for certain theologians in the Catholic
West,23 Dionysios was sometimes interpreted in ways that made him
a vehicle for further penetration of Greek Neo-Platonism into Western
theology. Ignoring that question, we will also confine our remarks to
Maximos' reinterpretation of Dionysios' Christian cosmology, leaving
aside Maximos' so-called role as a precursor of the Western Scholastic
distinction between being and existence. This seventh-century confessor
of the faith derives his vision of the created world from the sacramental
22. The role of synthesis as developed by the Gnostics in their cosmological theology made
this notion widely known in the third century and, by reaction, sharpened the Christian
focus on a vision of creation ex nihilo.
23. That is, John Scot Erigena, whose translation of Dionysios dates from 862; certain
Victorines (e.g. Hugues' commentary [h 141] on the CelestiaL Hierarchy and Richard's
commentary [tII73]) as well as certain Cistercians authors [Isaac ofStelIa tJI69], ete.
See Dictionnaire de la SpirituaLite, fasc. 18-19, Paris, 1954, cols. 3 18+). Dionysios' main
influence begins in the twelfth century with Robert Grosseteste's translation and com-
mentary, and that of A1bert the Great, and continues in the writings of Saint Thomas
Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure.
303
304 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
one he found in Saint Paul's epistles. Writing to the Ephesians (I: 14-15,
10), Saint Paul opens his letter with a famous description of humanity's
adoption by Christ before the world was created:
According as he (God) hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestined
us to adoption of children by Jesus Christ ro himself. .. That in the dispensation
of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both
which are in heaven, and which are one earth; even in him.
This implies that the Logos is present in all created things, by binding
their logoi (their reasons for being, 'toward God'2
4
) together. This leaves the
cosmos pregnant with an orientation towards the Trinity. Here hierarchy
is always a dimension of man's experience of his created life. God is not an
infinity, the ultimate 'beyond' of human intelligence, but the Creator. Alain
Riou (1973: 55) remarks that this is not an ontology applied to the domain
of cosmology, for both in Saint Paul and Saint Maximos, through the struc-
ture of the created world, one is led to the mystery of the God's good will.
Due to the presence of the image of the creator and Logos in man, the
latter's knowledge of the world through his logikoi, his own rationality, is
already a feature of that communion which life embodies. This is a God of
life who is both the One through whom all things were made and the Lord
of the insights of our mind (Thunberg 1985: 129).
The hierarchy Dionysios described concerned a cosmos defined by a
circumscribed place. This means that time in this cosmos is only circum-
scribed movement (Balthasar 1947= 9 I). Maximos replaces the emana-
tions of Dionysios by a natural form of being 'conform to the whole'
(the original meaning of the Greek word 'catholic', Kanx O,lOV) , Le. the
Logos. Maximos envisages the attributes of material existence with an
'Aristotelian optimism' (Balthasar 1947= 17). Its hierarchy is preserved in
a 'two-dimensional' relation that is both simpler, yet more encompassing,
not a great chain of being, but a cosmic liturgy where the image of God
in man makes of him the mediator between earth and heaven. Maximos
actually uses his vision of the divine dignity of the created world as an
essential part of his argumentation against diastole and systole of the
grace found in Dionysios. The path to the contemplation of the God
24. As Maximos paraphrases Ephesians I in his work Ambigua 7 (trans. by Riou 1973: 56):
'Chaque erre intelligible et rationnel, ange et homme, par le logos - meme selon lequel it a
ete cree (logos qui est en Dieu et qui est en vue - np6r; - de Dieu), est dit et est parcelle de
Dieu 11. cause de son logos qui preexiste en Dieu ... s'il se meut selon ce logos, it parviendra
en Dieu, en qui preexiste son logos d'ecre comme principe et cause.' (PG 90: I080b--c)
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
passes through 'natural' contemplation (eEwpia cpvalKi) of the created
world. If for Dionysios God's transcendence is a distance mediated by
what Chenu has jokingly called 'all that bureaucracy of light', Maximos
sees God's goodness everywhere at work in re-creating in the resemblance
to the image in which he was created. Finally this is a reformulation of
what Saint Paul wrote to the Romans (8: 28-29):
And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to
them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he
also did predestine ro be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the
firstborn among many brethren.
IBy whom all things were model:
creation ex nihilo
Riou has called this vision of Maximos a 'transcosmism', neither the 'eco-
nomic', soteriological 'cosmism' of Origen nor the ontological 'cosmism'
of Dionysios. Maximos the Confessor revises Origen's (c. 185-25 I)
concept that all rational beings (,lOY/KOt) were created equal and and that
themselves determine their place in the human hierarchy. This ranking,
for Origen, was not one based however on 'accomplishment', rather on
their respective de-, re-generation as human beings. Maximos' vision, on
the other hand, is based on God as a personal finality (TE,lOC;), involving
a vision (eEwpia) of movement towards Him. For Origen all ranking was
based on the Greek dichotomy of mind above matter, a nostalgia of lost
origins where the final end at best only reproduced the point of depar-
ture. In Maximos, the transfiguration of human nature in Christ pro-
duces an impatience to attain the future, as experienced in God. There
is no development from pantheism here. Eschatology is produced by a
vision of the future deriving from the divine council, i.e. providence,
preparing the advent of paradise.
As Saint Paul putS it, 'conformed to the image of his Son, that he
might be the firstborn among many brethren.' Preserving the meaning
of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo), for Maximos means grasping the
finality of all creation. A person yearns to configure him or herself to the
image in which it was created (see Riou 1973: 59,67,97). What is this
'nothing' out of which God's creation comes? Nothing is that which is
incomprehensible! Juan Miguel Garrigues insists that for Maximos what
is mysterious to the point of incomprehensibility, is the relation of man
to God, the mediation by the imago Dei .of the created to his Creator.
305
306 lA COHERENCE DES SOCl ETES
Lablme hyposrarique du Fils qui unit Dieu et I'homme est irreducrible a route
hierarchie des narures; il esr l' ex nihilo de la creation, le mysrere de la philan-
thropie triniraire dans lequel s'exreriorise l'indicible amour des personnes : 'Je les
ai aimes comme tu m' as aime' Oohn 17: 23, cired by Riou 1973: 97, nore 23)
This understanding of nothingness as 'nothing that is comprehensible
to man'25 is already found in Saint Gregory of Nyssa who identifies it as
the 'mystery of God's will: " ... to gather in one all things in Christ, both
which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in him'" (Ephesians
I: 9-10). For Saint Gregory ofNyssa (Riou 1973: 97 note 23, following
Wolfson 1970), the mystery of God's will is the only aspect of the incom-
prehensibility of God which really concerns mankind (Ephesians I: 9).
11 rransforme donc par la un theme meraphysique -'le non-etre'- pour signifier
le cceur meme du mysrere uinitaire : I'ex nihilo, le neant, c'est i'ablme de I'unite
hyposrarique du Chrisr pour I'economie de son incarnation pre-connue dans
la gratuite du conseil rrinitaire, En effer, Dieu ne peut etre dir neant dans son
essence, mais en tant qu'il imerviem comme 'comingence' dans la non-necessite
absolue de son libre arbirre creareur.
Above we have sketched our in what way for Maximos the recapitula-
tion ofChrisr's two modes of being in one person is both the foundation
of the economy of salvation and the eschatological movement of the
wgoi towards Christ. Bur what is hidden in Christ is also hidden in the
Holy Spirit. What in Maximos is called the kenosis, or self-emptying of
the Holy Spirit, parallels the kenosis of Christ when the Word of God
becomes incarnate, Filiation, being the son of God, lost by the first
Adam, is rediscovered when the second and final (&vrepo<; and {axaro<;)
Adam, Jesus, becomes incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary.
In the Ambigua (42) Maximos explains this work of the Spirit.
A i'origine I'homme est venu a i'etre a I' image de Dieu ; et sur ce,
il est ne it I'Esprir selon le libre choix et te<;:u en outre de parvenir
par lui-meme a la ressemblance par la garde du commandement divin, en sone
que le meme homme soir imitarion de Dieu par nature et fils de Dieu et Dieu
par grace par I'Esprit. Car il n'etait pas possible aurremem que i'homme cree
puisse etre 6ls de Dieu et Dieu selon la divini sation par grace, s'il n' etait d' abord
ne a I'Esprir selon le libre choix par la puissance qui est en lui,qui se meut
d'eUe-meme et qui ne comraim pas. (PG 1345 d; rrans. Riou 1973: 125-126)
25. Riou (1973: !O8): 'En elles-memes l'hypostase et la perichorese ne sont rien. EUes mani-
festem dans la Trinite le non-depassemem des Hypostases par une essence anterieure - ne
serait-ce que Jogiquemem - qui Jes engloberair.'
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
Maximos presents the paradox of an incarnate God signifYing his
divinity by metamorphosing his human body on Mount Thabor. This
appears in the tenth Ambigua (10. 3 I; see trans. by Ponsoye 1994: 196).
Christ 'becomes' the very model of man's salvation.
Le Seigneur esr devenu type de lui-meme selon son economie dans la chair: en
effet, idemique it nous par i'aspecr (par un incommensurable amour des hommes
- qJlAav()poTCia - iI a accepte d'etre cree, sans changemem cependam), il est devenu
eype et symbole de lui-meme. Il s'esr monrre en symbole lui-meme 11 panir de
lui-meme : il a conduir par la main la cr60'uion roUt emiere 11 rravers lui-meme
manifesrc en vue de lui-meme roraiemem cache comme ne se momrant pas, Et
comme indication de i'Infinire qui ne se montre pas, ' " par amour des hommes il
procure aux hommes les ceuvres divines se manifestam it travers la chair.
These self-emptyings (Kevwat<;) of both Christ and the Spirit are par-
allel dimensions of the incarnation, It is at that 'moment' when Christ's
hypostatic union becomes the internal principle of both the cosmic lit-
urgy and man's place in the world, In his Mystagogy (I; Sotiropoulos
2001: 123-13 5), Maximos shows how the Church is nothing other than
a figure and an image of God to the extent that it is the unifYing rpono<;
of God in the world, inside the world, in man's heart, The grace of being
'of' Christ, to bear his name (christian),
'" D' avoir une seule meme relation, simple, non divi see en panies, indivisible,
dans la foi, qui ne permet plus de reconnaitre meme I'existence des nombreuses
et inexprimables differences qui existent en chacun, par le fuit de la reference
universeUe de rous 11 elle et de leur rencontre en eUe (= eglise). Par cette rencomre
person ne n'est absolumem separe de la communaute, pas plus qu' il n'apparriem
a soi-meme, parce que rous som en affinire les uns avec les aurres, et rattaches les
uns aux autres dans la seule et meme grace et puissance simple er indivisible de
la foi. (Acres 4: 32) ' Car ils n' avaiem rous, est-iI dit, qu' un cceur et qu' une ame.'
We began this second section by saying that while venerating Dionysios
the Areopagite, Maximos, WTiting approximately one century after him,
reworks his cosmology in major ways. As Riou (1973: 139-140) points out,
Nous sommes donc loin d'une perspective dionysienne dans laqueUe ceue Struc-
ture de rapport (avarpop6.) de I'effet a la cause devenait la dependance automa-
rique de l'inferieur au superieur, et la categorie qui sous-rendait non seulemem
route la cosmologie, mais aussi la soreriologie elle-meme jusqu'l1 conduire au
monoenergisme chrisrologique .. . Ainsi, seule la kenose divine dans le mystere de
l'union hypostatique donne son principe interne a la liturgie cosmique et au jeu
du monde. Elle fair ressusciter l'homme a son tropos filial de la glorieuse liberre des
enfants de Dieu, dont route la creation attend, dans les gemissements, la revelation
(Romains 8: 19) , I'ApocaIyse. Er cene ne saurait erre celle de I'homme
307
308 lA COHERENCE DES SOCIETES
en tant qu'individu; elle est celle de l'homme comme vocation hypostatique (per-
sonnelle et catholique), celle de I'Eglise qui en hypostasie toute la creation.
What typifies Maximos' cosmology is that the categories of kind
(yevo<;) that differentiate God's creation also unites it by their sharing
in the quality of createdness. For Maximos only such a creation ex nihilo
endows men with an indelible personhood, guaranteed by the activity
and purposefulness (oKono<;) of its Creator (Thunberg 1995 [1965]:
63-64). Where Dionysios foregrounds the dynamic emanation of God's
grace, Maximos resituates that creative systole in the very act of the
embodiment (ev(JwfuXrwmp) of the Word of God.
Thus the foundation of the unity of the cosmos is the Logos (the 'Verb'
of God) which has been kept' ... free from the division founded on differ-
ence .. .' (Thunberg 1985: 83) When Maximos says (Ambigua 7; 1994:
127 ff.) that' ... always and in all His words, God wills to effect the mys-
tery of his embodiment ... ', he is putting centre stage a theandric vision of
reality. First of all, this concerns mankind: ' ... the flesh of the Logos is also
the perfect return and restoration of human nature to itself ... ' (Ambigua
la; 1994: 153 ff.). Still it also concerns the cosmos, seen as a makranthropos.
In this Christian revelation of cosmology, God's task is to unifY the world
and this is done through the Logos as mediaror. Man participates in Christ's
incarnation, becoming this microcosm; indeed he was created for this task.
A cosmic liturgy unifies through a new theandric energy the enrire universe
whose image is reflected in Christ as microcosm. By theandric, Maximos
designates that 'ineffable mode of mutual adhesion' between Christ's divine
and human natures. (Ambigua 5; 1994: 117; Thunberg 1985: 72). The
mystery of this identity 'in mutual preservation' is defined by Maximos as
identity in internal 'invariability
Conclusion
To make a resume of the major turning point in Christian understanding
of the cosmos where for the first time the role of the person took on the
form later developed in the Middle Ages into a Christian personalism,
three positions appear paramount:
- That the relation of the macrocosm to the microcosm found in Greek religions
in late antiquity is gradually replaced by the reciprocity of Christ's divine and
human natures. Instead of a series of correspondences berween the earthly and
the celestial, this new hierarchy berween the visible and the invisible, the created
'IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
and the uncreated, in Christianity has a single mediation, that made possible by
the incarnation of the pre-eternallogos. The only symbol Ca bringing tOgether')
that bridged the finite and the infinite for this Christianity was Jesus of Nazareth.
- That the relation of man to God is not individualised (one creature seeking
salvation from his Creator), bur the type of Christ's human and divine nature
united in one person becomes the occasion for the restoration of the image in
which man was created, renewing his stewarding of the logoi of all creation.
- That the Christian experience of this hierarchical threshold is located in the
Eucharist where commensality permits a communion (Kolvwv[a, a society) of
the creature with the creator. All the icons of this worship refer ro historical acts
in the life of Christ, yet the passion of Christ has occurred before this liturgy
starts; its linear movement is one beginning with the Resurrection and ending
in the second coming, that is to say the kingdom of God where all that Christ
has assumed on earth is returned to paradise.
These conclusions can be qualified by the wider perspective of the
development of Eastern Christianity. Any in-depth study of the appear-
ance of individualism in Western Europe, and its much later appearance
in seventeenth-century Russia and the Balkans of the eighteenth century,
would have to deal with the issues referred to below, but which are not
addressed here:
- To what extent did the theology of Saint Maximos the Confessor remain the
perspective of the Eastern Church or its monastic elite?26 As a mystagogy of the
liturgical practice of the entire Eastern Church it might have had greater influ-
ence had it not been gradually replaced by liturgical exegesis from bishops like
Symeon ofThessalonika (died 1429; PG 155). The ascetical view of such mys-
teriological piety was almost anti-liturgical according to Alexander Schmemann
(1975 [1966]: 155). In such authors we have the Dionysios of the Neo-Platonic
speculative tradition reintroduced into an Eastern Christian understanding of
liturgical life.
- Can the christO-centric personalism of Maxim os be qualified as a social holism
and, if so, what replaced it after the Ottoman conquest in the Byzantine
Commonwealth? This was not as radical a change in the Greek-speaking areas
of the Eastern Church as one imagines (Runciman 1968: 165-185). Since
the eleventh century certain parts of Asia Minor (the future Turkey), occu-
pied by Muslims and the Latins (Genovese and Venitians) had been taking
over Greek islands which they controlled even after the Turkish conquest of
Constantinople on 29 May 1453. The Arab/T urkic system of dhimmitude
did make of the churches bishops into ethnarchs. The clandestine Christian
schools saved Christian theology among the disappearing of the parishes, but a
new social space was being created, mixing Greek and Turkish culture (Balivet
26. See Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, 'Symbolism and Realism in Orthodox
Worship' p. 3-17 in SOllrozh (79, February 200q).
309
310 lA COHERENCE DES SOClETES
. -
1994). To analyse its social morphology dominated by the Muslim notion of
dhimmitude implies that the Christian oecumene has become, at least in socio-
logical terms, only a partial whole. Before outright nationalism, the former
Byzantine commonwealth might have shared common values, but the libera-
tion of the different 'ethnic' Orthodox lands in the Balkans later exacerbated
ecdesiological problems in the nineteenth and twentieth centurys. Only a
Neo-Patristic synthesis could begin to resolve these. Maximos much more than
Dionysios is at the centre of any renewed commonwealth.
Appendix
MAxlMos' UFE AND WORKS EVENTS AND PERSONALI11ES
454 - Council ofChalcedon Empereur Justinian (482-565)
c. 590-605 - Maximos studies
philosophy and rhetoric in
the Byzantine capital (Aristocle,
Dionysios, Evagrios, Origen).
--- - -
610 - Maximos works as the personal
'state secretary' to Emperor
Heraclios'; in 614 he leaves
the court for the monastery
of Philippicus at Chrysopolis,
across the Bosphoros
---
Ambigua II (commentary
on Gregory of Nazianze)
- - - - - - . - - ---------
Mystagogy
Commentary on the 'Our Father'
The Ascetic Life, The Foltr Centuries on 630 - Maximos enters monastery
Charity (prior to 632) of Euchratas under its abbot
Sophronios
- - - - - ------. _--- . -.. - - - - - . - . - -
Questiones ad Thalassios 634 - Synodalletter ofSophronios,
Patriarch of Jerusalem
Ambigua I (before 638) 638 - Statement (Ecthesis) of Emperor
Heraclius on the single will of
Christ
-
641 - Pyrrus, Patriarch of
Constantinople
- - --- ---
' IF ALL THINGS WERE EQUAL, NOTHING WOULD EXIST'
-
-------
645 - Maximos debates the exiled
Patriarch at Carthage
- - -
._- _ .
-
646-649 - Maximos in Rome Council ofLatran convened to oppose
Emperor Constans' and Patriarch
Paul H's doctrine of the 'single
will' (monotheletism)
- --
653 - Arrested, Maximos is returned
[0 Byzance
654 - Pope Matrin I arrested
by the Emperor;
Pyrrhus returns as patriarch
- -
_ . .
--
655 - First interrogation of Maximos
-- -
667 - Second interrogation
and martyrdom
. _---
-- -- -
680-681 -The Third Council of
Constantinople confirms the
Christology of Maximos
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