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Theology - Eschatology: Beginnings and ends

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Maximus the Confessor (Ambiguum 7) understands very clearly that the difference between Greek (or Origenist) and Christian thought is the difference between beginnings and ends, between a protologically-weighted ontology and an eschatologically-weighted one. He defends a “participation in a goodness that is yet to come” and refutes “one that existed once and was corrupted.”

He doesn’t think an original “henad” is possible or rational. If beings originally were at rest in God, or in Being, they have nothing to move them. Movement is driven by desire, desire by what is desirable, and things come to rest only when they have reached the destination toward which desire moves them, that is, only when they have reached the ultimately desirable. As he says, “If God can be abandoned once for the sake of experiencing something different, then there is nothing to prevent this from happening again and again.”

If the rational intellects clung to God at the beginning and then left, that implies that God is not the beautiful. His argument is:

If intellects left God for something else, then they were not adhering to the beauty of God for God’s own sake; but if that’s the case, then He cannot be the ultimately beautiful: “What is not good and lovable in itself, and does not draw all movement toward it simply by being good and lovable, cannot properly be beautiful.” A beauty that cannot hold its admirers is “incapable of satisfying the desire of those who find delight in it.

Henadology, he thinks, even excuses evil; henadologists should be “grateful to evil,” since only by estrangement from God were they taught “what is right and how to hold firmly to the beautiful.” On these premises, “evil brought things into being and is more useful than nature itself,” since “evil teaches what is fitting and allows one to attain the most precious possession,” which is love. Henodology is a doubly tragic metaphysics: Because it places the good in a past from which we have fallen, and because it makes evil and estrangement essential to the fulfillment of the world.

Maximus writes this section in a metaphysical idiom, but his argument helps fill out the importance of recognizing the eschatological aspiration that was inherent in Adam’s situation. If Adam was fulfilled, perfected from the outset, then we are almost inevitably left with a “fortunate fall” paradigm. If Adam were fully himself, all that he was going to be, from his first creation, but left that place of rest, then he needed the fall to attain his most precious possession. But Genesis 1-2 indicates that Adam was created sinless but immature, a child who had to grow until he was ready to receive the privilege of the tree of knowledge. He doesn’t fall from fulfilled humanness, or from perfected fellowship with God. He sins and becomes estranged in childhood, before he has reached his rest. The fall doesn’t initiate history, sequence, maturation; the fall makes the path of maturation more circuitous.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 3:50 pm

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Theology - Eschatology: Beginnings and ends

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