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Theology - Christology: Double will

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In a lengthy footnote to a brilliant article in Modern Theology on Maximus the Confessor’s cosmic Christology, David Yeago summarizes Maximus’ explanation of how Jesus’ Gethsemane prayer refutes Monothelitism: “According to Maximus, the words ‘let this cup pass from me’ demonstrate that Jesus had a natural human will, which naturally shrinks from what is harmful to its kind But the total utterance, which puts this natural shrinking into the context of a freely willed acceptance of the will of the Father, displays the tropos [the manner-of-being as opposed to the ousia] of the union of divine and human in a single subject, the Son of God. By these words ‘he shows, simultaneously with the shrinking-back, the impulse of the human will shaped and come to be in harmony with the divine will, by virtue of the interweaving of the natural logos according to the tropos of the economy, inasmuch as incarnation is a manifest display of both nature and economy that is, of the natural logos of those realities which have been united, and of the mode of the union according to hupostasis, which both confirms and makes new the natures without change or confusion’ (MPG 91, 48C). Thus the words of Jesus show the human will made new in the ‘tropos of exchange’ appropriate to the concrete unity of the divine and the human which Jesus is as hupostasis. They display both what he is by nature—true human being with a natural human will and true God with the one divine will that he receives from the Father—and who he is as an agent in the narrative of the economy, the one incarnate Son and Logos of God the Father. The deification of the human will by the divine will is identical with his particular choices of love and obedience, for deification occurs, not in the register of ousia, by some fusion of deity and humanity in the abstract, but the concrete way in which will is exercised in the single subject Jesus Christ: ‘As it is a matter of nature always to be capable of speaking, but a matter of hupostasis how one speaks, so it is also with the capacity to will and the act of willing’ (MPG 91, 48A).”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, February 17, 2012 at 7:37 am

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Theology - Christology: Double will

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