Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | März/2020 |
Spalte: | 212–215 |
Kategorie: | Dogmen- und Theologiegeschichte |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Lévy, Antoine, Annala, Pauli, Hallamaa, Olli, and Tuomo Lankily [Eds.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Architecture of the Cosmos. St. Maximus the Confessor. New Perspectives. Ed. with the collaboration of D. Kaley. |
Verlag: | Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Society 2015. 355 S. = Schriften der Luther-Agricola-Gesellschaft, 69. Kart. EUR 36,00. ISBN 978-951-9047-78-2. |
Rezensent: | Andrew Louth |
Interest in Maximos the Confessor shows no sign of diminishing: monographs on the Confessor and symposia on his thought keep appearing. Alongside this interest in Maximos, indeed overlapping with it, has been a growing interest in Byzantine philosophy, a subject that seemed scarcely to exist in traditional histories of philosophy: it is now recognized that philosophical reflection continued in the Greek world after the last flowering of Neoplatonism in the fifth and sixth centuries, a signal example being Maximos the Confessor, though there are many other Byzantine philosophers, be-fore and since. This symposium, the proceedings of a conference held in Helsinki in 2013, contributes to both trends.
The title, we are told in Antoine Lévy’s introduction, is deliber-ately expansive, intended to accommodate any »new perspectives« on St Maximos’ thought: there was no intention that »the architecture of the universe« should be in any narrow way the theme of the conference. Lévy’s »polycentric« introduction emphasizes the many different approaches found in the symposium, and provides a (sometimes critical) introduction to the papers included. There are four chapters (or perhaps better sections): first, »contextualization«, secondly, »philosophical approaches«, thirdly, »theological approaches«, and finally, »modern approaches« (though there is only one chapter in this section).
»Contextualization« begins with Peter Van Deun, the current general editor of Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca, in which the new critical edition of the Confessor is appearing, two volumes of which he has edited himself, in which he gives an up-to-date account of which works we can confidently ascribe to the Confessor, mostly warning against attributions that can no longer be maintained (some of the papers in the volume have not been re-vised in accordance with this article); Van Deun also tells us of his long contribution to the eagerly-awaited second part of the first volume of La Théologie byzantine et sa tradition, edited by Giu-seppe Conticello, with the title: »Maxime le Confesseur: Les derniers rayons de l’Antiquité chrétienne et les prémices de la théologie byzantine« – which only intensifies our anticipation. The other part of the first chapter is by Christian Boudignon, the editor of Mystagogia in the CCSG Maximos, demonstrating influence of Pseudo-Macarius on that work.
There are five contributions to the chapter on philosophical approaches. Two – by Christophe Erismann and Torstein Theodore Tollefsen – are concerned with the logical dimension of the Confessor’s analysis of reality, a dimension that se-veral times (e. g., in Amb. 41) appears alongside a more metaphysical analysis. Both discuss the question of universals and the related doctrine of the logoi; a good deal of Tollefsen’s discussion in fact concerns Amb. 41. Erismann’s discussion concludes with a discussion of the term ἐνυπόστατον; although what he says makes good sense to me, I am not sure that the term really covers a concept, which is the impression given by Erismann (who indeed speaks of the »concept of enhypostaton«). Perhaps, with the publication at last of Brian Daley’s edition of Leontios of Byzantion, some of the mystery surrounding enhypostasia will be finally dispelled (and might have been a long time ago, if Daley’s crucial article had actually been published). Valery V. Petroff discusses the use of the verbs ὑπάρχω and ὑφίστημι in Maximos’ Ambigua, demonstrating the varying range of signification of these terms, which have an important overlap in the way in which hypostasis (derived from ὑφίστημι) is regularly defined by its τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως, in contrast to the way in which λόγος τῆς οὐσίας defines nature: a distinction that has its origin in Trinitarian theology, but is applied more widely by Maximos himself. Petroff brings out well the complex-ity of Maximos’ use of these verbs and their derivatives. Grigory Benevich gives a brief and careful analysis of the Confessor’s teaching on providence, drawing attention to the importance of Nemesius for his understanding of providence, and relating the question of providence to the problem of theodicy (providence is also discussed in relation to universals by Tollefsen). Not mentioned (and perhaps not surprisingly, as the biographical accounts are regarded as off limits by most scholars, something endorsed by Van Deun in his article) is the place of trust in providence in the Confessor’s own life, as witnessed at the beginning of the Disputatio Bizyae. The philosophical chapter closes with a discussion by Pascal Mueller-Jordan of God as the desirable (τὸ ἐφετόν) in Maximos’ thought, compared with a similar notion in Proklos: a neat and fascinating demonstration of the parallels, as well as of the divergences, between the two thinkers.
The third chapter concerns theological approaches and begins with Antoine Lévy’s own contribution, which is sparked off by threefold repetition of γωνία, angle or corner, in the account of King Uzziah’s building works in Jerusalem in II Chronicles 26: 9–10, which leads Lévy on a fascinating discussion of the phil-osophical implications of ancient mathematical theory in Maximos’ Christo-logy. There follows a dense account of what Nikolaos Loudovikos wants to call Maximos’ »Eucharistic gnosiology«, which involves a further variant on the notion of analogy: ἀναλογία κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν, an acceptable Eastern rejoinder to the Western scholastic analogia entis, which, unlike the latter, is Christolog-ical, and realized in eucharistic communion or participation. Vladimir Cvetkovi gives an excellent, and wide-ranging, account of the mystery of Christ, stepping off from Qu. Thal. 60, and passing on to a lengthy discussion of how Maximos presents (and celebrates) the mystery of Christ in his Mystagogia, on the way engaging with the question as to whether the Incarnation is a result of the Fall or fore-ordained, coming to the conclusion that the Incarnation is, for Maximos, fore-ordained. The biggest puzzle I had with Cvetkovi’s paper is the title, which speaks of the mystery of Christ as »revived Logos theology«: I am sure that such a notion would never have occurred to the Confessor, and I am not sure what it contributes to Cvetkovi’s article, which is excellent as it stands. There follows one of the longest contributions to the volume (surely much expanded from the paper given at the symposium) by István Perczel in which he seeks to demonstrate the Origenist roots of Maximos’ On the Lord’s Prayer. This is pursued with Perczel’s customary learning and insight; the parallels Perczel invokes between Origen himself, Evagrios, and some of the anecdotes in John Moschos’ Pratum Spirituale are compelling, but, it seems to me, capable of diverse interpretations; these are prefaced by an account of an isochrist Origen-ism, given in Michael the Syrian’s Chronicle, and derived from the lost anti-Maximian treatise of Shem’un of Qenneshre. Part of the problem with Perczel’s account is the way in which he concedes than »Origenism« is capable of many nuances, at one point simply speaking of »Origenism, or par excellence Christian Platonism«: if that is all that is being claimed, then it may readily be conceded, but any such concession seems to entail for Perczel a disdain for what he calls »a conservative interpretation of Church tradition«, though on the same page (230), he goes on to speak of »representatives of this intellectual trend, almost always balancing at a thin edge between imperial orthodoxy and heresy, [who] have produced some of the finest achievements of Christian thought and mysticism«, commenting that »we are not speaking about something negative but rather about something positive: a school of Christian philosophy, an equal in its intellectual acumen with the Neoplatonist schools of philosophy but dedicated to the Christian revelation«. Indeed, that is what most scholars find who go at all deeply into Maximos’ thought, and not just Maximos’. It seems to me there is much less disagreement about these questions of affinity than Perczel professes. The final paper, by Pauli Annala, makes many connexions between the earlier papers in this symposium (though that perhaps does not distinguish it from the other papers; it just seems more obvious as it comes towards the end). Coming immediately after Perczel’s paper, it seems in a similar way to find affinities with Neoplatonism, and recalls, too, Mueller-Jordan’s emphasis on the triadic structures that Maximos’ thought shares with Neoplatonism. Annala seeks to show the way in which in Maximos’ understanding, especially in the Mystagogia, of the soul’s passage from the outward to the inward and then beyond the inward to the beyond (though I think this is confused by citing the Augustinian ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora [280, n. 4], which is not a triad, but should surely be understood in terms of his understanding of God as interior intimo meo et superior summo meo [Conf. III. 6. 11], the inward being identified with the upward; conceivably something to do with Augustine’s being indebted to Porphyrian Neoplatonism, in contrast to Maximos’ more obvious debt to Proklos). With admirable concision, we are led through an exposition of the soul’s movement inward and then beyond, which brings out striking Neoplatonist echoes.
The final section, and final paper, by Alexei V. Nesteruk, seeks to relate Maximian perspectives to the results of modern cosmology. This is clearly a fascinating subject and a promising one, for some elements in modern cosmology might be regarded as recovering aspects of ancient cosmology lost in the cosmology of classical Western physics. However, it seems to me that Nesteruk does not play to his strengths as a learned and talented mathematical physicist, rather we are treated to very general remarks about Maximos, very unsurely based on his texts (at one point, at least [333, n. 41], Nesteruk uses the five centuries of Diversa capita, of which Van Deun had complained that »still today it happens regularly that scholars continue to consider the Diversa capita to be Maximian« [33], rather than a somewhat random collection of extracts). More seriously, Nesteruk buys into a curiously cosmological interpretation of enhypostasia (unlike the careful way in which Erismann treats the term enhypostaton), so that we are told that »the universe is en-hypostasized by human beings« (332), or even that »humanity is hypostasis of the universe« (333, n. 40). I cannot see in what way humanity, an abstract universal, can be an hypostasis, which must be a concrete reality. This is a pity, as Nesteruk’s real expertise in modern cosmology as a mathematical physicist is scarcely deployed at all in this article. Overall, however, this is a fascinating collection representing different approaches to the mind of Maximos the Confessor, making manifest how fruitful such reflection on his thought can be.