The Theo-Drama of Salvation
An excerpt from Professor Paul M. Blowers’ Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 101–3.
For Maximus [the Confessor], the Christian Gospel gave witness to a universe being transfigured, to an emerging cosmic and eschatological politeia embracing all of spiritual and material creation, of which Jesus Christ was both the pioneer and the perfecter in his incarnation [...]
At the outset I would note my debt to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, in exploring the intricate web of dialectical themes and syntheses that constitute Maximus’ christocentric Weltbild, did not simply measure Maximus’ universe by the cosmological and metaphysical bequests of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, no matter the significance of those philosophical idioms to his doctrine of creation. Instead, von Balthasar recognized that for Maximus, as for others earlier in the Greek patristic tradition, the goal was less to construct a philosophical cosmology per se than to articulate a vision of the panoramic theo-drama of divine action in which creation and redemption form a seamless plot unveiling the triune Creator’s unbridled freedom and love. At the heart of that drama, moreover, was the true play-within-the-play, the “fiat of Jesus” as François-Marie Léthel aptly calls it, Maximus’ carefully constructed tableau of the work of Christ in his incarnation and passion constituting not only the climactic but also the original expression of God’s plan to realize his creative and salvific purposes.
While heavy attention has been given to Maximus’ cosmology as a correction of Origenism (to which I shall return shortly) or as an appropriation and adjustment of the metaphysics of Dionysius the Areopagite, I would suggest that, at an even more basic level, it is a sophisticated expansion on key insights of the Confessor’s distant predecessor Irenaeus of Lyons, which becomes clearer as Irenaeus’s doctrine of creation has itself come into sharper focus in recent scholarship. Irenaeus’s own theo-dramatic perspective, as recognized by von Balthasar and others, found new traction and reworking in Maximus’ theology of creation.
Irenaeus’s signature principle is the “recapitulation” (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of creation in Jesus Christ, for which he was heavily indebted to Paul’s christological reflection in Ephesians 1:3–14 (esp. 1:10). Recapitulation meant that only in the incarnation did the Creator truly fulfill his plan for creation. In Christ, the past and future of sacred history—of all the history of creation—collapsed into a perfect singularity of purpose. John Behr has demonstrated, however, that Irenaeus does not just set out a linear chronological progression of episodes constituting “salvation history” (creation, fall, incarnation, redemption); rather, seemingly counterintuitively, he posits the solution before the ostensible problem. The Creator’s original plan for the world was to reveal himself in Jesus Christ. Creation was not the “beginning” per se but was itself a staging-point toward gradually disclosing the fullness of the mystery of the incarnation and cross. “For insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.” The real “beginning” (ἀρχή) in Genesis 1:1, as Origen and numerous patristic writers after Irenaeus argued, was Jesus Christ himself.
For Maximus [the Confessor], the Christian Gospel gave witness to a universe being transfigured, to an emerging cosmic and eschatological politeia embracing all of spiritual and material creation, of which Jesus Christ was both the pioneer and the perfecter in his incarnation [...]
At the outset I would note my debt to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, in exploring the intricate web of dialectical themes and syntheses that constitute Maximus’ christocentric Weltbild, did not simply measure Maximus’ universe by the cosmological and metaphysical bequests of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, no matter the significance of those philosophical idioms to his doctrine of creation. Instead, von Balthasar recognized that for Maximus, as for others earlier in the Greek patristic tradition, the goal was less to construct a philosophical cosmology per se than to articulate a vision of the panoramic theo-drama of divine action in which creation and redemption form a seamless plot unveiling the triune Creator’s unbridled freedom and love. At the heart of that drama, moreover, was the true play-within-the-play, the “fiat of Jesus” as François-Marie Léthel aptly calls it, Maximus’ carefully constructed tableau of the work of Christ in his incarnation and passion constituting not only the climactic but also the original expression of God’s plan to realize his creative and salvific purposes.
While heavy attention has been given to Maximus’ cosmology as a correction of Origenism (to which I shall return shortly) or as an appropriation and adjustment of the metaphysics of Dionysius the Areopagite, I would suggest that, at an even more basic level, it is a sophisticated expansion on key insights of the Confessor’s distant predecessor Irenaeus of Lyons, which becomes clearer as Irenaeus’s doctrine of creation has itself come into sharper focus in recent scholarship. Irenaeus’s own theo-dramatic perspective, as recognized by von Balthasar and others, found new traction and reworking in Maximus’ theology of creation.
Irenaeus’s signature principle is the “recapitulation” (ἀνακεφαλαίωσις) of creation in Jesus Christ, for which he was heavily indebted to Paul’s christological reflection in Ephesians 1:3–14 (esp. 1:10). Recapitulation meant that only in the incarnation did the Creator truly fulfill his plan for creation. In Christ, the past and future of sacred history—of all the history of creation—collapsed into a perfect singularity of purpose. John Behr has demonstrated, however, that Irenaeus does not just set out a linear chronological progression of episodes constituting “salvation history” (creation, fall, incarnation, redemption); rather, seemingly counterintuitively, he posits the solution before the ostensible problem. The Creator’s original plan for the world was to reveal himself in Jesus Christ. Creation was not the “beginning” per se but was itself a staging-point toward gradually disclosing the fullness of the mystery of the incarnation and cross. “For insofar as [the Creator] preexisted as the one who saves, it was necessary that what would be saved should also come into existence, in order that the Savior should not exist in vain.” The real “beginning” (ἀρχή) in Genesis 1:1, as Origen and numerous patristic writers after Irenaeus argued, was Jesus Christ himself.
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