A review by theologiaviatorum
On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings by St. Maximus the Confessor

challenging medium-paced

4.0

 St. Maximus the Confessor is no easy read. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ is a collection of Maximus' writings in which he expounds that which was accomplished in Jesus Christ, often against the ideas of Origen, specifically the preexistence of the soul. After finishing the work and then revisiting my underlined portions to get an impression of the whole I was helped towards understanding him. Maximus says that all created things are created for some end and movement is always towards an end. When a thing moves towards its appropriate end it moves from mere being to well being and eventually eternal well being in God. To move towards wrong ends is to move towards non-being. Jesus as both God and Man makes possible our arrival at our end, that is, arrival in God, because in him Man has already arrived in God, being "taken up" into God by the incarnation. In Maximus' own words, "He gives them life, not the life that comes from breathing air, nor that of veins coursing with blood, but the life that comes from being wholly infused with the fullness of God. God becomes to the soul (and through the soul to the body) what the soul is to the body, as God alone knows, so that the soul receives changelessness and the body immortality; hence the whole man, as the object of divine action, is divinized by being made God by the grace of God who became man" (63). Again, "this renewal did not come about through the normal course of things, it was only realized when a wholly new way of being human appeared. God had made us like himself, and allowed us to participate in the very things that are most characteristic of his goodness" (70). In the end his message may be summed up in this: God became Man that Man might become god. This is a book for the stout hearted and intellectually inclined that will reward the courageous.