The Whole Mystery of Christ: Part I
It is possible to frame the entire theological enterprise as an attempt to answer the following question: How does the Creator relate to creation? The question, despite its succinct phrasing, has a nearly universal scope. It enfolds both the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of theological reflection: the theologian’s curiosity concerning the Divine as well as the theologian’s self-reflection as part of creation. One way to narrate our path to modernity is by recounting a sequence of attempts to address the creature’s capacity to know, and whether the human creature’s ability to know truth must (or must not!) pass through mediated relationships to the Divine.
For Christian theologians in the 20th century the Creator-creature relationship came particularly to the fore as theologians debated how to reconcile the intimacy of the Creator-creature relationship with the Creator’s absolute transcendence. Such debates fueled the Protestant Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth and the Catholic ressourcement of Hans Urs von Balthasar and others. Jordan Wood’s recent book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor, reframes these debates by retrieving the Christological metaphysics of the Church Father, Maximus the Confessor.
Contemporary interest in Maximus, a 7th century Christian monk, largely owes its origin to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s book Cosmic Liturgy, which offers unprecedented attention to the systematic nature of the patristic author’s thought. But Balthasar’s interest in Maximus was not merely historical retrieval. Balthasar utilized Maximus for his own project: crafting a critical response to 20th century German Idealism through a ressourcement of scriptural and patristic sources.
Like Balthasar, Wood sets out to attentively listen to Maximus and to perform Maximus’ theology. However, Wood carefully distinguishes his interpretation of Maximus from Von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy. Wood’s bold contention is that Western readers have so far failed to take Maximus at his word and thereby dulled the radicality of his Christo-centric vision.
Wood centers his book around a single epigraph from Maximus: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Wood seeks to take this statement at face value—not as pious hyperbole or metaphor—unpacking all that this entails for Christian metaphysics.
Principally, Wood argues that Maximus construes the relationship between Creator and creature at the hypostatic level, in Christ’s personhood. Wood’s reading of Maximus differs distinctly from Balthasar, who—heavily influenced by his teacher Erich Przywara—construes the God-world relationship at the level of analogy: created being bears an analogous relationship to divine being, but any and all similarity between creation and Creator is always outstripped by an “ever greater dissimilarity.” Wood wants to locate the God-world relationship solely in the person of Christ without appealing to Balthasar’s analogy of being.
In Christ’s person (hypostasis), Wood contends, created and uncreated natures are identified with one another while remaining infinitely differentiated. This identity of opposites is the very “mystery” of the Incarnation referenced in the epigraph. Chapter 1 of Wood’s book explicates the “Christo-logic” of this hypostatic unity.
Following the Council of Chalcedon’s Christological formula, Maximus holds that created and uncreated natures coexist without confusion or division in Christ’s person (hypostasis). Christ’s hypostatic identity allows for the infinitely dissimilar natures of God and creature to relate with one another while maintaining their respective integrities. Yet, Wood argues that God and creature cannot properly be thought apart from each other. God is the very one who from eternity lends being to this world and even joins himself to it. And creation is nothing other than the recipient of God’s being and the gradual manifestation of the “mystery of his Incarnation…in all things,” to quote Maximus.
For Maximus, hypostatic identity is metaphysically prior to all natural identities— created and uncreated natures are generated from Christ’s incarnation. Incarnation is creation. In Wood’s articulation, “Divine and human natures stand in no essential relation to one another, no tension or asymmetry; they have nothing natural in common at all.” Christ’s person is the reality and only possibility of any relationship between Creator and creature. In Wood’s terminologically dense distillation,
Christ is the hypostatic identity of natural identity and natural difference. He himself, his very person, became an “is” other wise unthinkable between created and uncreated nature. And yet his becoming that “is” is the ground and possibility of the most absolute and real natural difference. We might say that the Incarnation makes absolute natural difference thinkable for the first time in human thought. Hypostatic identity names the actuality or the fact of the very difference between God and man.
Once Wood introduces the centrality of Christo-logic to Maximus, he goes on in Chapter 2 to display how the Christo-logic of Incarnation is the very same logic of creation. Here Wood elaborates on Maximus’ famous doctrine of the logoi, typically taken to be identical to Platonic ideas or forms. Wood reads the logoi through Christo-logic instead, revealing that the very internal essences of creatures are linked inextricably to the Logos, Christ Incarnate.
William Blake, The Ancient of Days
At this point, the reader may worry that an implicit pantheism operates within Wood’s argument. If creation is God’s very Incarnation, would this not render all creatures God, thereby collapsing the Creator-creature relationship altogether? In other words, the critic might pose this claim: creation as Incarnation reduces the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) to a form of Neoplatonic emanation, or creatio ex deo (creation out of God). Wood attempts to quell these worries by exhibiting how Christo-logic renders the claims of creatio ex nihilo and creatio ex deo mutually illuminating. In fact, a true doctrine of ex nihilo depends upon a Christological appeal to ex deo.
Christo-logic dissolves the threat of pantheism by orienting our attention toward the primacy of Christ’s hypostatic identity, how Christ’s Incarnation is creation. Only in Christ’s person do created and uncreated natures coexist without division or confusion. It is precisely this character of Christ’s person that allows for relationship between God and the world. In Wood’s words, “If creation proceeds from God alone— lest the ‘nothing’ whence creation comes prove a ‘something’ alongside God—creation is simultaneously identical to and different from God.” This identity and difference is the very mystery of Christ’s incarnation.
On Wood’s account, creation and Incarnation are thus the same act and bear the same Christo-logic. In his words, “The mystery of creation ex nihilo is that a world proceeds from God as what differs infinitely from God, and yet what proceeds bears such absolute ontological stability that, even in its final return to God, this world will not cease to differ essentially and infinitely from the same God whither it has returned.” In the second part of this essay, I will review the remaining chapters of Wood’s book which bring Maximus’ Christo-logic to bear on eschatology and theodicy.
Joseph Reigle lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School.