The Whole Mystery of Christ: Part II
In the first part of this essay, I described how Jordan Wood’s The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor reframes contemporary debates around the Creator-creature relationship by arguing that creation is Incarnation. Chapter 1 of Wood’s book described the Christo-logic of the Incarnation which allows Christ to become identical with the world without violating the nature of Creator or creature. Chapter 2 displayed how the Christo-logic of Incarnation is identical to the logic of creation.
Chapter 3 of Wood’s text details how Christo-logic not only accounts for creation’s coming into being but also creation’s eschatological perfection in deification. For Maximus the Confessor, deification is “the very goal for which creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.” And Wood claims that the logic of Maximian deification entails that “we become identical to God in all but essence; we possess the innate power to do so; we realize this power through and in grace alone; and we concretely manifest it in and as the complete interpenetration of created and uncreated qualities, powers, modes, and activities.”
Wood does not disguise any of the boldness with which Maximus speculates regarding the degree of our deification. It seems to be nothing less than our becoming the Second person of the Trinity. In Wood’s words,
To become God we must become Christ—for no other mediator exists between God and man, creator and creation. Here we meet some of Maximus’s most provocative expressions, many of which say not just that we become “identical” to God in some nondescript sense but that we become Christ himself.
Maximus himself expresses this idea: “[through strict obedience to God we] become living images of Christ, or rather become identical to Him through grace (rather than being a mere simulacrum), or even, perhaps, become the Lord Himself, if such an idea is not too onerous for some to bear.”
Maximian deification does not emphasize our analogical dissimilarity but rather our complete incorporation into and as Christ’s person. “To the same degree that God became man in the historical Incarnation we become God in deification,” Wood claims in his reformulation of Maximus’s own tantum-quantum principle.
Yet the key difference between Christ and the mere creature is that we are never God in essence but become God by the grace of adoption. Everything given to Christ belongs to the Christian in baptism and faith. This is especially clear in Maximus’ Mystagogy, commenting on the Byzantine Liturgy. For instance, he states that when we pray the “Our Father” we announce and enact our gifted identity as the Son.
Wood’s commitment to not only rehearse but perform Maximus’ theology is most visible in Chapter 4 of the book, which considers the problem of evil through Maximus’ metaphysics. Wood introduces his chapter by posing the question: “If creation is nothing but the Word’s loving, ecstatic condescension in and as every creature and the whole cosmos, then why did creation fall?”
He answers by returning to the principle that God desires to manifest his Incarnation everywhere and in all things. Yet, essential to God’s desire for hypostatic union with creation is the creature’s freedom. And it is evident that in our creaturely freedom we actively choose not to become God, and thus not to become ourselves.
It is this freedom (not) to become God that allows for the possibility of evil. In Wood’s words, “Not only does God identify himself with and so generate the world; he offers himself even to the false world we have fabricated for ourselves.” God became man. But we refuse to become God.
For Maximus, evil occurs when we lend reality to a false way of being in the world, principally by acknowledging only our corporeal being and desires—“mere finitude”—or, more elusively, by escaping to aethereal realities without passing through the material mundane—“bad infinity.” The conclusion Wood draws is that this world of our making is not yet God’s creation.
The original possibility of our false ways of being and their ultimate defeat occur in Christ’s cross and resurrection. Christ overcomes our false ways of being and allows for their original possibilities—“In the historical Incarnation the Word ‘hypostasized’—gave his subsistence and person to—the very conditions which all of our personal sins cause and within which they occur…In his Passion he makes himself, freely and out of profligate love for every person, the actual possibility of every person’s rejection of him.”
Wood’s elaboration on this theme is worth quoting at length both for its intricate logic and poetic texture:
[sanctification is] a process of coming to see that my own sin causes the Passion of Christ, the same suffering that, because it is his personal experience, enables and annihilates my sin in principle. The judgment of the Passion thus restores my freedom and invites me to choose to be created, to be born of the Spirit rather than from my own primordial delusion. I must come to recognize the depths of God’s love in the fundamental Godworld reciprocity generated in the Word’s historical experience. That reciprocity creates the freedom to undo my own misuse of freedom exactly because the Word’s identification with the false world is simultaneously his identification with the true one. He made himself the hypostatic identity of bad and good infinities. That is, he received, in his Passion, the entire burden of the errant motions of every individual rational being, and by making them his own—he who is essentially God—endowed the very false “principles” our sin falsely incarnate, namely the “law of death,” with the deeper principle of providence, the complete deification of even this universe and of the “me” I make in vain. His true Incarnation, always and in all things, destroys all false incarnations from true beginning to true end—for he is both.
Wood’s argument is animated by a single question: “Does the historical Incarnation of the Word disclose anything about the fundamental God-world relation, and if yes, what?” His answer is a provocative rejoinder to much current Christology, and the entirety of Western retrievals of Maximus (going as far back as John Scotus Eriugena). Perhaps even more foreboding than the boldness of Wood’s rhetoric are the brief hints he gives that his reading of Maximus might bring about a positive reappraisal of Hegel.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam
It is my own opinion that Wood’s schema—taking Creation as incarnation—awaits application in other theological conversations to be fully evaluated for its promise and its peril. Already Thomas Pfau has integrated Maximus into his grandiose treatment of the phenomenology of the image. Yet, Pfau hinges his argument for the image’s epiphanic possibilities on the metaphysical priority of the analogia entis, not the metaphysical primacy of Christ’s hypostasis. How might Wood’s shift in metaphysical priorities transfigure Pfau’s project? In other corners, intense discussion is occurring on how a Maximian metaphysics may grant a cataphatic corrective to postliberal theology’s apophatic tendencies and render our theology of language more Incarnational.
But another application remains at the ordinary level. Is this theology edifying? What might the contemplative and liturgical upshot of Wood’s retrieval leave us with? To my eyes, it should lead us to nothing less than doxology. It may prompt us to see that to gaze at creation appropriately is to gaze at Christ. To see this world properly is also to see Christ’s incarnate hypostasis: the image of the invisible God.
Joseph Reigle lives in Durham, North Carolina, and is a graduate student at Duke Divinity School.