Monday, May 27, 2024

Benjamin E. Heidgerken on Christ's Humanity and Fallenness in the Theology of Maximus the Confessor (579-662)

  

Christ’s Humanity, Human Fallenness, and the Devil

 

For Maximus, Christ’s relationship with fallen human nature renders him susceptible to temptation and demonic attack as experienced after Adam’s Fall. To make sense of this claim, Maximus first distinguishes between Christ’s essential and relational appropriations of human nature. Second, he sees in Christ’s essential appropriation of human nature a “double descent” into characteristic features of both unfallen and fallen human beings. After outlining these distinctions, I explore some key terms that Maximus uses to indicate Christ’s essential appropriation of fallen human nature to show how this appropriation enables Christ to experience temptation in a mode parallel to that of fallen humanity.

 

Following form an affirmation of Christ’s sinlessness, Maximus recognizes that there are some aspects of fallen human existence that Christ cannot experience. If Christ’s mortal life were perfectly identical to that of others since Adam, he would no longer be a savior; he would be engulfed by sin like everyone else. Yet, Christ’s experience must make sufficient contact with the fallen conditions of humankind to render the affirmation of Hebrews 4:15 meaningful. How is Christ “tempted like us in all things, yet without sin?” To differentiate between the grounds of temptation and the beginnings of sin, Maximus distinguishes between Christ’s essential and relational appropriation, or “taking on,” of human nature. (TPO 19 [PG 91:220B]) According to the former appropriation. Christ assumes what is an intrinsic aspect of the logos of human nature; according to the second, Christ takes on, out of love of humanity, what belongs to others “without suffering or doing it himself.” (See Dispute with Pyrrhus [PG 91:304A-B) By essential appropriation, Christ becomes everything that other humans are by nature. On the other hand, what Christ appropriates relationally—what he does not experience—is truly sinful, a ”falsification of nature.” (TPO 20 [PG 91:237B-C]) Thus, Christ’s relational appropriation is the way in which Christ relates to the evil activation of human nature; he does not himself do it, but, by his essential appropriation of human nature, he understands the nexus out of which it arises.

 

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Despite Christ’s natural freedom from the consequence of Adam’s sin, Maximus argues that Christ, through his condescension, entered into deeper contact with those consequences. Christ willingly took on a passible, corruptible, and mortal body in order to heal each of these aspects of human life. Similarly, Christ suffers “out of weakness” precisely in order to save those equally weak and sinful human beings striving after Christ’s example; for this reason, Christ assumed a human nature that included the consequences of Adam’s sin. (CT II 27 [PG 90:1137A-B]) Thus, while in an absolute sense he did not need to, he willingly bore in his humanity the punishment of Adam, in particular the possibility, corruptibility, and mortality that all other human beings experience. (Benjamin E. Heidgerken, Salvation Through Temptation: Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas on Christ’s Victory Over the Devil [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021], 99-100, 101)