Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) on 2 Corinthians 5:21

  

QUESTION 42

 

 

How is it that we are said to commit sin and to know that we have sinned, while the Lord is said to have “become sin” without knowing sin? And how is sinning, and knowing that one has sinned, not a graver offense than sinning and not knowing it? For it says: “He who did not know sin, was made sin for us.”

 

Response

 

42.2. Because Adam’s natural power of free choice was corrupted first, it corrupted nature together with itself, losing the grace of impassibility. And thus the fall of free choice from the good toward evil became the first and blameworthy sin. The second sin, which came about as a result of the first, was the blameless alteration of nature from incorruptibility to corruption. Thus two sins came about in the forefather through his transgression of the divine commandment: the first was blameworthy, but the second was blameless, having been caused by the first. The first was a sin of free choice, which voluntarily abandoned the good, but the second was of nature which involuntarily and as a consequence of free choice lost its immortality. Our Lord and Savior corrected this mutual corruption and alteration of nature when He assumed the whole of our nature, and by virtue of the assumed nature He too possessed passibility as something adorning the incorruptibility of His free choice. And for our sakes, through the passibility of nature, He became sin, but He did not commit voluntary sin, thanks to the immutability of His free choice—to the contrary, He corrected the passibility of nature through the incorruptibility of His faculty of free choice, making the end of nature’s passibility, by which I mean death, into the beginning of the transformation of our nature into incorruptibility. In this way, just as the alteration of nature from incorruptibility to corruption came to all men through one man, who voluntarily turned his free choice away from the good, so too, through one man, Jesus Christ, who did not turn His faculty of free choice away from the good, the restoration of nature from corruption to incorruptibility came to all men.

42.3. The Lord, then, did not know my sin, that is, the turning away of my free will: He did not assume my sin, neither did He become my sin, but [He became] sin because of me; that is, He assumed the corruption of nature which came about through the turning away of my free choice, and He became, for our sake, man passible by nature, abolishing my sin through the sin that came about because of me. And just as in Adam, the individual free choice for evil rescinded the common glory of nature’s incorruptibility—since God judged that it was not good for man, who had used his free choice for evil to have an immortal nature—so too, in Christ, the individual free choice for good took away the common disgrace of corruption, with the whole of nature being recreated incorruptible through the resurrection on account of the immutability of the faculty of free will, since God judged that it was good for man again to receive an immortal nature, in that he did not turn away his free will. By “man” I am referring to the incarnate God the Word, on account of the flesh endowed with a rational soul that He united to Himself according to hypostasis. For if the turning away of the faculty of free will in Adam brought about passibility, corruption, and mortality in nature, it follows quite naturally that the immutability of the same <capacity> in Christ brought about, through the resurrection, a return of impassibility, incorruptibility, and immortality.

42.4. The condemnation of Adam’s freely chosen sin was thus the alteration of nature toward passibility, corruption, and death. Man did not receive this alteration from God from the beginning, but it was rather man who made it and knew it, creating the freely chosen sin through his disobedience, making his free will into something sinful, the offspring of which is clearly his condemnation to death. The condemnation of my freely chosen sin—I mean, of human nature’s passible, corruptible, and mortal elements—was assumed by the Lord, who for my sake became “sin” in terms of passibility, corruption, and mortality, voluntarily by nature assuming my condemnation—though He is without condemnation in His free choice—so that He might condemn the sin of my free choice and nature as well as my condemnation, simultaneously expelling sin, passibility, corruption, and death from nature, bringing about a new mystery concerning me, who had fallen through disobedience: the dispensation of Him, who for my sake and out of His love for mankind, voluntarily appropriated my condemnation through His death, through which He granted that I be called back and restored to immortality.

42.5. In many ways, I think, it has been succinctly demonstrated how the Lord “became sin” without “knowing sin,” and how man did not become sin, but rather committed and knew sin, both in his free choice, which he himself initiated, and on the level of his nature, which latter for his sake the Lord accepted, while being completely free of the former. Consistent, then, with the understood aim of my argument, and with the proper distinction between the two senses of the word “sin,” we can say that committing and knowing sin is in no way superior to “becoming” sin. For the one brings about separation from God, inasmuch as the faculty of free will voluntarily drives away from itself divine things, while the second quite often hinders evil, not permitting the evil intention of our free choice to proceed to the level of action.

 

Scholia

 

[1] The sin of nature, he says, is death, according to which we withdraw from existence even against our will. The sin of free choice, on the other hand, is the choosing of things that are contrary to nature, according to which we willingly fall away from well-being.

[2] He says that even though the Lord, when he became incarnate, was corruptible (insofar as He was man, according to which He is also said to have “become sin”), He nonetheless is naturally incorruptible according to His free choice, inasmuch as He is without sin.

[3] The death of the Lord, he says, became the beginning of the incorruptibility for the whole of nature.

[4] The sin of which we are the cause is the corruption of nature, while our own sin is the constitutive turning away of our free choice. This is why man became mortal, being subjected to the just judgment of natural death, unto the destruction of the death of his free will.

[5] The first sin, he says, is the turning away of free will, which the Lord did not possess, even if He indeed assumed the passibility of human nature, which was the punishment for the turning away of Adam’s faculty of free will. This is why He alone was “free among the dead,” for He was without sin, through which death came into being. (Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios [trans. Maximos Constas; The Fathers of the Church 136; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018], 241-45)

 

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