Sunday, June 30, 2024

Geocentrism in Maximus the Confessor's The Ambigua

  

In the first place, a “year,” according to our holy and wise teachers, is the periodic return of the sun to the same point from which it began, a circuit which contains the distinctive fivefold characteristic of time. For time is divided and drawn together by units of day, [1357A] week, month, season, and year. The same is true of the year itself, which is divided into units of hour, day, week, month, and season, yet its movement remains continuous and uninterrupted by intervals, so that the divisions perceived in light of its alterations are merely the measurement of time’s continuous and uninterrupted movement.

 

If in such manner, then, the year unfolds for us according to the movement of the sun, it follows that the year acceptable to the Lord (as Scripture calls it), when understood allegorically, is the entire extension of the ages, beginning from the moment when God was pleased  to give substance to beings and existence to what did not exist, and, through His providence—like an intelligible sun whose power holds the universe together in stability and graciously consents to emit its [1357B] rays—He deigned to vary the modes of His presence so that the good things He planted in beings might ripen to full maturity, until all the ages will have reached their appointed limit. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 46, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:203, 205)