Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Maximus the Confessor on the "Third Heaven"

  

From Saint Gregory’s same Theological Oration:

 

Had Paul been able to express the experiences gained from the third heaven, and his progress, or ascent, or assumption.

 

. . .

 

I think that our great and holy teacher, in elaborating on the rapture of the holy apostle Paul, had the aforementioned principles in mind, and thus appropriately assigned to each aspect of the apostles’ experience the most fitting name or word. Thus I am of the opinion that he uses the word “progress” to name the habitual state of virtuous dispassion, which established the holy apostle above the level of natural necessity, for in his dispassion he entered into no voluntary relation with nature; indeed he went beyond even the natural activity of sense perception itself, or rather he transformed even this into a permanent spiritual state. By “ascent” the teacher designates both the abandonment of all sensory objects—which no longer affected or [1237D] were affected by the apostle’s senses—and the transcendence of natural cognitive contemplation in the spirit, which reflects on those objects. “Assumption” is the name given to Saint Paul’s subsequent remaining and abode in God, which the teacher appropriately called an “assumption,” indicating that this was not something that the apostle accomplished, but rather experienced.

 

. . .

 

The “third heaven”—to hazard a conjecture—most probably signifies the boundaries that circumscribe practical philosophy and natural contemplation, as well as the highest principles of theological mystagogy, in other words, their limits, since there is a certain measure to the comprehension of virtue and of nature, and of the theology pertaining to both, and this is determined for all beings by God in a manner appropriate to the nature of each. . . . Again, when Scripture speaks of the “third heaven,” it may perhaps be referring to the three successive orders of holy angels that are immediately above us, which Saint Paul may have reached, being initiated into their positive affirmations through the negation of his own cognitions and imitating their permanent habits of mind through the transcendent negations of those proper to himself. For every nature of rational beings, in accordance with its order and potential, is initiated into and imitates the cognitive states, propositions, and affirmations of the order and essence above it, and it does this by way of privation [1240D] that is, through the apophatic negations of what is proper to itself. (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 20, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:409, 411, 413, 415, 417)

 

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