Thursday, July 4, 2024

Examples of Free Will being Emphasized in Maximus the Confessor in The Ambigua

  

For there was no other way for man, being created, to become the sons of God by the grace of divinization, without first being born of the Spirit, I the exercise of his own free choice, owing to the indomitable power of self-determination which naturally dwells within him. [1348A] (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 42, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:181)

 

If, then, voluntary activity makes use of the potential of nature, either according to nature or against nature, it will receive nature’s limit of either well-being or ill-being—and this is eternal being, in which the souls celebrate their Sabbath, receiving cessation from all motion. The eighth and first, or rather, the one [1392D] and perpetual day, is the unallowed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest; and, throughout the whole being of those who by their free choice have used the principle of being according to nature, the whole God suitably abides, bestowing on them eternal well-being by giving them a hare in Himself, because He alone, properly speaking, is, and is good, and is eternal; but to those who have willfully used the principle of their being contrary to nature, He rightly renders not well-being but eternal ill-being, since well-being is no longer accessible to those who have place themselves in opposition to it, and they have absolutely no motion after the manifestation of what was sought, by which what is sought is naturally revealed to those who seek it. [1393A] (Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 65, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:279, 281)