Saturday, July 6, 2024

Maximus the Confessor Using “faith alone/only” in a non-Protestant manner

  

From Saint Gregory’s poems, on the words:

 

The sublime Word plays in all kinds of forms, judging His world as He wishes, on this side and on that.

 

When the great David, by faith alone [GK: κατα μονην πιστιν], spiritually thrust his intellect through the latches, as it were, of visible realities, and gazed upon intelligible realities, he received from the [1408D] Divine Wisdom a certain cognitive mark of the mysteries that are accessible to human beings—then, as it seems to me, he said: Abyss, calls to abyss at the sound of Your cataracts. With these words he may perhaps be indicating that every intellect in a state of contemplation, on account of its invisible nature and the depth and multitude of its thoughts, is like an abyss, for after it has passed through the whole orderly arrangement of visible things and finds itself in the region of intelligible realities, and when, again by faith [GK: κατα πιστιν], it transcends even the majesty of these things by means of a forceful motion, so that it comes to stand still in itself, [1409A] utterly fixed and immobile (on account of its passage beyond all things), it is then that, as is fitting, it calls to the Divine Wisdom—which to our knowledge is really and truly an unfathomable abyss—and asks that it might be given, not of course the divine cataracts themselves, but their sound, which means that it asks to receive a certain cognitive mark of faith concerning the modes and principles of divine providence governing the universe. Through this gift, the intellect will be able to remember God from the land of Jordan and Hermon, where the great and awesome mystery of the divine descent of God the Word was accomplished through the flesh, a mystery in which the truth of right faith in God was given to human beings, and which, insofar as it utterly transcends the whole order and power of nature, was called the foolishness and weakness of God by [1409B] the divine Paul, the great apostle, who is both an initiate and initiates others in the divine and secretly known wisdom—and I believe that he called it such on account of it surpassing wisdom and power, whereas the great and godly-minded Gregory characterized this mystery as a kind of game, on account of its surpassing prudence.(Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 71, in On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:313, 315)

 

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