Mystagogy, Metaphysics, and Maximus
God as the World’s Formal Cause in Maximus the Confessor
In honour of the feast day of Saint Maximus the Confessor (January 21), I decided I would read his work on ecclesiastical theology titled On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, in which the saint sets out to provide a theological and mystical contemplation of the rites and ceremonies praticed by the Church. The resulting blog post has nothing to do with our saint’s goal. Instead, I was inspired by a particularly challenging passage near the beginning of the work to consider Maximus’ metaphysics and how he conceives of God and the world’s relationship to him.
A brief note on the translation: The edition of On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy in my possession includes a translation by the editor, Jonathon Armstrong. However, as I read it and compared it to the included text of the original Greek, I came to suspect that his translation was less than optimal. Normally, I refuse to believe that my Greek is better than that of a Ph.D.—and if I were in your place, dear reader, I would pretty quickly assume that I had fallen into the clutches of dire delusions of grandeur—but in this case it was too difficult to deny the possiblity. To show forth my good will and excuse what would outherwise be a blot on my ethos as a “writer,” I have compiled an analysis complete with the text, Armstrong’s translation, my translation, and my rationale for you to scrutinize. You can find it here. Bellow I present my own translation.
The text:
For just as God, in making all things and bringing them into being by his limitless power, sustains them, draws them together, and circumscribes them, he also providentially binds to himself and to each other both the sensible and the intelligible. By holding all things around himself as their cause, beginning, and end, he renders what by nature stands divergent from one another convergent by the power of their relationship to him. By which power all things are brought into an uncorrupted and unconfused identity of motion and subsistence referenced to absolutely no being that is originally by some difference of nature or motion discordant and divided (since all things have been united to all other things without confusion by the one indissoluble relationship and protection of the only beginning and cause). This relationship then nullifies and covers over all specific relationships considered according to the nature of each extant thing, not by corrupting and annihilating them and making them not to be, but by surpassing and outshining them. Just as when a totality of parts appears, or rather the cause of that totality according to which both the totality itself and its parts by nature both appear and exist (since the parts possess the whole cause which outshines themselves), and just as the sun outshines the stars in nature and power; in these ways this relationship covers the substance of things as a cause does its effects. — On the Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, 664d-665b
To unravel what Maximus is trying to describe here, we need to do some metaphysics. As an analogy, let us consider a mosaic. A mosaic is a collection of small tiles inlaid into a wall, ceiling, or floor in such a way as to comprise an image. In this case, let us imagine a grand mosaic of Christ on the ceiling of a cathedral. We can say that this mosaic has three things: parts, a whole, and a cause. The parts are obvious, they are the pieces that make up the mosaic; they may differ in nature from one another: some being stone, some ceramic, some precious metals, etc. The whole is, of course the mosaic itself, a unity of its parts. The cause of the mosaic is the thing after which it is imaged, in this case the face of Christ. This use of the word “cause” is an unusual one for the modern mind; we are more likely to think of the cause of the mosaic as the artisans who built it, or the patron who commissioned it. The ancient mind would call these the mosaic’s efficient cause, that is, the agents that effected the change that brought the mosaic into being. However, a thing’s efficient cause is only one kind of cause among (typically) four: the efficient, material, final, and formal causes. When Maximus refers to the cause of a whole as its unifying principle, he is referring to a thing’s formal cause, that is, the principle that dictates the form, or shape, of the whole.
Maximus talks about a totality appearing from its parts: anyone looking at the mosaic experiences this phenomenon when they look at the mosaic and see an image rather than all of its parts. The parts themselves are overshadowed, or, in the saint’s language, outshone by the whole unity. You look at the mosaic and see a picture, not a collection of stones and tiles. The principle is the same in the case of the unity’s cause: when we look at our mosaic, we see Christ and not the mosaic per se. This cause dictates the nature of both the whole and the parts. That the cause dictates the nature of the whole should be obvious. An image should look like the thing it is imaging. Making all provision for artistic imagination etc., we would call an image bad if it departs from the form it is trying to capture—a mosaic of Christ would be a bad mosaic if the image of Christ therein were not recognizable as being that of Christ. The whole, therefore, derives its being from the cause. In so far as the whole, which is attempting to capture the cause’s likeness, is made of parts, the relationship of one part to another must also be defined by the cause, since the parts must be arranged in such a way that the whole sufficiently images the cause—the parts must be arranged so as to produce the image of Christ in our mosaic. In this way, the visage of Christ as the cause of the mosaic outshines any particular relationship that one part has to another. Thus is can be said that the parts possess the cause in that they derive from that cause their being as parts of the mosaic. For the same reason we can say that that cause is present in every piece. If we remove a piece from the mosaic it ceases to be a part of the whole.
So much for our mosaic. Now we must take that analogy and abstract it to the highest degree, because what I have said about our mosaic Maximus predicates of the whole world as a unity of every existing thing. In Maximus’ view—indeed, in the general view of the ancient mind—the world is an ordered and unified whole, a cosmos. But if a thing is ordered or unified it must have a form that dictates that order, and, just like our mosaic, the parts of the whole must relate to its cause for the whole to exist. This should be rather obvious. How can one talk about an order if there is nothing to define that order? Or how can we call anything a unity if there is no way for us to identify what is and is not unified? Formal cause is what allows us to differentiate between the mosaic and the pews in our hypothetical cathedral. We know that the pews are not a part of the mosaic because the mosaic has a clear unifying principle. If it did not, we would not see a mosaic but only an aggregate of rocks and tiles. So it is with the cosmos according to Maximus, in whose view God is the formal cause of the cosmos. It is by its relationship to God as the formal cause of the whole, that each thing derives its “identity of motion and subsistence.” Moreover, each thing, by its relationship to God, derives its relationship to everything else, and by virtue of their relationship to God, all things are unified to each other, in which union subsists the universe. As the world’s formal cause, God is the source of each thing’s being; that is, the nature that each thing actualizes in its act of being is an indispensable and specific part of the nature of the universe.
Therefore, in God, every individual nature finds its proper place, where it neither strays into the province of some other nature, nor is itself eclipsed. However, these boundaries between natures may be mobile and mutually defined; this is perhaps the “motion” of a thing’s identity to which Maximus alludes. This, I think, nicely accounts for our current theory of evolution, since the principles of adaptation, fitness, and equilibrium would quite naturally be predicated of the cosmic formal cause, which, we have said, is God. Really, this merely suggests that, when change occurs in a thing’s nature, the natures to which the altered nature relates will also change to accommodate, or else the relationship between the altered nature and the one that refuses to adapt is annihilated (that this is universally the case should be a rather simple matter of observation). In either way, the boundaries between natures are preserved by the formal cause that defines the cosmic unity. I admit that such an idea would likely have been alien to Maximus. The ancient mind tended to assume that natures were static and immutable. They would have repudiated the kind of mutation theorized by modern evolution. Nevertheless, I think a sufficient account of it can be given in Maximus’ language.
But why does any of this matter? Really, it is merely a theoretical system designed to account for the phenomena of the world within a certain set of presuppositions (I, along with Saint Maximus, happen to feel that this theory is a rather powerful one); in the context of the Mystagogy, Maximus is arguing that the Church is an image, or icon, of God in that it also provides an organizing and unifying principle, though not on a cosmic scale. In Late Antique Christianity, especially in the East, such metaphysical theology was quite commonplace. It’s not surprising, then, that the language here employed by Saint Maximus was also employed by others in such areas of study as religion, the physical world, politics, and ethics, to name a few. It is my hope that, with a firm, if novice, grasp on these ideas, we can consider some of their implications for our experiences of the world. Stay tuned! And consider reading the previous post, “Things Happen,” for another look at ancient metaphysics through a somewhat different lens. Additionally, if you’re curious to know how this classical metaphysics has been applied to religious discourse, you may be interested in another blog on this site: An Introduction to Apophatic Theology.
Disclaimer:
I lack serious formal education and I’ll probably never get it. Because of this, I do not have access to resources or peer review. As such, the only way for me to get past my crippling imposter complex is to acknowledge my ignorance and plead for your help. Therefore, if you, dear reader, come across something in my writing objectionable, questionable, or downright wrong, I hereby place you under MORAL OBLIGATION TO CORRECT ME. I beg of you, get in touch via the link below.
