Dr. Albert Rossi: Once again, this is Dr. Albert Rossi, for Ancient Faith Radio. And Today, we’re going to talk about a very, very interesting topic: the influence of St .Maximos for us today. St Maximos is an enormously influential and insightful father of the church. And I have with me, now, a friend—he and I go back many many years. A graduate of St. Vladimir’s, a priest: Fr. Joshua Lollar, who has done extensive work on St. Maximos. And he’s going to talk about it with us. So, Fr. Joshua, what can you begin with?

Fr. Joshua Lollar: Well, just to remind listeners of who Maximos was: he lived in the 7th century, was a very prolific writer and defender of what we now take for granted as being “the Orthodox doctrine of Christ”: that He is fully God and fully man, that He acts as a human and as God, that He wills as a human and as God. All of these things were widely disputed at his time, and he, in a sense, stood alone against the Eastern half of the Roman empire, defending these positions. And, again, they are positions that we sing in church every day, and he is the clearest expresser of that.

So he was a very difficult writer in some ways to study: a very complex mind. To wade into his Greek is like wading into the ocean. You can get swept away by the waves very, very quickly. So it’s a daunting task to study him, but a very rewarding one. And I think the reason he was, in a sense, so complicated, as a writer, and wrote so much, and wrote in such varied ways, is he had such a deep sense of the all-pervading presence of Christ in everything. He very famously wrote in one of his works that the Word of God, who is God Himself, desires that the mystery of his embodiment come to pass in everything.

Dr. Rossi: In everything.

Fr. Joshua: So, you know, there’s a kind of technical theology bound up with all of this. But the sense of it is that everything that truly exists—and Maximos is very aware that much of what we think exists doesn’t—

Dr. Rossi: For example…?

Fr. Joshua: Our own passionate fantasies. He’ll use the language of — many of the fathers use the language of — going towards “what is not.” Which we would just say is a fantasy, a delusion. But anything that truly does exist, that has been created by God, isn’t only something that God made, and left to its own devices; but is God’s own revelation to us; that every experience, every object even in the world, contains the Word of God. Maximos thought of the World as being another scripture: to read the world… and in some ways, the world is clearer than the scriptures. He says, “It all but cries out with a loud voice that God is present.”

So in the midst of all of his complex theology and philosophy and so on, he’s driven by this almost overwhelming sense of the presence of God in all things.

Dr. Rossi: And isn’t that vital for all of us? Me, and you the listener, today. Fr. Joshua and I were talking earlier about—and it struck me at Theophany this year—where, at the tropar we sing: “O Christ our God, who revealed Thyself, etc.” And He did! By His baptism, and the rest of His life, He revealed the Godhead. And, that’s what he wants us to do! We are to reveal the Godhead in our mere everything. Our mere presence. The way we eat soup. The way we talk, and the way we dress, and all the rest of it: we show God! That’s pretty daunting! Pretty mind-blowing, because I—to tell you the truth—I don’t really like it. I don’t want to know that this is what is going on inside me. I prefer to be dumb old me, and bump along. That’s not the way it is. So that’s the first part.

The second part of it is—as Fr. Joshua said so eloquently—not only seeing myself as emitting, revealing the Godhead, but seeing that in others. So that every time I look in someone’s eyes, or even at their ears, or look at a lamp, or a glass of orange juice, I can see God! I can see the godhead. I can see God’s hand. But not only, “God created this.” It is an experience of actually Him now. This is Him. This is how He is, Who He is. This whole insight is very deep.

This struck me about the face of a child. I have five grandchildren. One of them particularly, I was recently at his 4th birthday party. And he’s just such a sweet, loving boy, and it’s so easy—me as an Italian grandfather, just to look at him, and say, “Oh, what a sweet kid!” And that’s true. But it’s also true that looking at his little face, and his little body—skinny—is looking at God. Wow!

Fr. Joshua: Well you brought up children. And Maximos has a wonderful image of how God is with us in the world. He says that, “The world is filled with things that get our attention. And ultimately they’re there to instruct us.” And he says, in fact, what it is: imagine how parents are with their children. They take brightly-colored clothing, toys, and stuff, and play with their kids, to teach them, in a way that’s appropriate to the children, how the world is. Because you can’t sit down and lay out a lesson for a child. They just need objects to play with. Shiny objects, beautiful objects to keep their attention.

Maximos says, that’s what God is with us. He says, quoting Gregory the Theologian, “The exalted Word plays in the world.”

Dr. Rossi: “The exalted world plays…”

Fr. Joshua: “…plays in the world.” Kind of making determinations as he wishes, this way, and that way. And Maximos is wondering, why would Gregory say that God plays games in the world? Well, it’s because we are his children. And this whole drama around us: it’s real, but it’s also God playing, coming down to us to draw us to himself in ways that we can appreciate and understand.

As much as there’s this heavy theology in Maximos, there’s also this lightness about his sense of being in the world as a child.

Dr. Rossi: So thought provoking, so insightful. I’m reminded of a little interchange that I had with my eldest grandchild, Colin, who is now 15. When he was 4, I recall vividly, he and I were talking, and I said, “Colin, I love you.” He said, “Papa, I know you love me.” I said, “Well, Colin, how do you know I love you?” Without a blink, he just said, “Because you play on the floor with me!” It’s like, that’s his definition, his translation, his operationalizing of my love! And he’s right! I’m on the floor with him. And in that sense we’re equal. We’re both the same size, so to speak. Yeah—God plays with us.

Fr. Joshua: And this, I think, is why Maximos was so insistent upon defining Christ in His humanity. In a way, this is why I was attracted to study Maximos in the first place: because the technicalities of his theology were confusing to me, and I wondered, why does it matter to spell this out in such detail? But, it’s because Maximos had such a conviction of God’s closeness to us. And that we experience this, of course, most profoundly in Christ. God not only saves us: He becomes us. And it’s only in becoming us that He saves us. Living with us, getting down on the floor with us. That’s what the incarnation is, we can say: Him getting down on the floor, and being with us as we can be with Him.

Dr. Rossi: This is so much a—from my point of view—a definition of Orthodoxy: the imminent godhead. We say that God is both utterly transcendent and utterly imminent. Much of theology, as I understand it today, is transcendent. God made us, He gave us free will, He made us strong, He’s up in the clouds, He watches how we use our lives, and, in a sense, may help us if we ask Him to, but, pretty much, just leaves us alone, and He does His thing, whatever that might be. And in the end He judges how we did. Well, that’s not what we’re saying! God is not absent. God is inside the fiber. He’s within within within within.

Fr. Joshua: And Maximos is very much a receiver of the tradition of this transcendent notion of God. As we say in the liturgy, God is ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, absolutely. And Maximos sees the divine darkness on Mount Sinai, and so on. But he also understands that there’s light on the other side of that darkness, that, yes, we have to pass through ignorance and acknowledge that nothing we say of God can be adequate to the expression. But, God also invites us to speak. It’s not as though God says, “You can’t talk about me, so don’t talk to me.” God says, “You can’t talk about me, so talk to me.” And that’s what Maximos’s theology is—that’s what Orthodox theology is. It’s a theology that seeks to daringly praise God, knowing that, of course we don’t know what we’re talking about! But we love the one to whom we are trying to speak. It’s, as we know, God Himself who speaks in us, who allows this language on the other side of the darkness of negation, the darkness of ignorance, to wake up. And having that darkness present nevertheless—to say things that are true and real, precisely because they are with God. Not speaking abstractly to some object that we may or may not understand, but with God, to God.

Maximos wrote a beautiful treatise on the liturgy, giving a mystical interpretation on the liturgy. Very striking: he talks at the very beginning of that text, called the Mystagogy, that the Church building itself is an image of God. And he says one of the reasons why is because it encompasses all of reality. It’s kind of an image of the world. And there are many doorways to get in.

Dr. Rossi: Many doorways to get in…

Fr. Joshua: It’s just more expansive than we can imagine. So, yes, it’s important that we pass through our ignorance of God. But it’s more important that we come to the fact that God has made himself known. He’s not interested in holding us back and insisting that we be reminded of His holiness and His transcendence. That’s all there and true. But the deeper thing is that He desires that His embodiment becomes known in all things.

Dr. Rossi: And as—I think it was St. Gregory the Great said, God is the “luminous darkness.” What does that mean? well, we can say, we don’t know what it means, but we do know what it means. And that gets back to Fr. Hopko’s statement, that Orthodoxy is paradoxy. It’s such a paradox, but we hold both sides of the paradox together, and then walk on with a paradox. Which doesn’t compute fully with the rational mind, but it’s not irrational. Sometimes they use the word trans-rational. It is rational but it’s way, way more than that.

Fr. Joshua: And Maximos’ favorite word, precisely, is logos: rationality. And our problem is, we have a narrow view of what to be rational really means. The rational thing is to respond to the God who is transcendent but who is speaking to you. If he is coming down and speaking to you, the rational thing is to respond; not to say, well, I can’t know anything about you, so I’m not going to be present to you. But rather to accept what is being given, and to respond in kind. God has come to us as a man. He became human, so we have to become human in order to be with him.

Strikingly, Maximos says, “God and man are paradigms of each other.” We can understand God as the paradigm; we try to be like him. But man as the paradigm of God? That’s something that I can’t really spell out, but that’s the meaning of love of your neighbor. Christ said that if you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.

Dr. Rossi: So insightful. Well, with that, Fr. Joshua, we’ll finish up. Any last word you want to say?

Fr. Joshua: I think, just to the listeners—Maximos is a difficult author, but worth studying, worth reading and struggling with. He has great insight and a comprehensive vision that’s endlessly inspiring for us, so that we can receive him as one of the great teachers of the Church.

Dr. Rossi: Thank you for that. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that. So we’ll wrap up.