Energetic Procession

Maximos Confessor on the Infinity Of Man

From: Felix Heinzer – Christoph Scönborn (ed.), Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confeseur (Fribourg, 2-5 september 1980), Éditions Universitaires, Fribourg Suisse, 1982.

Ι have chosen my subject for this conference, stimulated by my studies οn the writings of Gregory Ρalamas, which I have edited with the help of a group of my students in Thessaloniki.

Palamas in his attempt to emphasize difference between knowledge of a thing and participation in it, pretended in one of his treatises that those who praise Gοd through knowledge of his uncreated energies are merely pious, while those who participated in them become without beginning and without end by grace άναρχοι and ατελεύτητοι. He bases his optimistic perspective mainly on Maximos the Confessor, whose thought rules οn a high level over his argumentation during the middle period of his literary activity. Gregory Akindynos, against whom that treatise was addressed(1), of course rejects this aspect(2) and ironically questions how Palamas succeeded in becoming a man without beginning, since all men have a physical beginning(3). Ιn the sequel he refers to that haeresiarch, who was expelled from the Church οn the grounds that he merely had said that the human body of Jesus Christ was without beginning and heavenly. He obviously meant Apollinarius.

Palamas needed to return again to this subject and dedicated a few pages of his Antirretics(4). Though he was more extensive this time, he could not state all the complex thoughts, which led Maximos to the formation of his doctrine on this point.

Μan may certainly be considered as άναρχος and ατελεύτητος in the neoplatonic system, where all beings are of the same essence with the One. They come forth from tlιe Οne and return to it. Ιn this case however, tlιere is nο question of a personal existence, but οnly the idea of man or the cοmmοn existence of humanity. Τhe position of Maximos is personalictic and at first it certainly seems strange and inconceivable that man can enter the course of the uncreated. Τhe uncreated is that which really exists, and is not subjected to number and movement, the unique. Οn the other hand the created is that which came from nothing, which is subjected to number and movement, the multiform (5). Maximos sententiously states this fundamental doctrine of Christian theology: “the distance and difference between the uncreated and the created is infinite”(6). The words he ιιses in this reference κτιστόν and άκτιστον, differing from each other only by tlιe privative alpha-prefix, express two realities not merely different, but strange to eαch otlιer, two realities standing on two levels which do not meet each other anywhere. By limiting his reference only to man he characterises this distance as immense, as a “chasma”, as a gulf: “there is a real “chasma”, tremendous and great, between God and man”(7).
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