The Gideons & St Maximus the Confessor

My dear friend and brother:

It has been suggested by a few of our Christian traveling-men that we might increase our usefulness and also our helpfulness to each other by quietly coming together to plan some simple organization that we might better know each other and possibly widen our influence, and by preconceived plans surround the archenemy of our souls, and give him a black eye by the help of Him who is altogether lovely, and the chief among ten thousand.

This renaissance of scholarship on St. Maximus can largely be traced back to a work that we would be remiss if we failed to include: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor (1941). Von Balthasar suggests that Maximus is surprisingly relevant for today’s intellectual scene because he “is the philosophical and theological thinker who stands between East and West. In his self-effacing serenity, and also in the fearless courage of his truly free spirit, he reveals how, and from which directions, these two come together.” It should thus not be surprising that in the 21st century his works in the English-speaking world have been published by some of the most prominent Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic publishers.

Knowing, then, that nothing is more proper to rational beings than reason, and that nothing is more fitting for the spiritual nobility of those who love God than the understanding and exercise of reason—and when I speak of “reason” I am not referring to a reasoned discourse [logos], fashioned through mere rhetorical artifice and cleverly concocted to please the ear through lovely speech, which even immoral men are capable of producing. Rather, I am speaking of the hidden reason that nature—essentially and independently of any learning—possesses by its inner character, which it has received for the unerring examination of beings and for the true comprehension of their inner principles [logoi]. Once this reason has been well formed by means of the virtues, the Holy Spirit of God naturally becomes its intimate companion, and fashions it into a divine image, according to the likeness of the Spirit’s own beauty, so that by grace it lacks nothing of the attributes that belong to the Divinity by nature. For reason is the instrument that with consummate skill gathers together the whole manifestation of the divine goodness, which like lightning intelligibly flashes forth in beings.