The Word Becomes Thick
St. Maximus the Confessor on St. Gregory the Theologian's Oration 382019 Nativity Feast Reflection #3
by Erin Doom
Feast of the Theophany of Our LordandSavior Jesus ChristAnno Domini 2020, January 6
by Erin Doom
Feast of the Theophany of Our LordandSavior Jesus Christ
Anno Domini 2020, January 6
WE ARE
going to end this evening’s Nativity Feast with a reading that we’ve now done ten years in a row. You could say it has become an Eighth Day tradition. Just as St John Chrysostom’s Paschal Catechetical Oration
is ready every year in the Orthodox Church on Pascha (Easter), every year at the EDI Feast of the Nativity we read St. Gregory the Nazianzus’s Oration 38, On the Nativity / Theophany.
But before that reading, let me first say a few words about St. Gregory Nazianzus and St. Maximus the Confessor, thereby adding two more heroes to the cloud of witnesses for this evening’s celebration (the others being St. Athanasius, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, and David Jones)
St. Gregory the Theologian
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390) has been given numerous titles, including “Thunder of Dogmas,” “Divine and Sacred Head,” “Eye and Voice of the Universe,” and “Palace of Eloquence.” But most famously, he is only one of three saints to whom the Church has given the title “Theologian” (St. John the Evangelist and St. Symeon the New Theologian are the other two).
Here is how St. Gregory was described in the fourth and the eleventh centuries:
O Gregory, thou art a man in body but an angel in spirit…. For thy lips praise God like one of the Seraphim, and enlighten the universe with the teaching of true faith. Therefore, accept me who comes to thee with love and faith and be my teacher and enlightener. ~Eusebius (4th cent.)
Every time I read St Gregory, and I often have occasion to do so, chiefly for his teaching but secondarily for his literary charm, I am filled with a beauty and grace that cannot be expressed. […] The beauty of his works is not of the type practiced by the duller sophists, epideictic and aimed at an audience, by which one might be charmed at first and then at the second contact repelled—for those orators did not smooth the unevenness of their lips and were not afraid to rely on boldness of diction rather than skill. But his art is not of that kind, far from it; instead it has the harmony of music.
~Michael Psellos (11th cent.)
You’ll hear that harmony of music firsthand shortly.
After the Bible, St. Gregory is the most frequently cited author in all of Byzantine ecclesiastical literature. He is most known—especially in the West—for his Five Theological Orations
in which he responded to the radical Arian theology of Eunomius, which attributed full divinity only to the Father.
After retiring from public life as archbishop of Constantinople and bishop of Nazianzus, he spent much of his solitude composing poems—theological, moral, and autobiographical—and editing collections of his letters and forty-five of his orations. By the 9th century, sixteen of those orations had been chosen to be read on feast days, saint’s days, or as commentary on the Gospel text for the day.
During the century between his birth (A.D. 329) and the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), where he was officially given the title “Theologian,” there was an explosion of commentaries on his writings. His orations are highly rhetorical and, unlike his fellow Cappadocians (St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa), according to Fr. Maximus Constas, “he theologized in a more ‘literary’ mode, delivering himself of charismatic, near-oracular utterances whose laconic obscurity and polysemic allusiveness were not easy to grasp—and likely to be misunderstood—without informed analysis and interpretation.” For the interpretation of that “laconic obscurity and polysemic allusiveness” we turn to St. Maximus the Confessor.
St. Maximus the Confessor
The earliest works of St. Maximus the Confessor (A.D. 580-662) were written primarily to correct influential but non-orthodox doctrines of Origen and his disciples. Maximus’s Chapters on Love
(A.D. 626) rewrites nearly one-hundred Evagrian passages, shifting Evagrius Ponticus’s emphasis from human knowledge to divine love. The Ambigua, his next work which he began in A.D. 628, according to Fr. Maximus Constas, “set out to transform the theology of Origen and Evagrius, not simply in the flower of its language, but in its deepest roots, effectively securing Christian asceticism and spirituality on solid theological, philosophical, and anthropological foundations."
Philosophically and theologically, the Ambigua
is Maximus’s greatest work. It is where his genius and creativity as a theologian shines most brilliantly. Essentially two works in one—Ambigua to Thomas
and Ambigua to John—it’s written in a literary genre that was popular in monastic and philosophical circles: Questions and Answers. And both parts are Maximus’s attempt to clarify “ambiguous” passages (or comment on "the difficulties") in the writings of St. Gregory the Theologian
.
Ambigua
31-38 all reflect on parts of Gregory’s Oration 38, On the Nativity. I’ve highlighted four of the “ambiguous” phrases in the passage we’ll be ending with (see below). For this occasion, we'll focus on Ambigua
33 (also see below) in which St. Maximus offers an explanation of the Theologian’s phrase “the Word is made dense [or thick].” Before ending with the reading of Oration 38, let's see how Maximus explains Gregory.
Maximus says St. Gregory the Theologian had three ideas in mind:
1) Quite simply, to instruct us “by means of words and examples.” Christ teaches us both through His words and His deeds.
2) The Word becomes thick by concealing (or incarnating) Himself in the logoi of beings. All of creation is stamped by the Divine Logos, that is to say, there are logoi (principles/rationales) that reflect the Logos in everything. In Maximus’s words, the Logos remains
- Without origin in things that have a beginning
- Invisible in things that are seen
- Incapable of being touched in all that is palpable
But why?
3) For the sake of our thick minds, the Logos consented to be embodied and expressed through letters, symbols, and sounds. According to St. Maximus, “So that from all these things He might gradually gather those who follow Him to Himself, being united by the Spirit, and thus raise us up to the simple and unconditional idea of Him, bringing us for His own sake into union with Himself by contraction to the same extent that He has for our sake expanded Himself according to the principle of condescension.”
In his earlier Ambiguum
10, reflecting on St. Gregory’s oration on St. Athanasius, Maximus had already used this same idea of “becoming thick”: “the Word, who for our sake became like us and came to us through the body, and likewise grew thick in syllables and letters.” Notice the repetition of thickness in syllables and letters. In other words, the Word of God doesn’t just become thick by taking on our flesh, or by stamping all of creation, but also by embedding Himself in words and syllables and letters.
In summary, St. Maximus illustrates the three ways Christ became dense by using the image of a garment:
- Christ took on the garment of flesh.
- The forms and shapes of created things that our physical eyes behold are also garments of flesh, which are stamped with the principles—the logoi—that reflect their Creator, the Logos.
- Similarly, the words in Holy Scripture are garments. According to Maximus, the inner meaning of those words—logoi—are the “fleshes” of the Word—the Logos.
In that same Ambiguum
10, St. Maximus offers some of his most important reflections on the Transfiguration of Christ. Drawing that feast together with the Feast of the Nativity according to the Flesh of our Lord, God & Savior Jesus Christ which we celebrate this evening, the admonition to us from both St. Maximus and St. Gregory (as well as St. Athanasius, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, and David Jones!) is to follow Peter, James, and John up the mountain of the divine Transfiguration where we can behold the garments of the Word in His Incarnate Body, in all of His creation, and in all of His words of Scripture, all of which, according to St. Maximus, are “shining and glorious in their reciprocal teachings” about the eternal Son and Word of God, the Divine Logos.
Now for St. Gregory’s Oration!
CLICK HERE for St. Gregory the Theologian's Oration 38
in which there is a link to St. Maximus the Confessor's Ambiguum
33.
*Erin Doom
is the founder and director of Eighth Day Institute. He lives in Wichita, KS with his wife Christiane and their four children, Caleb Michael, Hannah Elizabeth, Elijah Blaise, and Esther Ruth.
**Originally delivered at the 11th annual Feast of the Nativity in the Year of Our Lord 2020 in Wichita, KS at The Ladder, headquarters for Eighth Day Institute.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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