Ambiguum 7

• Written against Origenists who use a statement from Gregory of Nazianzus to justify the existence of souls that were punished by having to take on bodies, with physical bodies being the punishment for the worst offenses.
• [The “soul” seems to like it is possibly the intellect: “...if our opponents say that intellects could have adhered to the divine goodness, but did not, because they wanted something different...”]
• To say that souls could have continued participating in the Good, but wanted something else, that is saying that the divine goodness is not satisfying in itself. How could it be the Good, then? What is stopping this process from happening repeatedly? That would hardly be the Sabbath rest we are promised. Indeed, we move from being (created), through movement (change), and finally end up at stability (rest). In fact, something’s end purpose is established at its beginning, and our end is to be drawn into the divine.
• Only God has no passions [this seems to mean “desire for change” or “change”] and is unmoving, because he is self-caused and exists for nothing. Everything else was created by him for a purpose (end), which is found in him. Since he is infinite, our movement towards our end never ceases.
• We (“the saints”) participate in God’s goodness, but only through a likeness, as 1 Cor 2:9-11 says. Since God is beyond understanding, we can only ever participate in a likeness.
• Our participation is by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to Christ, just as Christ voluntarily subjugated himself to the Father. This is a “voluntary handing over of our self-determination to God”, but it is not a destruction of the will. It is a will that has been trained to want nothing else, like a seal that is stamped does not “want” to be in any other shape.
• Just as a the stars disappear when the sun rises, so our other desires will be outshone by desire for God when we see him for who he is.
• “‘Then we shall know as we are known’ (1 Cor 13:12), when we mingle our God-formed mind and divine reason to what is properly its own and the image returns to the archetype for which it now longs.” (from Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.17)
• How “we portions of God” have “slipped down”
• The one Logos is many logoi and vice-versa, and the logoi of angels, humans, etc. preceeded their creation. [I am not entirely clear what logoi mean here. It cannot be purpose or end, since that would be teloi. The “Logos” is Christ. In Ambiguum 45 logoi is translated “divine principles” and logos “cardinal causative principle”]
• Everything participates in God in some way, whether it is through intellect, reason, the senses, etc. Thus we are all “portions” of God, because we our logoi was preexisting in the one Logos.
• “Although he is beyond being and nothing can participate in him in any way, nor is he any of the totality of things that can be known in relation to other things, nevertheless we affirm that the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One. Because the One goes forth out of goodness into individual being, creating and preserving them, the One is many.” And because the many are drawn to the end in the One, the many are one.
• “We are said to have ‘slipped down from above’ because we do not move in accord with the Logos (who preexisted in God) through whom we came to be” (1081C)
• Jesus is the “substance of all virtues” (see 1 Cor 1:30), thus if we participate in virtue by habit, we participate in God [since Jesus is virtue and Jesus is God]. Participating in virtue is living and moving and having our being in God.
• We received being from God at our creation. Living virtuously gives us well-being. Participating in our logoi, which is loving God, gives us spiritual well-being, which is being a “portion of God”.
• God’s love caused him to bring himself down to man (hominization) and his power brings man up to God (divinization).
• When we refused to participate in our logoi, we “slip down” towards non-being, and we become disordered. Our end still exists, we just choose not to move towards it. “[Slip down] means that someone who had the ability to direct the steps of his soul unswervingly toward God voluntarily exchanged what is better, his true being, for what is worse, non-being.
• Quotes Gregory of Nazianzus from Oration on Hail: The saints keep themselves chaste and steadfast, and are permeated with God (similarly to how the soul permeates the body). God becomes to the soul what the soul is to the body, and thus the soul receives changelessness and the body receives immortality. “[Hence] the whole man, as the object of divine action, is divinized by being made God by the grace of God who became man. He remains wholly man in soul and body by nature, and becomes wholly God in body and soul by grace and by the unparalleled divine radiance of blessed glory appropriate to him.”
• Maximus argues that someone in this state of rest could hardly be unsatisfied by it, because God is infinite, and thus his desire can never actually be satiated (leading to a desire to experience something different).
• Gregory’s purpose (in the passage used by the Origenists) was not to explain the origin of man, but why we experience pain.
• Both the body and the soul are essential to being human. That is why we say “human soul” and “human body”, when the soul and body are apart. It is not just any kind of soul or any kind of body, but a human soul or body.
• “By practicing virtues the body gains familiarity with God and becomes a fellow servant with the soul.” God (will) live in the soul, and because of its connection with the body, the body becomes immortal.
• When humans return to oneness with God, then God will be “all in all”. [Or perhaps the passage means that when we are all one in Christ?]
• Adam’s punishment “was death, which means that the capacity to render to God what is due God alone, to love him with all our mind, was destroyed. As a result it is only when we have been taught by suffering that we who love non-being can regain the capacity to love what is.”
• Quotes Gregory saying that if we did not have hardships, we would be tempted to be satisfied with our temporary state and love pleasures, instead of loving the eternal Good.
• Gregory (Oration on the Nativity) said that the intellect and the senses had not been mingled originally, and God combined them in Man to show his goodness. He took matter and put an intellectual soul in it, so that Man would be a second cosmos: made from matter but able to praise God like the angels.
• God has united us to himself so that we become the members of his body. “For he united our nature to himself in a single hypostasis...” God’s Spirit is the soul of body-of-Christ.
• (Therefore, how could we speak of pre-existing souls of different species? How could different species unite into a body of the same species? That would require fundamentally altering the original species.)

Ambiguum 8

• We experience unequal outcomes (not because of the severity of the sins in our pre-material existence, as the Origenists claimed) because, as bodies, we are susceptible to the passions and the “proneness for undergoing change”. God uses the actions of our impulses to our correction, as we deal with the instability and disorder of these. God is taking the chaos of the material world and making it ordered.

Ambiguum 45 (excerpted)

• Quotes Gregory of Nazianzus saying that “the Logos knew three births for us: bodily birth, birth through baptism, and birth through resurrection.” Apparently some people thought that his next sentence, bodily birth through the “original and vital in-breathing” suggested a fourth birth, which Maximus disputes. He says that it references the divine principles (logoi) and modes (tropoi). Christ took on both the creaturely form of Adam as well as his vulnerability to sin.
• “he voluntarily assumed the likeness of corruptible humanity, he willingly allowed himself to be made subject virtually to the same natural passions as us yet without sin; the sinless one became morally liable, as it were.”
• The creaturely origin was pre-Fall, but the “passable birth” [mortality? physicality?] was post-Fall, and the two redeemed the extremes of each other: “his birth amid dishonor to save and renew his honorable creaturely origin and, conversely, by making his creaturely origin sustain and preserve his birth. By the ‘extreme’ of his honorable creaturely origin I am speaking of its incorruptibility, the basis of his impeccability, while the extreme of his ignoble human birth is that sinfulness which is the basis of all passion and corruption. Now of course the Savior in his incarnation did not assume this sinful passion, and corruption; he took their consequences, and enabled his birth to save his creaturely origin by his own suffering. On the other hand, he enabled his creaturely origin to preserve his birth by sanctifying the passibility of that birth with his own sinlessness. He accomplished these things in order to preserve in full the creaturely origin which secured his human nature in its divinely perfect principle, and fully to liberate from the bonds of birth that same nature, fallen through sin, that it might no longer embrace the same means of procreation as all the rest of the animals of the earth.”
• God’s purpose was to return disciplined humanity to its original logos/principles. He also gave us the gift of deification: since God permeated flesh like the soul permeates the body, how could he not do the same for us, restoring, or better, recreating our nature? [By implicit contrast, unlike us] Christ’s two natures were completely unified. “... he took on himself our human nature in deed and in truth and united it to himself hypostatically...”
• Asserts that Gregory indicates that Christ did this to free us from procreative birth like the animals—right now we multiply by seed almost like the grass does.
• One could perhaps also interpret two births as the birth of the flesh and the ensoulment of the body at conception.
• To say that souls pre-exist or post-exist bodies (as the Originists do) is silly. Mixing things of two different species (categories) is either natural or unnatural. If it is natural, then they always remain a synthesis; if it is unnatural then they never actually form a synthesis. Gregory clearly says that souls are created by the divine in-breathing, not from matter. Bodies are clearly made of matter from the mother-body. The two form a synthesis at conception. This same process happened for Adam: God took matter from another body (the earth) and in-breathed the soul. Similarly with Christ, who took his body from the Virgin and in-breathed himself. “Or rather, the Creator of humanity was he who, as almighty and immutable, willingly for our sake fashioned his own manhood at the time he took flesh and animated it with an intelligent and rational soul.”
• [Translation skips some lengthy arguments against pre-existing souls]
• Innovation [kainotomia, also “invention” according to wiktionary] changes the mode (tropos), not the fundamental principle (logos). If it changed the logos, then the thing itself would be corrupted and would no longer be itself. The principle (logos?) of human nature is conjoined soul+body, but the mode—the way it acts and can be acted up—can change. This is how God’s miracles work. Enoch and Elijah’s translations changed their mode of interaction with the world, likewise how Abraham and Sarah had a child in old age. The waters of Egypt being turned to blood was the same: the waters were red but remained water in principle.
• No created thing receives its being from its parts. It also can’t exist as half of itself. Nor is there a temporal delay between its nature (the “soul” of the thing) and its constituent parts. No created thing exists by its own principle [logos?]. “The principles of these natures have enjoyed perfection in God simultaneous with their very existence, and their creation and substantiation are thoroughly incapable of admitting any addition to, or subtraction from, what the nature is in itself.”
• “... in the beginning humanity was created in the image of God in order to be perpetually born by the Spirit in the exercise of free choice, and to acquire the additional gift of assimilation to God by keeping the divine commandment, such that man, as fashioned from God by nature, might become son of God and divine by grace through the Spirit. For created man could not be revealed as son of God through the deification by grace [n.b. this is sabbatical transformation, not Protestant grace] without first being born by the Spirit in the exercise of free choice, because of the power of self-movement and self-determination inherent in human nature. ... [Since Adam rejected this,] God deservedly punished him for willingly choosing morally inferior objects by replacing his free, impassible, voluntary, and chaste birth with a passible, servile, restrictive birth akin to that of the unreasoning and unintelligent beasts of the earth and by replacing the divine and ineffable honor of dwelling with God with the dishonor of being put on a material par with mindless beasts.”
• Christ, by taking our nature, and being born through baptism (as Gregory has said and we have hitherto left unexamined), he enables us to have spiritual birth again.
• “God, as it were, connected for me the principle of my being (bodily life) and the principle of my well-being (virtuous/spiritual life), bridging the separation and distance between them that I had caused, and thereby wisely drew them together in the principle of eternal being. The end goal is humanity “born into immortality in an unchanging state of being”; “It is for this principle of eternal being that the nature of visible things received its existence in the beginning; and by this principle that same nature will acquire by grace the state of essential incorruptibility.”

Ad Thalassium 1: On the Utility of the Passions

• The passions (e.g. emotions: pleasure, grief, desire, fear, etc.) were not originally part of Man (otherwise they would be part of the definition of human nature. As Gregory taught, it was “on account of humanity’s fall from perfection [that] the passions were introduced and attached themselves to the more irrational part of human nature”. This was part of the divine nature in Man being replaced with the animal nature. However, the passions can become good when they are oriented towards God: desire -> the longing for heavenly things; pleasure -> the pure joy of the mind when “enticed towards divine gifts”; fear -> “the cautious concern for imminent punishment of sins committed”; grief -> repentence.

Ad Thalassium 2: On God’s Preservation and Integration of the Universe

• God is not resting (doing nothing) after creation, but is instead maintaining all things. He is “bringing about the assimilation of particulars to universals until he might unite creatures’ own voluntary inclination to the more universal natural principle of rational being through the movement of these particular creatures toward well-being, and make them harmonious and self-moving in relation to one another and to the whole universe. In this way there shall be no intentional divergence between universals and particulars. Rather, one and the same principle shall be observable throughout the universe, admitting of no differentiation by the individual modes according to which created beings are predicated, and displaying the grace of God effective to deify the universe.”
• [As I understand this, God is deifying the universe by the movement of all created things towards its end, its logos, so that all creatures voluntarily embrace movement into their end. Then, since the Logos is one with the logoi, and vice-versa, God will be in all and through all.]
• God the Father approves the work, God the Son does the work, and God the Holy Spirit completes the approval and the execution.

Ad Thalassium 6: On the Grace of Holy Baptism

• Why baptized believers still sin if 1 John 3:9 says that those born of God will not sin because God’s seed is in us?
• The reason is that baptism creates in us the potential (the gift of adoption)—the Holy Spirit here is like the Seed of the Sower—, but God does not force our wills, so “the inclination to sin does not disappear as long as [we] will it.” He does leave us with the desire to willingly surrender ourselves to the Spirit. (Presumably, when we do,) there is a second baptism which is “deification through cognizant experience”, which is like once we see the sun, we never mistake the moon for it. Once we experience deification this way, we are incapable of reverting [to willing to sin?] because “the Holy Spirit takes the whole of their free choice and translates it completely from earth to heaven, and, through the true knowledge acquired by exertion, transfigures the mind with the blessed light-rays of our God and Father, such that the mind is deemed another ‘god,’ insofar as in its habitude it experiences, by grace, that which God himself does not experience by ‘is’ in his very essence. With those undergoing this second mode of baptism, their free choice clearly becomes sinless in virtue and knowledge, as they are unable to negate what they have actively discerned through experience.”

Ad Thalassium 17: On Spiritual Progress in Virtue

• Why was the angel going to kill Moses? Why not kindly tell him to circumcise his son first?
• Anyone who diligently examines Scripture with the fear of God and because of the divine glory, and removes “the curtain of the letter” [the literal meaning?], will see “face to face”, and “[n]o impediment will be found to the perfect motion of the mind toward divine things.” The literal meaning was already fulfilled in Moses, so we look to the spiritual meaning. The desert is either human nature or the world, which no longer has the passions. The mind who, subsisting in that habitude and dwelling in this world, is instructed in true knowledge through the contemplation of created beings, receives a hidden and mystical commission from God invisibly to lead out of the Egypt of the heart—that is, from the (realm of) flesh and sense—divine thoughts of created beings, in the manner of the Israelites. For such thoughts are uselessly spent on clay, that is, on the passions of the flesh.” But, as Gregory of Nyssa in Life of Moses said, “the immobility of virtue is the beginning of vice”; one cannot stop on the road to virtue.
• If one prefers the literal meaning, note that the incident happened when Moses had stopped at an inn.
• Otherwise, Zipporah uses a small stone (the word of faith) to remove the passions of the flesh.
• “Therewith the word (of God), which like an angel smites the errant mind through the conscience and frustrates every emerging thought save that which properly befits it, suspends its purification. For the way of the virtues is in truth filled with many holy angels who can effect every specific virtue. I am really speaking of the principles and modes of the virtues. They are the ‘angels’ who cooperate with us in pursuing what is good and who elicit such principles (of virtue) within us.”

Ad Thalassium 21: On Christ’s Conquest of the Human Passions

• What does Col 2:15 mean that Christ “put off the powers and principalities”? And how did he put them on, if he was without sin?
• Because Adam sinned, he [the human race?] “he was condemned to birth based on sexual passion and sin.” “The liability to passions entered connected with sexual procreation on account of sin.” Since we are all born via sexual procreation, we all deliberately sin by becoming liable to passion. “The more human nature sought to preserve itself through sexual procreation, the more tightly it bound itself to the law of sin, reactivating the transgression connected with the liability to passions.” “Wherefore every wicked power is at work, amid human nature’s liability to passions, driving the deliberative will (gnomon) with the natural passions in to the corruption of unnatural passions.”
• But Jesus became like us in every way except without sin, and so the powers and principalities [in Ad. 17 he says angels are principles and modes of virtue, not literal; are the demons similar except principles and modes of unvirtue (passion?)?] assumed that he would act “deliberatively” like us, instead of “volitionally”. “These evil powers hoped to use natural passibility to induce even the Lord himself to fantasize unnatural passion and to do what suited them.” He did this again in Gethsemane, overcoming fear of death. In these ways Christ defeated the powers and principalities, and put them off from humanity by means of his victory.
• “Man’s will, out of cowardice, tends away from suffering, and man, against his own will, remains utterly dominate by the fear of death, and in his desire to live, clings to his slavery to pleasure.”
• We could interpret this text mystically, but we must not write down ineffable truths, so we shall continue contemplating them.

Ad Thalassium 22: On Jesus Christ and the End of the Ages

• How can God show us the riches of his goodness in the coming ages (Eph 2:7) if the end of the ages has already come (1 Cor 10:11)
• One possibility: God predetermined that he would hypostatically unite himself with us, so he wisely determined one set of ages where he would become man, and another set of ages where man becomes God. Christ, therefore, ended the first set of ages, but the comes ages are where we experience the ineffable goodness of deification.
• Another possibility: Jesus is the beginning (archo), middle (metotos), and end (telos) of all ages, then, since Jesus has come, we can say that the end (telos) of deification has already come in potential through faith.
• A third possibility: Paul distinguishes between the active ages and the passive ages. The ages of the flesh involve toil (see Ps 48:10: man “toiled in this age and shall live until its end”) and are active. The “future ages in the Spirit, which are to follow the present life, are characterized by the transformation of humanity in passivity. ... But in the ages to come we shall undergo by grace the transformation unto deification and no longer be active but passive; and for this reason we shall not cease from being deified. ... when in the future we are rendered passive (in deification), and have fully transcended the principles of beings created out of nothing, we will unwittingly enter into the true Cause of existent beings and terminate our proper faculties along with everything in our nature that has reached completion.”
• Finally: the end of the ages has not actually come, because we have not received “the gift of benefits that transcend time and nature.” And, therefore whoever, by the exercise of wisdom, enables God to become incarnate within him or her and, in fulfillment of this mystery, undergoes deification by grace, is truly blessed, because that deification has no end.” (Because God is infinite.)

Ad Thalassium 42

• How could Jesus become sin (2 Cor 5:21), but not know sin like we do (1 John 1:8)?
• Adam’s volitional sin of rejecting the divine resulted in a “second,” non-volitional sin, being subjected to the passions and the loss of impassibility. Jesus took the sin that resulted from the sin, that is, passibility and subjection to the passions, but he did not volitionally sin. Thus he became sin (that is, became the results of sin) but did not know sin because he did not willfully sin.
• The second sin is the loss of “the grace of impassibility”. [I assume Maximus is seeing as a sort of sin-state that begats sin-actions, namely we act according to the passions instead of according to the Spirit.]
• “[Jesus] became the ‘sin’ that I caused; in other words, he assumed the corruption of human nature that was a consequence of the mutability of my free choice. For our saje he became a human being naturally liable to passions, and used the ‘sin’ that I caused to destroy the ‘sin’ that I commit.”
• Adam’s sin introduced liability to the passions in to the human race [it seems like Maximus, from previous answers, views this as being transmitted by submitting to sexual passion in order to reproduce], but Christ’s victory introduced incorruptibility [presumably by being born through baptism]. “For if the deviance of free choice introduce passibility, corruptibility, and mortality in Adam’s nature, it only followed that, in Christ, the immutability of free choice, realized through his resurrection, introduced natural impassibility, incorruptiblity, and immortality.”
• Free will brings about evil, but becoming sin might inhibit evil since there is no choice. “For the former ‘sin’ [the volitional sin] incurs separation from God, since free choice voluntarily rejects divine things; but the latter ‘sin’ may very well hinder evil, since it does not allow that wickedness of free choice that is based on the infirmity of nature to advance into concrete action.”

Ad Thalassium 60: On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

•  If Christ was “foreknown from the foundation of the world” (1 Pet 1:20), who foreknew him?
• The short answer is that, of course no creature can foreknow God, so it was God (Father, Son, and Spirit) who foreknew Christ, the incarnate one.
• Christ hypostatically unites the divine and humanity, despite which the essence of each is unchanged. (As Maximus says, the differences between the two natures remain immutable, the natures themselves remain undiminished, and the quantities remain unaltered.)
• In the incarnation, God became what he was not by nature.
• God is unchanging and he requires nothing outside himself to continue existing. The mystery of Christ (that is, the hypostatic union between God and humanity) is the reason, the telos, for which everything exists. This is the great plan of God (Eph 1:10-11) and the Logos (God) became the messenger of the plan when he became man.
• This plan is a union between the limited and unlimited. “This union has been manifested in Christ at the end of time, and in itself brings God’s foreknowledge to fulfillment, in order that naturally mobile creatures might secure themselves around God’s total and essential immobility, desisting altogether from their ovement toward themselves and toward each other.”
• The union is so that we can have experiential knowledge of God. Right now we have rational knowledge of God, but it is the experiential knowledge of God that is what produces deification, and this is likely what Paul was saying in 1 Cor 13:8 (prophecies, tongues, and knowledge will disappear).
• (No created being can fully know what its essence is, or another creature’s essence is, only God can.)
• “[It] is impossible to be completely coexistent with Christ, just as it is impossible ever to depart from him entirely, since the termination of time is fixed within Christ, as is the stability (stasis) of mobile created beings, a stability wherein no created being will know any change at all.”

Ad Thalassium 61: On the Legacy of Adam’s Transgression

• What does 1 Peter 4:17-18 mean that it is time for the judgment to start with the house of God, and that the righteous man is only barely saved?
• “When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably.”
• But Adam immediately used his capacity to enjoy God to seek sensible pleasure. (According to a footnote in Ambiguum 42, Maximus says Adam sinned immediately because otherwise he would have enjoyed God for a period before deciding to disobey, which would undermine his argument against the Origenists that, seeing the beatific vision creates such a desire [or transforms us?] so that we will not get bored and seek new experiences, like the Origenists’ pre-existing souls.)
• God added pain (the law of death) to the pleasure, “to curb the foolish mind in its desire to incline unnaturally toward sensible things.”
• “[E]very suffering (ponos), effectively having pleasure as its primary cause, is quite naturally, in view of its cause, a penalty extracted from all who share in human nature.”
• Our beginning is corrupted with sexual pleasure, and our end is the corruption of death, so the only way for us to be saved was for Christ to partake of our nature, but intervene between the unrighteous pleasure and the just death. He did not partake in the pleasure of conception and thus his end/telos was not caused by pleasure, but he did partake in our punishment. By dying unjustly (that is, because he had not sinned, but yet partook our punishment), Christ used death as a tool to eliminate sin (that is pleasure which produces pain).
• “[Christ] turned that very passibility into an instrument for eradicating sin and the death which is its consequence—or in other words, for eradicating pleasure and the pain which is its consequence.”
• “Indeed the rule of pleasure and pain over our nature clearly originated in the liability to passions. Wanting to escape the oppressive experience of pain we sought refuge in pleasure.” This, of course, just made things worse.
• Christ is unchanging, and so he defeated this cycle through his Passion, his own “deprivations of the flesh”, and his deification, which introduced these things to human nature. [How did he introduce them? Perhaps because all the logoi are one in the Logos, so if the Logos incorporated those things were were not originally part of the logoi, the Logos and logoi again became one?]
• [Death appears to be pain, ultimately physical death: “For death, once it has ceased having pleasure as its ‘birth-mother'...]
• Thus through Christ, death becomes a tool to destroy sin.
• Thus it is time for judgment to begin (judgment on sin), and it starts with the house of God.
• Maximus ends by discussing the last half of the verse, “if a righteous man is barely saved where will the impious man and sinner appear?” He notes that since God is everywhere, and it is only the righteous who are with God, then there is no where for the non-righteous to be. Certainly the non-righteous will not have a life of no limitations, since it is only God who has no limitations, and the non-righteous have not been brought into him.

Ad Thalassium 64

• How can one make sense out of Jonah 4:11, where grown men cannot tell their right hand from their left?
• Each thing in Scripture needs to be interpreted itself, as each item has its own literal/spiritual meaning. (A footnote informs us that Maximus describes ten modes of interpretation in Ambiguum 37, the five basic ones being place, time, race, individual persona, dignity/occupation). Also, the meanings of Hebrew names are important.
• “Jonah” means “repose of God”, “gift of God”, “healing from God”, “God’s grace to them”, “labor of God, “dove”, “flight from beauty”, “their toil”. He went to Joppa, which means “vision of joy”, “wondrous beauty”, and powerful joy”. He also went into the sea, into a whale, and under a gourd tree.
• The person of Jonah has multiple spiritual meanings:
• He signifies Adam, because he went from “wondrous beauty” (i.e. Paradise) into the sea (the brine of sin), also shown by his name “flight from beauty”. In the sea of sin they are swallowed by the whale and descend to the deeps of the earth [e.g. Jon 2:6-7, Job 10:21, 22]
• (The trees in the garden may have been physical or only intelligible, and he may not have touched them to eat them.)
• He represents our human nature: he went from Joppa into the sea of sin (and the chaos of material life), was swallowed by the whale (the Devil), and is in the depths of the earth, as it has no desire for God. The depths of evil and the mountains of error (evil spirits, Eph 6:11) have come over it. “Like eternal bars, human nature has ingrained proclivities toward material objects which keep the mind from being freed from the darkness of ignorance to behold the light of true knowledge.”
• He prefigures Christ, who though God, descended from Joppa (“contemplation of joy”) into the sea of life (not sin, as he he had no sin) and was three days in the whale (earth). Thus Jonah/Christ is our “repose”, “healing”, and “grace”, as well as the “labor of God”.
• He prefigures the repose of those who labored in pain, healed the broken, and received the grace of forgiveness of sins. Christ descended from “contemplation of joy” into the sea, and into the earth, from whence his resurrection lifted us up. Thus Christ is our repose, healing, and grace.
• He is a figure of prophetic grace, because when he left Joppa he prefigures the grace transferring from the keeping of the Law to the Gentiles, represented by Nineveh, which repented at hearing the grace of the prophetic word, just as the Gentiles repented at the preaching of the grace of the Gospel, which the Jews are envious and angry at (as is Jonah at the end). Like the trumpeters of the Gospel, like Paul, endured sufferings but brought life, so Jonah endured sufferings and brought life to the city.
• Nineveh also has several meanings:
• The message was received by Nineveh/Gentile Church and the king/throne (the law of human nature), put off its robe (the vanity of worldly glory) and put on sackcloth “(indicating contrition and the annoying, astringent discipline of mortification befitting a godly way of life)”. The greater and lesser men are those convicted by the (preached) word of more or less sinful way of life.
• Nineveh is our shared human nature. The king is the law of nature. The men of the city are those cling to erroneous knowledge of God, while the various kinds of animals are people under various types of enslavement to sin. The Jonah preaches and each day turns people from sin.
• Nineveh is each person’s contemplation. The city is the soul, king is the mind (nous), the men are impassioned thoughts, and the animals are various forms of passions and seeking the material world. The king mind arises from his throne of ignorant habits, puts off his robe (“a false estimation of created beings”), puts on sackcloth (repentance) and ashes (poverty of spirit), and cries out to God earnestly confessing their sins.
• The right and left hands:
• The population of Nineveh is “twelve myriads”, and twelve is five plus seven. There are five senses and seven days of the week, and Nineveh, the Church, has men who do not know their right hand from their left, that is, they transcend human nature (five sense) and time (seven days). Due to their cultivated virtue, they avoid both the left hand (passions of the flesh) and the right hand (conceit over their accomplishments). Thus they do not know their right hand from the left, because they live in neither of the extremes.
• In our natures, we can move to the left if we move contrary beyond our limits and nature and to the right if we move beyond our limits and nature. Both movements are away from God, and therefore those who follow Christ will avoid both extremes.
• When our soul withdraws from contemplation of things of time and nature, it instead contemplates the divine mysteries, and thus knows neither the left of defect and the right of excess.
• Those who aspire to sublime understandings will understand the left hand as the principles of corporeal things and the right hand as the principles of incorporeal things. “Whoever’s mind has been absolutely elevated to the Cause of created beings is fully ignorant of both, since he does not contemplate any principle within God, who is by essence beyond every principle as far as all causality is concerned. Such a mind, having been drawn toward God and away from all created beings, knows none of the logoi of the things from which it has withdrawn; in its ineffable vision it knows only that Logos whom it approaches by grace.”
• Jonah also prefigures “the foolishness of the Jews”: he desires the gourd plant (the observance of the Law) above the salvation of the Gentiles, and is distraught when the worm (Christ). We can see that the worm is Christ both because David prophesies of Christ “I am a worm and not a man” (Ps 21:7 LXX, footnote: this was held to be a messianic psalm in the Patristic era). Also, worms do not produce by sexual reproducing [n.b. we know this is incorrect], just as Christ was not produce by sexual reproduction. Furthermore, Jesus used his flesh as bait on his fishhook for the Devil. The Devil had “baited” man with the hope of divinity; Christ baited the Devil with the hope of becoming man (that is, he was deceived into thinking he would become human by “eating” Christ), and the result was that the Devil vomited man. When the Sun of Righteousness rose, a scorching wind withered the gourd. Or, it is a scorching wind produced by the “intransigen[ce] toward the word of grace [which] signifies the abandonment which stops the rain of knowledge and the dew of prophecy, and which dries up the natural spring of pious thoughts of the heart.”
• The three day journey is three different forms of the godly life (that is, the disciplines appropriate to each).
• Natural law: do to others what you desire them to do to you; controlling the senses. This prevents the divisions caused by self-love and creates of unity of love.
• Scriptural law: for the foolish, the fear of punishment trains them to “equitable distribution” and pursuit of justice, and thereby slowly transforms them into loving others. “For the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:10) consists precisely in the mutual union-in-love of all who share in a common human nature, a union which has charitable desire [footnote: godly love] as the crowning virtue of the rationality of human nature.”
• Note that Jesus said “love your neighbor as your self” not “regard your neighbor as yourself”. The latter is simply being “connatural sharing in being”, whereas the former is “providence leading us toward well-being”.
• Law of grace: imitate God, who loves his enemies so much that he became man. (In fact, the more he became man, the more he deified us by grace.) Thus he taught us to care for one another (naturally), to love others as ourselves (spiritually), and to voluntarily die for others (like God).

Opusculum 6: On the Two Wills of Christ in Gethsemane

• Maximus uses some minute analytic logic on Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane “if it is possible let this cup pass from me, but not my will but yours” to determine that Jesus has two wills, and after some more logic, concludes that his wills are in harmony. In fact, in saying “not my will but yours” he is speaking humanly, because he is voluntarily giving his will to God.