The thought of the early Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor continues to be a growth industry among Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran scholars. Torstein Tollefsen, a convert to Orthodoxy from the Church of Norway, has already published one book under this title, a doctoral thesis from the University of Oslo Press. The work under review is a revision of that earlier study, but – as the author explains – the original title so perfectly summarized his claims about the thought of the seventh century Greek Father that he felt it best to let it stand, despite the likely confusion to bibliographers. Organised by reference to four key themes, Tollefsen's work combines a history-of-ideas approach with a speculative attempt at the conceptual reconstruction of Maximus's ideas, encoded as these are in a complex language and (especially) syntax that is not always patient of easy decipherment, as many who have sought to struggle with it can attest.
The heart of Tollefsen's account is a proposition central to all Christian metaphysics: God makes created participations of his being exist outside himself. But for Maximus, and, accordingly, for Tollefsen too, such a claim must be understood in a thoroughly Christocentric way, in terms of the Word and, not least, of him incarnate. Maximian thought thus emphasizes the teleological thrust of this protology as it searches out the midpoint and crown of creation in the theophanies of Christmas and Easter. To make full sense of the distinctive ontology of the created order we need to know that the created is to enter into communion with the Uncreated, thanks to the unique yet universally influential union of the two brought about in Jesus Christ. Hence Tollefsen's reiteration of an original title: ‘Christocentric cosmology’. In an evangelical context, metaphysics and soteriology belong together.
Tollefsen argues that the two most crucial structuring elements in this integrated scheme are exemplarism and a doctrine of the divine energies. Exemplarism is ecumenical. It is a feature of all Christian Platonisms, among which we can count Thomas Aquinas's. By contrast, the late Byzantine doctrine of the divine energies, linked to the name of Gregory Palamas, is a specialty of Orthodoxy. Catholic writers, including those who, like the French Dominican Alain Riou, find in Maximus a form of doctrinal thought isomorphic with Thomism, have been inclined to discount the alleged presence of such ‘proto-Palamism’ in Maximus's corpus. The key term energeia can be translated, after all, ‘operation’ or ‘activity’ just as well as ‘energy’. Either is possible in this regard for Maximus's sources: the Cappadocian theologians, and Dionysius. We should note, though, the findings of a recent magnum opus by Riou's younger confrère, Antoine Lévy. In Lévy's judgment, whatever be the case in the earlier Greek tradition the connexion between Maximus and Palamism is indisputable. Yet its sting for Latins is drawn if they can be brought to appreciate – here I simplify a conceptual stratagem laid out in highly sophisticated form – the identity of dogmatic intention in two otherwise incompatible linguistic schemes. Lévy's work, which appeared in 2006, has gone unnoticed by Tollefsen, unless the latter considered the comparative character of Lévy's study – on Maximus and Aquinas – warranted its exclusion from his reading-list.
After an introduction (Chapter 1) which could well serve the newcomer to St Maximus as a first glance at his writings (but not life), his philosophical (but not theological) sources, and his place in recent scholarship, Tollefsen devotes two chapters to exemplarism, which between them constitute rather over half the book. This is justified, since, as he writes, Maximus's ‘doctrine of logoi and tropoi’, i.e. of the creative divine ideas and of the modes in which these are realized in creatures, aims to show reality as suitably disposed for the deification of the creaturely. He is good at filling in seeming lacunae in Maximus's argumentation on such topics as the logic of totality and infinity (Chapter 2), but, rightly, the emphasis lies (Chapter 3) on the Greek doctor's affirmation of the eternally fore-known humanization of the Word as principle of the providential – historical as well as ontological – ordering of the world. Tollefsen's account of the divine activity (Chapter 4) uses Plotinian categories to throw light on Maximus's doctrine (Lévy's work, with fuller textual enquiry, suggests Simplicius as a closer Neo-Platonist master). The divine energies are the transitive aspect of the divine essence in its own immanently energetic existence. This formulation is eirenic. Unlike many Orthodox spokesmen on this issue since Lossky, Tollefsen does not sound anti-Western, there is no over-playing of the Palamite hand. The energies, so understood, become participated (Chapter 5) at appointed times and seasons as God gives himself ‘economically’ to what he creates according to the ‘proportion’ he wills for each. One can see what French Dominican students of Maximus have meant by a family resemblance to Thomas when Tollefsen describes the upshot: ‘the paradox that the fulfillment of the creature transcends the creaturely capacity without eliminating the creaturely essence’, which essence in no way finds its ‘activity … abolished’.
Some brief ‘Concluding Remarks’, seeking to show the pertinence of Maximian thought to twenty-first century concerns, relate a ‘Christocentric cosmology’ to the topics of human rights and the environment. The discussion is too condensed to be more than suggestive, but certainly Tollefsen is right to suppose that Christian reflection on these themes should be full-bloodedly theological and not a parroting of secular rectitudes.
