Paul Blowers's Maximus the Confessor was commissioned by Oxford University Press's Christian Theology in Context series, a series that seeks to locate the texts of Christian theologians within as fully articulated a context as possible, including not only philosophical and theological background, but also social, political, and economic dynamics. In this work, Blowers, who has been studying, translating, pondering, and writing about Maximus the Confessor for many years, has provided us with a wonderful gathering place of learning and historical and theological reflection on the great seventh century monastic theologian and philosopher.

Blowers seeks to understand and present Maximus within his own late antique context (though the context of Maximus's intellectual formation is admittedly obscure and very much in dispute amongst scholars), but Blowers is also aware of and attentive to the context of Maximian reception by medieval and modern theology, and so allows the multiple aspects of contextualization—those giving shape to the possibilities of Maximus's thought and also Maximus himself as a shaper of the context of the theology that would come after him—to speak in his study of the Confessor. Blowers strives to give a “thick description that elicits not only the internal intelligibility or consistency of [Maximus's] literary corpus” (2), but also the complex texture of the threads of writing, reading, and relating in his world and in the worlds he helped form.

The guiding thematic of Blowers's reading of Maximus is Hans Urs von Balthasar's concept of “theo-drama,” in which theology is read as the drama, with Christ the principal player, of divine salvation and transformation of the cosmos. Within the contours of Maximus's thought, it is the teleology and eschatology of Christ, the culmination of the drama, as it were, in the transfigured humanity of Jesus, that gives shape to his dramatic vision. Blowers offers the term “cosmo-politeian” to describe, then, the way creatures, and particularly humanity, which is “a theo-dramatic work in progress” (6), are to be understood in all their particularity within both a cosmic and a historical framework as a function of the drama of Christ.

Part one addresses the historical and social milieu, the politico-socio-theological tumult of the seventh century, in which Maximus lived and thought. Within this milieu, Blowers traces the competing accounts of Maximus's life and early formation, as found in the Syriac and Greek vitae traditions, and gives a useful summary of the most recent scholarship on this controversy. He also gives an account of what it was to write theology in Maximus's day, reading Maximus here as a thinker and author who is neither simply a (proto-)scholastic nor a romantic spiritualist. Maximus is a rigorous interpreter of scripture and the fathers, but he is also a monastic guide of souls and philosopher, and his texts, argues Blowers, must be understood in the light both of conceptual rigor and of spiritual-ascetical struggle.

Part two begins the work of presenting Maximus's thought itself, within the horizon of its context, but also of that of later theological reflection. Creation, Christology, and liturgy are read as the theo-dramatic unfolding of God's purposes for the cosmos; the world, Christ, and the liturgy are the stages for the acting out of this multifaceted divine dramaturgy.

Part three sharpens the focus on humanity and the human response in freedom and virtue to these dramatics. Blowers analyzes the nature of human passivity in the light of what he calls Christ's “active passivity,” his disposition of willingly undergoing passion for the sake of human freedom, and then folds the human pursuit and experience of virtue into this notion.

Finally, part four gives a brief, but instructive, overview of Maximus's theological legacy, both East and West, from the early medieval period to the present, and the Epilogue considers how Maximus, whom Blowers considers to be “one of the few genuinely ecumenical theologians” (329) of his era, might continue to be received as a source of theological inspiration for global Christianity on the strength of his vision of a transfigured cosmic politeia, which is effected and made manifest in the mystery of Christ.

Blowers's work here is truly masterful in the precise sense of that term: every major aspect of Maximian scholarship has been mastered and presented in some form, and Blowers moves fluently within the complex world of Maximus's texts with the sureness of one who has wandered the terrain again and again. It may very well be the book one would give to an aspirant of Maximian studies as, along with the texts of the Confessor himself, a place to start. But it is also masterful in another sense, in that it brings its hard-earned historical and philological rigor into direct encounter with contemporary theology, a challenging move in that Blowers reaches here well beyond the specific articulation of Maximus's own language and thought and into the thought that has been inspired by it.

Von Balthasar's “theo-drama” frames Blowers's overall reading, and while the inspiration and working out of the concept in Von Balthasar come in part from his own reading of Maximus—he refers to Maximus's exposition of divine “play” from Ambiguum 71 in the first volume of Theo-Drama—as a guiding principle, its thoroughgoing applicability to Maximus, whose understanding of history, and therefore dramatic narrative, is not ours, might have been more clearly argued for by Blowers. Moreover, there is, I think, more “philosophical cosmology” (102) in Maximus than the theo-dramatics of Von Balthasar might like to allow. The book also frames particular aspects of its reading with reference to some prominent modern Greek Orthodox figures—Zizioulas, Loudovikos, and Yannaras—who draw from Maximus to fund their own theologies. Of course, reading from the present backwards in some form is inevitable for us, and while caution is demanded with respect to the imposition of a modern dramatic theory or the particularities of Modern Orthodox personalist theology on the texts of Maximus, Blowers's positive contemporary theological work in immersive encounter with an established master of the tradition from the past is certainly work that falls within the best Maximian spirit and thus brings us a presentation of Maximus the Confessor that is contextualized with respect both to the past and the present of theology.

While Blowers himself articulates a strong reading of Maximus in terms of theo-dramatics, his writing and presentation are open-ended and invite, indeed demand, continued inquiry, and the book should stand as a consistent reference point for scholars of Maximus and of the late patristic and early Byzantine worlds.