Premium
Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor[Note 1. Many thanks to Justin Shaun Coyle, who read and ...]
Author(s) -
Wood Jordan Daniel
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
modern theology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.144
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1468-0025
pISSN - 0266-7177
DOI - 10.1111/moth.12382
Subject(s) - incarnation , metaphysics , philosophy , christology , relation (database) , epistemology , doctrine , identity (music) , natural (archaeology) , theology , literature , history , aesthetics , art , computer science , archaeology , database
Maximian logoi or the “principles” of created being are often virtually identified with Platonic ideas or forms. This assumption obscures what is distinctive about Maximus's concept of the logoi . I first note two metaphysical peculiarities of his doctrine, and then propose that these only make sense if we follow Maximus's own directive to read the logoi through Christology proper – that is, as describing creation as the Word's cosmic Incarnation. This suggests, in creative tension with a good deal of twentieth‐century philosophical theology, that the God‐world relation is not fully exhausted by the analogia entis : Maximus divines a still deeper hypostatic (not natural) identity between Word and world that actually generates natural difference – for perhaps the first and only time in the history of Christian thought. Here I assay a first step toward retrieving that relation.