THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST:

NOTES ON GNOMIE IN
MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR
A dr i a n J. Wa l k e r
Christ is not less free than we are, but infinitely more so,
and this surprising more-human-than-human freedom
certifies his unique way of personalizing humanity.

According to the teaching of the Third Council of Constantinople, which was held from 680 to 681, Christ willed and worked
our salvation both as God and as man. He possessed, say the
Council Fathers, two fully operational natural wills, one divine
and one human, but, far from being contrary, as the impious
heretics have dared to claim,1 these two natural wills came
together in him in mutual accord for the salvation of the human race.2 Communion between the divine and the human,
1. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. I: Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman
P. Tanner (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 128, lines
1719: et duas naturales voluntates [praedicamus] non contrarias, absit, iuxta
quod impii asseruerunt haeretici. All translations mine.
2. Ibid., 130, lines 12: ad salutem humani generis convenienter in eo
concurrentes.
Communio 43 (Spring 2016). 2016 by Communio: International Catholic Review

30

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

between Gods will and mans, is not only the fruit of the Redemption, but also its efficient cause, insofar as each of the two
natures willed and operated what was proper to it while communing indivisibly and unconfusedly with the other.3
The Catholic Church, then, has placed the full weight
of its supreme magisterial authority behind the vindication of
Christs natural human will and of its indispensable role in
Gods saving economy. The present essay is devoted to the latter of these two points, namely, the soteriological significance of
the Saviors properly human volition. The telos of the following
meditation, then, is Christs fully human Yes to the saving will
of the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. This Yes, I hope
to show, makes a decisive contribution to liberating our freedom
from the tyranny of what St. Paul calls vanity (Rom 8:19) or
corruption (Rom 8:21). Note that this corruptio is both physical and moral at once. In preventing our complete moral
unity with ourselves, with one another, and with God, it condemns us to physical dissolution as well (and vice versa). If the
wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23), fear of death (Heb 2:15) is
also a source of our slavery (ibid.), i.e., our incapacity to realize
fully the freedom that ineradicably belongs to our nature.4
The following remarks are inspired chiefly by the saint
whose defense of Christs natural human will was posthumously
vindicated at Constantinople III: Maximus the Confessor (580
662). According to Maximus, the hypostatic union realizes the
communion, or circumincessive exchange, between Creator and
creature for whose sake God brought the universe into being.
For all its asymmetry, such an exchange requires a fully operational human partner, an intact nature that must be endowed,
in its turn, with a fully operational will. This natural will, as
Maximus understands the term, consists in an intelligent love of
the good of being, a love that includes a resolute desire, or desir3. Ibid., 129, lines 4042: dum cum alterius communione utraque natura
indivise et inconfuse propria vellet atque operaretur.
4. Although original sin cannot destroy our innate freedom, it does prevent
our freedoms full manifestation, thwarting its destined completion-in-act. To
use terminology dear to Maximus the Confessor, our freedom is impaired in
the tropos (or mode) of its manifestation, though not in the logos of its nature.
The logos and the tropos are of course inseparably interwoven in the concrete,
but they nonetheless remain distinct in principle.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

ing resolution, to be wholly what and who one is in Gods plan.5

Consider, for example, this classic definition from the first of the
Opuscula theologica et polemica:
They say that natural will, or volition, is a power that
is appetent of being according to nature and that holds
together all the properties belonging to nature in virtue of
[natures] essence. For the ousia, which holds itself together
by this [will], has an appetite to be and live and move
sensitively and intellectually, expressing therein its desire
for its natural and plenary entity. For nature is volitional
with respect both to itself and to everything naturally
constitutive of it, therein striving appetitively for the logos
of its being, according to which it is and has come into
existence. This is why others, defining [natural volition],
call it a rational and vital appetite.6

The human will, then, is a rational appetite for being that

(awakened by being and by the divine Good shining through it)
unfailingly accompanies mans ousia from the very beginning of
his (and its) existence. At the same time, the thelma physikon is
also the naturally given, indwelling source of what we might call
each individuals personal appropriation of the essential human
ousia in which he participates. Put another way, the natural will is
the wellspring and the beginning of our affirmation of what we
areour natureand who we areour person. This implies that
to affirm the good we have in common with our fellow men, i.e.,
our natural being, is implicitly to affirm the good that is proper to
ourselves, i.e., our personhood, and vice versa. (Indeed, the common good of nature is also proper to each, just as the proper good
of the person is, or is meant to be, common to all.)
What, then, about the term that figures in the subtitle
of the present essay: gnomie (Gr. gnm)? In Maximuss later,
anti-monothelite writings, the term gnomie, which we could
5. The appetite of the natural will, I am claiming, is aimed at the logos of
nature in recto, but, in so doing, aims at the logos of the individual in obliquo.
That there is a logos for each single human being is clear from passages such
as Ambiguum 7, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca (hereafter cited as
PG), ed. Jacque-Paul Migne (Paris, 1865), 91:1080A. For a Greek text, see On
Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. and ed. Nicholas Constas
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1:9597.
6. Maximus the Confessor, Opuscula theologica et polemica, 1; PG 91: 12C13A.

31

32

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

also translate as resolution (in the sense of having made up

ones mind), has to do with the individually colored mode or
quality of the appropriation of what and who we are.7 In particular, gnomie is related to, though not identical with, choice
(proiaresis). If choice is an act, gnomie is the dispositional habitus
from which this act immediately proceeds. Gnomie is the state
of having made up ones mind to choose some particular good:
Gnomie, they say, is a disposition of [rational] appetite for
what is in our power such as gives rise to choice. Put another
way, gnomie is a disposition toward what is in our power
insofar as the latter is the object of a deliberative counsel
accompanied by appetite. When, in fact, the appetite has
become disposed in a certain way based on the judgment
proceeding from counsel, [this appetite] has taken the form
of gnomie, after which, or, to say it more properly, out of
which, comes choice. Gnomie, then, stands to choice as
habit stands to act.8

If the natural will is a resolute desire to be what and who

one is, gnomie is the individual configuration (disposition) of
this desire in space, time, and history. For Maximus, it is important to see, the adequacy of this expression is limited by an a
priori deficit, in that the gnomic expression of the natural will is
concretely impaired by what St. Paul calls vanity or corruption. But why, it will be asked, does gnomie inevitably express
such a deficit? A helpful approach to answering this question is
suggested by the above-cited account of natural will, where we
read that the ousia, which holds itself together by this [will], has
an appetite to . . . move sensitively and intellectually, expressing
7. In what follows, I will be considering gnomie only in the context
of Maximuss anti-monothelite polemic. Note that this polemic obliges the
Confessor to transform into a term of art a word that, as he himself notes,
occurs in many different senses (twenty-eight by his count) in Scripture and
the writings of the Church Fathers (Cf. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 312
C/Doucet, 568).
8. Opuscula theologica et polemica, 1; PG 91: 17C. If, as Maximus says at Opuscula theologica et polemica, 1, 13A, volition is not to be identified with choice,
which is a concurrence of [rational] appetite, deliberative counsel, and judgment, it only stands to reason that choosing, considered as an action, cannot
proceed immediately from the ground of the voluntas, but requires a particular
disposition of the will formed precisely by the just-mentioned concurrence.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

therein its desire for its natural and plenary entity. Now, this
statement implies, inter alia, that mans natural will gives him the
highest form of the good that Aristotle saw as a central sign of life
(in the sense of being alive): self-motion. But, as we will see
presently, the analysis of self-motion brings us face-to-face with
the very problem which Maximuss account of gnomie is meant
to highlighta problem, it is important to stress, that finds its
adequate solution only in the person and work of the Redeemer
(on which more below).
Since it would take us too far afield to discuss Aristotles treatment of self-motion in its own right, let us concentrate
instead on the phenomenon itself. The first thing to be said in
this regard is that life (vivere) is not one property of living things
among others, but their very being what they are at all (esse).
Life, we would say, is the actuality that constitutes the living being as the undivided, irreducible whole it is. But if animate being
is endowed with such wholeness from its very first origin, it also
stands ab initio as an ultimate subject, or supposit, of its own
living actuality. By the same logic, the animate entity is also the
supposit of everything it, or its parts, do to maintain or express its
actuality. In its undivided, irreducible wholeness, the living being is the unifying subject of its own vital operations, which is to
say: of those motions belonging essentially to the economy of its
earthly existence.9 Note that this subjecthood implies no splendid isolation from the network of interconnected entities we call
the world, but is from the very beginning a fruit, a partaker,
and a fellow source of this cosmic intercommunion.
An important implication of the foregoing is that selfmotion efficaciously expresses an original indivision, whose perfection belongs to living beings in many diverse, yet mutually
corresponding ways.10 This indivision, however, is not absolute,
9. For a fine account of the intrinsically analogical nature of this indivision, see D. C. Schindler, Analogia Naturae: What Does Inanimate Matter
Contribute to the Meaning of Life?, Communio: International Catholic Review
38 (Winter 2011): 65780.
10. To be sure, the self-motion of living bodies always involves the reciprocal action of certain physical parts. If I am to walk to the corner supermarket,
my brain and my limbs will have to interact in a certain way all throughout
the process. From the very beginning, however, every such interaction presupposes a mutual fit or correspondence between the organs in question, a

33

34

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

at least not in those cases where the living being is also a living body. For if the living body is actually undivided, it is not
therefore naturally indivisible, but contains the possibility of becoming divided, as happens definitively upon its death.11 Given
this inherent fragility of the animate body, it can be tempting to
imagine life as an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to keep mortal division at bay. This picture rests, of course, on an error of
perspective, since the love of life does not originate with the
fear of death or of the dissolution attendant upon it. Nevertheless, the image of a temporary stay of execution does have the
merit of confronting us with an important question. If life is an
original phenomenon, and if love of life has a positive source
untouched by fear of dissolution, what, if any, is the significance
of death? Is death purely accidental (at least with respect to the
ongoing life of the species)? Should we agree with those who
charge the architects of the classical doctrine of substance with a
failure to take seriously (enough) what Hegel called the labor of
the negative?12 Note that we cannot resolve this question merely
by attempting to demythologize the problem of death by reinterpreting mortality as a purely natural affair. Such pretended
naturalizationespecially when it takes the form of an effort
to seize a supposedly scientific control of our mortal conditionis powerless to rob death of its sting.
The problem that has begun to emerge here becomes
fully acute in relation to specifically human death (which, of
course, remains interconnected in manifold ways with the death
correspondence that, in its turn, presupposes the unifying actuality of the selfmoving whole as such. Once again, this is not to deny the indispensable role,
or the ancillary goodness, of A + B, but only to stress the conditional character
of their necessary interaction. For the interchange between A and B presupposes the entire living body as such, whose undivided wholeness precedes A
and B (both temporally and ontologically), fits them together a priori, and
endows them with the wherewithal to make their specific contribution to the
end-directed operations of the self-moving whole.
11. I am speaking, of course, about the kind of division that involves the
irreversible loss of unifying actuality. This destructive division is distinct from
(though not entirely unrelated to) the fruitful division we observe, e.g., at the
cellular level.
12. For a helpful exposition of this objection, see Kenneth L. Schmitz,
Substance Is Not Enough: Hegels Slogan; From Substance to Subject, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 61 (1987): 5268.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

of all other animate creatures, itself bound up with the temporal

finitude of their inanimate brethren). For if, as Maximus says in
the above-cited account of natural will, nature strives appetitively for the logos of its being; and if the logos preexists in God,
who establishes it as the measure of his creative self-donation,13
then it follows that the natural love of being is convertible with
a threefold movement defined by self-reception from the Creator, communion with him, and self-return to him. This is true,
analogically speaking, of every creature, but it is true in a special
way of man, whose healthy love of life (self-reception) includes a
certain healthy acceptance of death (self-return), as we see in the
case of a soldiers willingness to die for his country or a mothers
willingness to sacrifice her own life for that of her child. The
beauty we find in such examples suggests that death must be capable of bearing something like a positive significance. How,
then, are we to understand this positivity, which must transcend the entire dialectic between self-contempt and self-glorification? How, in other words, are we to say an unreserved Yes
to our being as a gift that we fully receive and enjoy in the very
act of returning it to its Source, a return whose Ernstfall lies in
the death of the saints that, the Psalmist assures us, is precious
in the sight of the Lord (Ps 116:15)?
13. Maximus makes this point in Ambiguum 35, which I take the liberty of
citing in full: When I asked the great and wise elder whom I have frequently
mentioned, he said that the great and divinely wise Gregory shows through
these words that the same God, being in himself alone, inasmuch as he is properly one, having nothing at all different by nature conceived along with him,
and in himself alone having his beginningless and incomprehensible abidance,
out of which, according to the infinitely giving outpouring of goodness he
wanted to produce and make subsist beings from non-being, and to give himself to be participated analogously to all things and to each, giving to each the
power to be and abide, according to the holy and divine Areopagite Dionysius,
who says that the one is hymned of God by being removed from all things, so
that, having produced by goodness the whole ordering of the intellectual beings and the good order of the visible things, he might dwell without diminution, analogously to each of the creatures according to a certain ineffable logos
of wisdom, without, on the other hand, being caught by any logos or tropos, in
the ones by a super-abundant good-giving, in the others mediately, and in the
others at least in some respect to be able to iconize him. And this could be,
according to my lack of prudence, the outpouring of the good and its journeying: the one God analogically multiplied with respect to the receivers by the
participation of good things (PG 91: 1288D1289B). For the Greek text, see
On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2:6870.

35

36

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

This question, it is important to see, coincides with the

question that gave the present meditation its starting point: How
do we adequately appropriate our innate resolve to be wholly
what and who we are? How do we become truly free? The flow
of the argument thus brings us back to the problematic relationship between the natural will, on the one hand, and gnomie, on
the other. But what is it, exactly, that causes this problem? What,
precisely, is wrong with gnomic volition?
Maximuss answer to this question, I want to suggest, has
nothing to do with any sort of animus against the good of preference or election, which he implicitly ascribes to Christ himself.14
The real trouble with gnomie, Maximus thinks, can be traced
back to the loss of original justice, which de facto prevents us from
adequately expressing our native resolution to be what and who
we are. Although it is called to make good precisely this postlapsarian deficit of freedom, gnomie is constitutionally incapable
of fulfilling its assigned task with anything like the required degree of perfection. It, too, shares in the inner self-contradiction
of fallen man, who, being alienated from his natural good, is
also deprived of the completed form of true self-determination,
indeed, of freedom tout court. In this respect, gnomie is analogous
to the garments of skin spoken of in Genesis 3:21, which have
the virtue of covering the nakedness of Adam and Eve, yet are
incapable of restoring them to their original innocence.
In order to grasp this point, we need to situate gnomie
in the context of Maximuss larger account of freedom, whose
complete form and measure he calls autexousia or, alternatively,
exousia. In an important passage from Opuscula polemica et theologica 1, the Confessor defines this exousia as a legitimate (self-)
dominion over the matter of our actions, or unimpeded dominion over the use of what is in our power, or unenslaved desire

14. In the Disputation with Pyrrhus; PG 91: 320D324C, for example, Maximus demonstrates the reality of Christs human will by adducing eight Gospel
passages that show him either willing one thing rather than another or even
being unwilling to do something, as in the case of his refusal of the gall he is
offered to drink on the Cross. For the Greek text of the Disputatio, see Marcel
Doucet, Dispute de Maxime le Confesseur avec Pyrrhus: Introduction, Texte
Critique, Traduction et Notes (PhD diss., Institut detudes medievales: Universit de Montreal, 1972), 541618; here, 57780.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

for what lies in our power.15 Note that in principle the natural
will and exousia are one and the same: The will [itself ], Maximus says in the Disputation with Pyrrhus, is natural self-dominion
[autexousiotta].16 Nevertheless, in the case of [mere] human
beings, the habitual possession [of self-dominion] is understood
as preceding [its] actual exercise in time.17 This temporal interval means that the completion of our freedom, which coincides
with the complete realization of what and who we are, is marked
by the distinction-in-unity between our beginning and our end.
From one point of view, then, exousia is natures gift, and its actualitywhich Maximus sometimes designates using the term
actual use [chrsis]18 precedes every individual choice or action on our part.19 From another point of view, however, exousiain our present condition at leastis also a good whose
full realization or appropriation we have yet to achieve. In this
sense, the plenitude of freedom is also the fruit of particular
actions that, in many cases, presuppose a prior process of selfdetermination. Insofar as gnomie represents a stage within this
process, it inevitably confronts us with the problem raised by
the process itselfthe problem, that is, of the (in)adequacy of
our personal appropriation of what and who we are and, therefore, of our true freedom.
In the Disputation with Pyrrhus, Maximus defines gnomie
as a volition qualified in a certain way by virtue of its embracing, in the mode of a habitual disposition, some real or imagined
good.20 This definition recalls the Confessors earlier-cited observation that gnomie involves a disposition of rational appetite,
a state of having made up ones mind on the basis of a judgment
15. Opuscula theologica et polemica, 1; PG 91: 17CD.
16. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 324D/Doucet, 581.
17. Ibid., 325A/Doucet, 582.
18. In contrast to choice [proairesis], which merely elects, dominion [exousia] actually uses the things that are in our power (Opuscula theologica et
polemica, 1; PG 91: 17D). The term use should be taken in a more-thaninstrumental sense; it always involves at least a hint of fruition.
19. This is why the Confessor can say that exousia precedes and commands
the entire process of self-determination, from deliberation through judgment
to choice (cf. ibid.).
20. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 308C/Doucet, 565.

37

38

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

following deliberation and preceding choice. But what, again, is

wrong with such a state? Insofar as gnomie represents a qualified
volition, i.e., a particular expression or realization of the natural
wills resolution to be wholly what it is by nature, the answer to
this question is nothing at all. Yet if gnomie cannot help presupposing and expressing mans natural will, it nonetheless labors
under a deficit that it cannot overcome on its own. What, then,
does this deficit consist in and where does it come from?
Maximus gives us an important clue to answering this
question when, in the above-cited passage from the Disputation
with Pyrrhus, he hints that gnomic volition is indifferent to the
distinction between the real good and the imagined good, i.e.,
between good and evil. Seen in this light, gnomie is not simply identical with self-determination tout court, but represents a
particular enactment of self-determinationone presupposing
a prior indeterminacy with respect to the distinction between
good and evil. This particular kind of indeterminacy, however, is
far from innocent. True, it presents itself as an initial neutrality,
which many people wrongly take to be necessary for the exercise of the liberum arbitrium, but in reality such putative neutrality
presupposes a prior decision, i.e., our first parents No to the
Creator. Once again, gnomie is not simply self-determination as
such, but a particular expression of self-determination burdened
by fallen mans alienation from our natural will, i.e., our inborn
commitment to being what and who we truly are.
We can illustrate the effects of this burden by comparing
the problem of gnomie with the problem of the moral self or
character, which is the fruit of which gnomie is the seed.21 Now,
the ascetic monk Maximus is perfectly aware that the process of
character formation takes a certain amount of time and requires
an appropriate setting as well. Nevertheless, the fact that the acquisition of virtue demands a costly effort is a sign for him that
21. Before offering his own account of gnomie in the Disputatio cum Pyrrho,
Maximus gets his opponent Pyrrhus to cite Cyril of Alexandrias definition of
gnomic volition as a certain mode of life, and then goes on to oblige him to
concede that the mode of life meant is one either according to virtue or to
vice (Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91, 308B/Doucet, 564). This passage seems to
suggest an identification of gnomie with the moral character, but, when read
in conjuction with Maximuss own definition of gnomie, it yields another
interpretation: gnomie is not the virtuous (or vicious) character per se, but the
seed of which this character is the fruit.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

the business of character building labors under a certain deficit

that we cannot eliminate on our own. If, in fact, the virtues [per
se] are natural, then the toilsome effort to acquire them, while
in one sense praiseworthy, is also proof that we are not entirely in
harmony with our nature, which is to say: with the wills natural
commitment to the Good.22 That we all have trouble seeing our
lives, and the tapestry of particular goods that constitutes them,
in light of the Good tout court; that we do not walk confidently
in the radiance of the Good, but grope our way tentatively in the
darknessall of this points back, for Maximus, to an initial, selfcreated disharmony with ourselves, with one another, and with
God.23 (This is not Baianism: the loss of grace does not change
22. For the citation from Maximus, see Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91, 309B/
Doucet, 566. Maximus means this quite literally: the virtues, he says, exist
equally in all those sharing the same [human] nature (ibid.). Why, then, is
not everyone equally virtuous? Because not everyone operates the things of
nature in an equal manner. If, therefore, we all did operate the things of nature
in an equal mannerwhich is what, after all, we have been created to do
then, just as nature would be manifested as one in all, so, too, virtue [would be
manifested as one in all], not admitting of a more or a less (ibid.). This is why,
as Maximus explains at 309C312A/Doucet, 567, the purpose of asceticism is
not to introduce the virtues as a purely novel addition from the outside, but
to remo[ve] what is contrary to nature so as to let what is in accord with
nature, and it alone, shine through. Note that, even under what Maximus
regards as ideal circumstances, there would still be a distinction between nature [physis] and operation [energeia] and, therefore, a place for properly moral
action as well. In the ideal condition, as Maximus sees it, man not only wills to
be what he is, but also is what he wills to be. The problem that the Confessor
reads off of gnomie, then, lies not here, not in the distinction between nature
and operation, seen as the ontological source of a movement toward God, i.e.,
of something like history, but, rather, in the concrete, sin-induced variance
between nature and operation that has conditioned history ever since the Fall.
23. To regret that the Good is no longer evident to us is not, of course,
to regret that we, or our first parents, did not come into existence already
enjoying the beatific vision. The latter regret would be a silly one, since, as
Maximus shows in Ambiguum 7, a pure creature can receive the visio beatifica
only as the fruit of a movement separating and conjoining beginning and
end, natural being and supernaturally natural well-being. The non-evidence
of the Good Maximus describes, then, is the result of the loss of original
justice. It does not represent a positive step forward, or even a tragic, yet
ultimately fruitful misstep, but a refusal to move toward the eschatological
goala mad wish to give history the shape of our culpable alienation from
the Good. It is worth pointing out that, in this postlapsarian situation, we
tend to replace the evidence of the Good (a fruit of original justice) with
a deceptive counterfeit: the false immediacy of an apparent good sought in
place of the true Good we have turned away from. The result is the domin-

39

40

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

the logos of nature, though it does affect the tropos of its manifestation.) In his view, every instance of gnomie, even gnomie of the
virtuous variety (whose possibility he appears to grant at least in
principle), is somehow overshadowed by the loss of original justice, indeed, by the logic of original sin itself, i.e., the attempt to
reconstruct freedom as original indifference to good and evil.24
Note that the assertion of this supposedly neutral indifference
is already a bid to seize control of the entire distinction between
right and wronga distinction the tempter presents as the violent
imposition of an envious divinity whose arbitrary power, he suggests, we should make bold to usurp for ourselves (cf. Gn 3:15).
As already noted above, Maximus identifies the full form
of (human) freedom with what he calls autexousia, or self-dominion. This authentic self-dominion, it is important to stress,
should not be conflated with what the regnant culture conceives
to be the autonomy of the self. The latter, in fact, is at best a
counterfeit of the former; it is not even genuine autonomy, but
only a parasitic parody of the real thing. The essential move of
this parasitism is to try to reverse the natural order of volition,
according to which we choose by virtue of self-dominion, but
we do not exercise self-dominion by virtue of choice.25 Note
the point Maximus is making here: choice is an expression of the
natural will, understood as autexousia, which means commitment
both to the Good and, in principle, to all the particular goods by
whose means we are called to enact our Yes to the Bonum simpliciter. So long as it remains within this context, choice partakes
of the commitment-character of true freedom, and is therefore a
(partial) good in its own right. Conversely, the attempt to wrest
ion of the disordered passions, from which only the Holy Spirit can completely and radically free us.
24. Even in the case of a person who manages to develop a virtuous moral
self, there must have been a time when he might have chosen a life of vice or,
at the very least, when he might have failed to choose a life of virtue. Considered as a physical power, of course, the capacity to choose is not an evil. What
is evil, or at any rate highly imperfect, is the non-evidence of the true Good,
which has concretely overshadowed the physical capacity for choice ever since
the Fall. The point, of course, is not that every action of fallen man is inevitably sinful, but rather that his efforts to overcome sinhowever noble and
successfulcannot erase the fact that he began life needing to convert from it.
25. Opuscula theologica et polemica, 1; PG 91: 17D.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

choice from this, its native context, so as to make it the sole criterion of autexousia, implies the attempt to divide choice from freedoms commitment-character. Since, however, choice makes no
sense without the firmness of committed election, this attempt,
if successful, would abolish choice itself. Ironically, the bid to
absolutize choice does not exalt choice but eviscerates itwhile
filling its now empty husk with a deceptive counterfeit: the sheer
process of making up our minds (gnomie treated as a summum
bonum), indistinguishable from a pure fickleness whose only rule
is the tyranny of mutually conflicting appetites.
The Confessors position, then, has nothing to do with
a rejection of what Thomas Aquinas (for example) calls liberum
arbitrium, much less with an option for what Luther (for example) calls servum arbitrium. His critique of gnomie revolves,
instead, around the insight that gnomic volition, considered concretely, offers only an ambiguous, inherently dialectical image of
what true self-determination would look like under ideal, i.e.,
unfallen, circumstances. On the one hand, gnomie expresses the
logos of the human will, including its innate power of self-determination, and in this sense it represents a positive good; on the
other hand, gnomie is always confronted with, and so circumscribed by, the lingering effects of Adams attempt to reconstruct
self-determinationto recast the very ideas of self and determinationapart from God, and in this sense it represents a
diminishment of being and freedom, a shadow cast by what Paul
calls corruption. As we have just seen, this corruption involves
a certain division from ourselves on the moral level, but this
moral division has a physical counterpart as well. By refusing to surrender himself into Gods hands, Adam condemned his
posterity to suffer its postlasparian eidolon: the unforeseen, painful death whose looming threat constrains us to put our earthly
house in order, without, however, removing the cause of the
disorder we are thus forced to try to set right.26
26. Contrary to the insinuations of the serpent, the Creator always intended for us to share in making ourselves by realizing the logos of our nature
in communion with him. We were to complete our self-reception from God
by virtue of a freely obedient, and obediently free, self-return to him, which
was to enable the totally painless, and purely joyful, fulfillment of the law that
we find ourselves only by losing ourselves in love. Rejecting friendship with
the Creator, Adam sought to seize the divine gift of self-making, and so to

41

42

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

It goes without saying that I have hardly scratched the

surface of Maximuss account of gnomie and its relation to natural will. Nevertheless, I hope I have said enough about these
matters to make it clear why the Confessor, while strenuously
defending Christs possession of the thelma physikon proper to
man, just as strenuously denies that Christ exercised this natural
will in a gnomic mode. While the former is required by the
logic of the Incarnationhow can the Son of God truly appear
in the flesh unless that flesh is rationally ensouled and endowed
with volition?the latter is not. On the contrary, the ascription of gnomie to the Savior actually undermines the logic of
the Incarnation, since, as the Confessor himself explains in the
Disputation with Pyrrhus,
those who predicate gnomie of Christ . . . preach the
dogma that he is a mere man, making up his mind upon
deliberation like we do, and ignorant and hesitant, and
affected by contraries, since one deliberates about doubtful
things, not of ones admitting no doubt. For we naturally
have desire for what is simply good by nature, whereas we
figure out what is good in any given case through inquiry
and deliberation. And this is why gnomie is fittingly
ascribed to us, keeping in mind that gnomie is a modality
[tropos] of use, but not the logos of nature, since otherwise
nature would be subject to indefinite alteration. But it is
impossible to predicate gnomie of the humanity of the
Lord, whose hypostatic existence was not that of a mere
human being like we are, but was divinefor the one
who appeared by the flesh taking his origin from us and
for us was God. For by its very being, that is, by its [i.e.
the humanitys] divine way of subsisting hypostatically, it
naturally had an affinity for the good and an allergy to
the bad, as the great eye of the Church himelf, Basil, put
it in his exposition of the forty-fourth Psalm: It is in this
sense that you should also take what Isaiah said concerning
him, namely that Before the child knows evil or opts for
it, he will elect the good once and for all. Before the child
knows good or evil, then, he has already elected the good

reconstruct it on his own terms by dividing freedom from obedience, power

from love, and life from death, in order to control the entire relation between
them. The result was both an impairment of the manifestation-in-act of our
freedom and a subjection to death in its postlapsarian form (these things being
two sides of the same coin, as it were).

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

once and for all and so turned his back on wickedness. For
the word before indicates that he held fast to what was
good by nature in virtue of his very being, i.e., on account
of his divine mode of subsistingand not on the basis of
inquiry like us.27

At the beginning of this passage just cited, Maximus

clearly expresses the concern animating his refusal to ascribe
gnomie to the person of the Incarnate Word. If, the Confessor reasons, Christs human will were realized in the form of
gnomie, then we would have to imagine him trying to discover
what to do and then making up his mind to do it. Such a Christ,
however, would be ignorant and hesitant, not only concerning
what he should do, but also, more profoundly, concerning who
he himself should be or become. He would be a Savior who had
not always been sure about who he is, which is to say: he would
be no true Savior at all. On the contrary, he would be someone
in need of saving himself; he would be a mere man like us, who
27. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 308 CD/Doucet, 565ff. Guido Bausenhart offers a helpful gloss on this passage: A gnomic enactment of the human
will, one, in other words, that necessarily includes the aspect of decision, entails self-determination in an abiding (in the case of the saints, progressively,
albeit asymptotically, decreasing) difference between the empirical self and
the true, ideal self, and this difference is a distance from God, his will, and his
determination, in which alone true self-realization comes to fruition. Jesus
humanity, which is enacted in the identity of the one divine hypostasis and in
a divine mode, knows no such distance. Jesus lives wholly from the mission of
the Father, next to which nothing else has any influence on him, the Son. For
Maximus, freedom . . . means being free from ignorance and from subjection
to any external compulsion, hence, acting out of the sourcehood [Ursprnglichkeit] of inner spontaneity. This spontaneity, however, must not be equated
with a sort of inability to do otherwise, in the sense of an unspontaneous,
constraining determinism. Such spontaneity, for its part, also requires intentional determination. The freedom to choose between good and evil is not a
necessary component in this conception of freedom. Even freedom of choice
strives beyond itself into a state of decision [Entschiedenheit], and thus, sublating
itself, demonstrates its provisional character. Acts of self-determination aim
at laying hold ever more fully of the determination that comes to one from
God and demands the whole of ones beingand compared with which every
other alternative that might possibly still attract one simply fades to insignificance. Nor is this kind of freedom heteronomous, for this determination is
really given to it, but precisely by the Absolute, and, therefore, is also given in
view of this Absolute (Guido Bausenhart, In allem uns gleich ausser der Snde.
Studien zum Beitrag Maximos des Bekenners zur altkirchlichen Christologie. Mit
einer kommentierten bersetzung der Disputatio cum Pyrrho [Mainz: Matthias
Grnewald, 1992], 161ff.).

43

44

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

is not only subject to the possibility of falling, but who also participates in the actual fallenness of the human race. This is why,
speaking of Sergius, who was Pyrrhuss predecessor as Patriarch
of Constantinople, Maximus says that
at other times taking as his helpers those who call [Christs
will] . . . gnomic . . . he presented the Lord, not only
as a mere man, but also as subject to turning [trepton] and
sinful, since gnomie has to do with judging of contraries,
and inquiring concerning the unknown, and taking
counsel concerning the unclear.28

It is important to stress that Maximus is not equating

inquiry, counsel, and judgment with sinfulness. Once again, the
process of making up our minds is not problematic insofar as it
involves reason and will operating on particular objects, but insofar as that operation is conditioned by doubtor hesitation between contrariesand ignorance. For, as we have already seen,
doubt and ignorance are signs that man has fallen out of communion with his Creator.29 To attribute gnomie to Christ, then, is
not only to imagine him subject to doubt and ignorance; it is also
to imagine that he shares in fallen humanitys attempt to be (in
another sense) a mere or naked man [psilos anthropos], i.e., to
be what and who he is apart from communion with God. By the
same logic, it is to deny his identity as God the Son, who came
in the flesh in order to heal the original source of our woes, the
(fallen) human will, from withinthe very reason why the Savior had to assume the full reality of the human thelma physikon:
For if Adam willingly listened [to the tempter], and
willingly beheld [the fruit], and willingly ate, then the
first thing subject to [sinful] affection in us is volition. If,
however, volition is the first subject of [sinful] affection,
but the Logos, having become incarnate, did not himself
28. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 329D/Doucet, 586f.
29. Maximus is of course not claiming that man is or should be naturally
omniscient or naturally confirmed in the Good; he is not equating finitude
with sin. His point is that, as Gods image, man is at his natural best when he
communes with the divine Archetype in being and actionand not when,
having lost communion with God, man finds himself left, as it were, to fend
for himself in a world whose theophanous character is no longer so clear to
him on account of his alienation from the Creator.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

assume volition together with the nature, then I have not

been separated from sin. But if I have not been separated
from sin, then I have not been saved, either. For what is
not assumed is not healed. But here is a further point: if
natures power of self-dominion is his work and artifact,
but, according to them, the Logos, having been made
flesh, did not assume it together with the nature within the
ineffable union, then he cast it away from himself either
because he despised his own creation, as if it werent good,
or else because he begrudged us its healing, thereby both
depriving us of complete salvation and showing himself
subject to passion either by not willing to save us or not
being able to do the job completely.30

The Confessors refusal to ascribe gnomie to the Savior

in this passage (and others like it) is anything but an inconsistency that betrays his otherwise rigorous defense of the full reality of the Saviors human will. On the contrary, if Maximus
denies gnomie of Christ here, it is precisely because he (rightly)
judges that gnomic willing would compromise the plenitude of
the Lords properly human volition and, in so doing, would also
violate the principle that what is not assumed is not healed
the very principle whose rigorously consistent application marks
Christ as the Redeemer of his own creation.31 The Savior realizes the logos of our natural willing with unsurpassable perfectionnot in spite of, but thanks to, the divine tropos, or mode,
in which he gives his nature its (hypostatic) subsistence. For, as
30. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 325AB/Doucet, 582.
31. Insofar as hesitation between alternatives represents a division, it temporarily paralyzes the agent, and thus diminishes his freedom. The hesitant
agent is like an unskilled dancer who is unsure about the next steps: As soon
as the dancer begins to waver, he loses the freedom of movement and comes
crashing heavily to the floor. Now, if Maximus denies gnomie of Christ, its
because the Savior cannot be like the wavering dancer; he cannot be a hesitant
agent paralyzed by indecision and the division accompanying it. The presence
of gnomie in Christ, in other words, would mean that he was affected by a
deficit of freedom whose very nature is incompatible with his identity and role
as Savior. If Christs human volition were subject to a dividing hesitation and
doubt, he would lack the fullness of human freedom, and this lack would be a
sign that he had not healed our nature in himself. But this failure to heal our
nature, in its turn, would be a sign that he had not fully assumed our nature,
either. For if what is not assumed is not healed, it is equally true that what is
not healed is not assumed, inasmuch as the Word took on our humanity for the
sake of its healing (and deification).

45

46

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

Maximus explains in the Disputation with Pyrrhus, every natural

property predicated of Christ has, joined to the logos befitting
it, the tropos above nature, so that nature might be confirmed in
its trustworthiness by the logos and the economy [might be confirmed in its trustworthiness] by the tropos.32
In denying gnomie of Christ, Maximus is simply following the rule enunciated in the passage just cited: he is implicitly affirming the supereminence of the divine tropos,
or mode, of Christs subsistence, and, in doing that, he is affirming the unsurpassable perfection with which the Savior
realizes the logos of our natural will. For Maximus, then, the
removal of gnomie from Christ serves to underscore the Redeemers superabundant fulfillment of the perfection to which
gnomie, taken at its best, aspiresthe freedom in which all
elective self-determination finds its source, model, and end.
Such, at any rate, seems to be one of the chief implications of
the passage from Basils commentary on Psalm 44 that Maximus approvingly cites in the text from the Disputation with
Pyrrhus that we are examining here: Before the child knows
good or evil, then, he has already elected the good once and
for all [exelexato to agathon] and so turned his back on wickedness. This teaching is not so far removed from that of St.
Thomas, according to whom Christs will, though it is determined to the Good, is not determined to this or that good
in particular. It therefore belongs to Christ to elect by means
of liberum arbitrium while being confirmed in the Good, just
as [the same perfection] belongs to the blessed in heaven as
well.33 (I need only add that Christs properly human election of all the particular goods making up his earthly life is
the expression and enactment of his a priori resolve to realize
32. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 297D300A/Doucet, 554f.
33. Summa theologiae III, q. 18, a. 4 ad 1. This conclusion presupposes that
election does not necessarily presuppose or require doubt, hesitation, and ignorance. On this point, see ibid., ad 1 and ad 2. Note an important implication
of Thomass teaching here: confirmation in the Good founds a determinability
by the Goodexpressed, for example, in the context of particular actions
and passions ordered to it. This determinability recapitulates the open-ended
character of earthly lifethe good of possibility, as it wereon a higher level,
where it is no longer affected by lack of full actuality, but is the superabundant
fruit of perfect actuality itself, i.e., of freedom as total, unwavering commitment to the Bonum simpliciter.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

the entirety of the Fathers plan for the Incarnation, both as a

whole and in every detail.)
Let us consider the matter from a more properly theological point of view, starting from the person of Christ himelf. The
Savior, after all, is not a mere man who finds himself thrown
into an earthly existence conditioned by the loss of original justice. On the contrary, he is the coeternal Son of God who chose
to take flesh out of an absolute freedom uniting the best of passionate desire and the best of kenotic generosity in a unique synthesis of truly divine beauty. Now, the Sons own fidelity to this
beauty requires him to assume a properly and integrally human
will capable of translating his pretemporal freedom into the
language of the (rationally ensouled) flesh. Clearly, this natural
human will cannot fall below the level, as it were, of the divine
choice that grounds its existence; it cannot be any less endowed
with elective self-determination than the gnomic will of a mere
man. If, in fact, Christs entire temporal existence is established,
encompassed, and shaped by his own pretemporal commitment
to the Incarnation, then his human will must possess such an
excess of self-determination as to be the superabundant source,
model, and end of all self-determinative election on our part.
Once again, Christs human will contains in overflowing measure everything that is positive in gnomiewithout participating in the deficit hampering gnomies ability to realize this positivity in a truly faithful manner.
The absence of gnomie in Christ, then, points to his
identity as the Word made flesh, and thus highlights his status as
the Archetype of all freedom. But what, exactly, does this freedom consist in? Maximuss definition of natural will in Opuscula
theologica et polemica 1 rules out any one-sided answer to this question, either solely in terms of determination by oneself or solely
in terms of determination by the other. The movement the Confessor ascribes to the thelma physikon lies beyond every eitheror between these poles, for its characteristic energy is both a
self-determination to the Good and a being-determined by it.
But if the natural wills constitutive pattern is communion, this
communion involves commitment: commitment (on our part)
to the Good, but also, in principle, to all the particular goods by
which we are called to enact the fundamental commitment to

47

48

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

the Bonum simpliciter.34 Note that Christ assumed and perfected

the natural will, and the freedom with which it coincides, in both
of these dimensions, since his Yes to the Fathers redemptive
plan concerned not only the plan as a whole, but also every one
of its details. Before entering the world, the Son chooses the
earthly life given him by the Fatherand, having become incarnate, he re-enacts this choice moment by moment from below,
so that each action or suffering becomes a fresh beginning that he
gives himself by receiving it from his Father in the Holy Spirit,
and vice versa.35 Christ is not less free than we are, but infinitely
more so, and this surprising more-human-than-human freedom
certifies his unique way of personalizing humanity (in mission
from the Father) as the source, model, and end of our Yes to
what and who we are.36
34. This implies that the perfection of our freedom, which is also the perfection of our being, fulfills both our nature and our personal mission, while
bringing each into beautiful congruence with the other.
35. There is never a time when the Saviors human will does not belong
to God the Son, who freely assumed it in order to fulfill his Fathers salvific
design. By the same token, there is never a time when the Lords human will
is not in accord with this design as a whole and in its every detail. Because
this accord both reveals Christs divine filiation and springs from the depths
of his assumed humanity, it represents his ownmost actwhich is perfect
from the beginning and which he gives himself anew in every moment of his
earthly life. Here, the a priori and the a posteriori, the supratemporal and the
temporal, are two sides of Christs human freedom, itself the epiphany of his
eternal Sonship in the flesh.
36. One way of stating the point behind Maximuss refusal to ascribe gnomie to Christ is to say that, in doing so, he means to say that Christs moral
self hood was not the principle of the hypostatic union, but its immediate consequence, an immediate revelation of his divine identity; he did not have to
achieve a character on the basis of inquiry, deliberation, and choice (even if we
grant that the character he thus achieved was as flawless as could be given the
indirect conditioning of fallenness). Note well: Maximus is not denying that
Christ (in a sense) chose, but only that he did not have to inquire and deliberate his way out of an initial ignorance about the right thing to do, an ignorance
that is a consequence of the Fall. Nor is Maximus denying that Christ had (in
a sense) a human personality, if by that we mean something on the order
of a moral self or a human character; the point is that his being the Savior
from the start also gives him his human character ab ovo; he does not need to
become the Savior through the gradual formation of his character. Thanks to
the hypostatic union, Christs humanity reflects the eternal Sons simultaneous
possession of infinite being and moral perfection. Christs humanity, then, is at
every stage of its existence a perfectly transparent, temporal human expression
of his being the Son who is ontologically and morally perfect at once. This

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

In Christs humanity, then, our freedom (finally) shines

forth to the full extent of its inborn logos, whose pattern is defined by the fruitful circumincession of goods that fallen man
tends to see, if not as mutually incompatible, then at least as essentially disparate: actuality and possibility, self-reception and
self-making, natural givenness and personal achievement, determination by oneself and determination by another, and, last
but not least, moral integrity and physical wholeness. As many
students of the Confessors work have noted, Maximus evinces
a particular fondness for contemplating this irradiation of freedom in light of Christs fully human Yes to the Father on the
Mount of Olives. One point the Confessor is especially keen to
highlight in this context is that the Lords Yes is both the fruit
and the internal condition of the saving communion between
God and man that Christwho is not some [third] thing other
than his natures, from which and in which he has his hypostatic
existence37recapitulates and founds in his own person. This
insight finds classic expression in the following justly famous passage from Opuscula theologica et polemica 6:
Wherefore, according to both the natures from which, and
in which, and of which he was the hypostasis, he made
himself known to be existing as by nature such as to will
and work our salvation; on the one hand, decreeing it in
his good pleasure along with the Father and the Spirit; on
the other hand, insofar as for its sake he became obedient
to the Father unto death, even death on a Cross, and
personally working through the flesh the great mystery of
the economy in our regard.38
does not exclude a real growth in wisdom on his part, but only assures that,
whatever growth (or change) he undergoes, he always remains fully in character, always the Son of God made man. Christs human character is, in one
sense, not like ours; it is not the result of a partly unchosen history, but, rather,
the source of a history chosen from beginning to end and in every respect. But
precisely because he gives himself his particular human life story by receiving it from his Father (and vice versa), he genuinely lives through each of his
stages, as if outdoing the passive dimension of our existence on its own terms
and from within. Not, to repeat, so as to make himself perfect, but so as to become the source, model, guide, and end of all our growth toward perfection.
37. Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 289B/Doucet, 544.
38. Opuscula theologica et polemica, 6; PG 91: 88D90A. This communion
involves a genuine mutual (though asymmetrical) perichoresis, which at one

49

50

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

Abba, Father . . . not what I will, but what you [will]

(Mk 14:36): in pronouncing this prayer, the Incarnate Son opens
himself in total transparency to the Father, as if to reenact in space
and time the constitutive gesture of the divine persons, who as
Augustine puts it, are both seen [videntur] to be determined one
by the other and infinite in themselves.39 Yet if Christs human
Yes to the Father in Gethsemane is a unique saving deed of
the Only-begotten Son made man, it also represents the finest
flowering of (his) humanity, the ultimate fruitfulness springing
from the depths of the (assumed) human natural will and manifesting the latters entire virtue in act. Even in our case, after all,
the thelma physikon connotes a moved self-movement toward the
plenitude of our being. Even for us, in other words, the natural
will is the perpetual budding, which has already started to blossom and take shape, of our Yes, not only to our own nature and
our own person, but also and above all to the benevolent divine
will that has chosen to manifest itself in both. Put another way,
the natural will is Gods Yes in us that answers his creative
Yes to usand, for that very reason, it is the root and pledge
of our most inward, more proper act: our free, obedient Yes to
what and who we are. It is this human Yes that the Immaculate
Virgin gives to her Son in the Annunciation;40 it is this Yes
out of which he, in his turn, fashions the paradigmatic unity of
point Maximus describes as a mutual gift-exchange: There is no mutual
gift-exchange [antidosis] between one, he tells Pyrrhus, but between two
unequal realities, inasmuch as the ineffable union brings it about that the properties naturally present to each part of Christ have, by means of an exchange,
been made over to the other, without any change and confusion of the one
part with the other as far as the logos of its nature is concerned (Disputatio cum
Pyrrho; PG 91: 296D297A/Doucet, 552).
39. Augustine, De Trinitate, VI, v, 12.
40. If the Blessed Virgin is the God-bearer, then it is not enough to say
that the hypostatic union lifts the assumed humanity into the divine subjecthood of the Word. We must also say that the union adapts the Word to
human nature, allowing him to recapitulate our being constituted as individual, complete, fully operational human beings endowed with an ability
to manifest ourselves from within our own innate resources. It is not that the
Word thereby becomes a mere human person. Rather, he relives what, for us,
is an experience of being created in a new mode: as a pure manifestation of
his divine personhood within the limits of our humanity, with all its conjoined
misery and grandeur.

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

freedom and obedience God looked to when he first conceived

the idea of human nature and of each of us with it.
Christ remains perfectly himself even in accepting death
for our sakes on the Mount of Olives. In so doing, he both confirms and transforms the undivided self-motion that, as we saw
above, is in one way or another characteristic of all living beings.
On the one hand, he proves once and for all that the indivision in
question includes a good duality between self-as-mover and selfas-moveda duality reflecting, in its turn, the fact that all our
self-movement toward the Good is a being moved by it (which,
in turn, enables and includes our self-moving activity). On the
other hand, Christ distinguishes this good duality from the sininduced division that pits the self-as-mover against the self-asmoved, causing us to clutch desperately at ourselves in one moment only to push ourselves away contemptuously in the next.
Put more concretely, Christs Yes in Gethsemane confirms,
restores, and purifies both our love of life and our readiness to
sacrifice it, reconciling them in such a way as to turn the very
paradigm of what is unchoiceworthy in itselfdeath as the rupture of the undivided dual unity of the self into an occasion
for returning our finitude to the Creator. As Christs own Resurrection shows, God responds to this eucharistic return by renewing his original gift of being, whose natural indivision he now
crowns with the grace of everlasting indivisibility. The Saviors
Yes in the Garden of Olives, then, is the seed of incorruption,
whose indissoluble wholeness is not Olympian invulnerability,
but total transparency to Godan unhindered communion with
our Maker in which we fully catch up, at last, with the unity
of physical wholeness and moral integrity, of being and love, that
was his by nature from all eternity.41 In this communion,
41. Ambiguum 7; PG 91: 1076AB/Constas I, 88. Maximus himself interprets Christs words in the Garden, Yet not as I will, but as you [will], as a
prefigurement of the eschatological state. This state, the Confessor says, is that
subjection by which, according to the divine Apostle, the Son will subject
to the Father those who voluntarily receive being so subjected. It is after [this
subjection], and on account of it, that the last enemy, namely death, will be
destroyed, inasmuch as our power over ourselves, or our self-dominion [autexousiou], through which death made its entry to us and so consolidated the
power of corruption over us, voluntarily gives way to God and rules beautifully over its own self-rule, no longer willing any object besides that which
God wills, as the Savior himself, personifying our reality in himself, says to the

51

52

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

God [is] in participated as a whole by [the blessed as] the

wholes [they are] and becomes to the soul what the soul is
to the body, while extending this relation through the soul
to the body, so that the soul might receive the inability to
turn away [from the Good] [atrepsia] and the body [might
receive] the inability to die [athanasia] and the whole man,
being divinized by the grace of the God who became man,
might be deified, remaining wholly man in soul and body
with respect to his nature and becoming wholly God in
soul and body with respect to grace and the divine splendor
(whose beauty now suits the whole of him in every regard)
of the blessed glory, than which nothing more splendid or
more exalted can be thought.42

Father: Yet not what I will, but what you [will]. This passage is a continuation of ibid., 1073D1076A/Constas I, 8688, where Maximus describes the
eschatological state as an ecstasy suffered, as it were, at the hands of God, who
draws the blessed out of themselves and into himself, embracing them wholly
on every side. The point is that this being-wholly-possessed-by God also enables the blessed to see and possess themselves from outside, as it wereand
so to embrace the whole of themselves (including their very self-embrace) in
turn. The blessed therefore enjoy the entire perfection of moral and physical
indivision. Yet this indivision (better: indivisibility), it is important to stress, is
no mere monadic self-identity, for the blessed possess themselves wholly only
because they are wholly in the possession of their Creator. The indivisible
unity of heaven, in other words, recapitulates, and vindicates the goodness
of, duality, which is now fully at liberty to perform its native task of expressing creatures wholly positive distinction from God, from one another, and
even from themselves. Corollary: The eschatological state reveals once and
for all that the plenitude of freedom, which is also the plenitude of being,
consists in the fruitful interplay of unity and duality (as well as of motion
and rest, ecstasy and enstasy, complete determination by God and complete
self-possession, and so forth)an interplay in which we glimpse a created
trace of, and foundation of our participation in, the circumincession of the
Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.
42. Ambiguum 7; PG 91: 1088B/Constas I, 112. Note the simultaneity and
inseparability of moral integritythe inability to turn away from Godand
physical incorruptionthe inability to die any more. Note, too, the simultaneity and inseparability of the deification of man and of the humanization
of Godwhich implies, in its turn, the simultaneity and inseparability of the
divinization and humanization of man, as well. The more man loses himself
wholly into God by grace, the more he finds himself restored to himself in
(incorruptible) wholeness. This is why Maximus can say that heavenly impeccability, which is the fruit of deifying glory, also includes (and just so far is
also the fruit of ) the ultimate affirmation . . . of our freedom [tou autexousiou]
(Ambiguum 7, 1076B/Constas I, 90).

T H E F R E E DOM OF CH R IST

Much more could be said, of course, concerning Maximuss theological exegesis of the Gospel narratives concerning the
Lords Agony in the Garden.43 Since, however, it is time to conclude
this essay, I limit myself to highlighting just one point implicit in
what has been said so far: the evangelists do not show us a Christ
who in Gethsemane initially refuses the chalice proffered him by
the Father, changes his mind after a moment of struggle, and then
finally accepts what he had at first rejected.44 Such a reading, as
43. For a fine, historically informed justification of this reading of Maximuss exegesis of the Gethsemane narratives, see Jonathan Bieler, Maximus
the Confessor on Christs Human Will, in the present number of Communio
(5582).
44. PG 91: 65A68D. Here Maximus shows that the second half of Christs
prayer in Gethsemaneyet not what I will, but what you [will]suggests
just the opposite of resistance or cowardice (65B). But then who pronounces
this brave consent? Since these words refer to a human will (not what I will),
but express accord rather than refusal, Christ must be speaking them in his own
sacred, sinless humanity (cf. 68A). By the same token, these words reveal both
the distinction and the harmony between Christs divine and human nature and
his divine and human wills (ibid.). At this point, Maximuss opponent has only
one possible way outwhich is to claim that Christ is referring these words to
his divine nature, as if to underscore that, as God, he has no natural will other
than the one he shares with the Father from all eternity (cf. 65AB). The trouble
with this solution, Maximus rebuts, is that, if the second half of the prayer refers
to the divine will, then the first half must refer to, or be spoken on behalf of,
the divine will as wellin which case we would have to deny that God wills
our salvation (cf. 65BC)! If this conclusion is unacceptable, then it remains
that Christs entire prayer in the Garden of Olives, including the deprecation
of the chalice, expresses both the reality of his human will and its impeccable
accordat once a priori and a postierioriwith the divine will he shares with
the Father in the Holy Spirit. This suggests that even the deprecation of the
chalice has a soteriological significance. Although Maximus does not explicitly
explain in Opusculum 6 what this significance is, in other texts he hints that
Christs free acceptance of the chalice has to emerge from a love of the good of
being in itselffor the sake of the Giver who is present in it. Consider the following text: For if beings, which came into existence out of nothing, also have
the power to hold onto being, not nonbeing; and if the natural property of this
power is the impetus toward what constitutes and the rejection of what corrupts,
then even the superessential Logos, because he had become essence humanly,
also had the power to hold onto the being of his humanity, whose impetus and
counterimpetus he displayed through operation as he willedthe impetus in
making use of what was natural and blameless to such an extent that unbelievers
reckoned that he was not God; the counterimpetus in voluntarily withdrawing
from death at the time of his Passion. So in what way has the Church of God
committed a folly in confessing that, along with his human and created nature,
the logoi that he, as Creator, put into nature, exist without the lack of a single one
in him? (Disputatio cum Pyrrho; PG 91: 297BC/Doucet, 553).

53

54

A DR I A N J. WA LK E R

Maximus recognizes, misses the entire point of the Saviors prayer

in the Garden, whose opening words set the tone for the whole:
Abba, Father (Mk 14:36). Christs deprecation of the chalice, in
other words, occurs within, and presupposes, an unbroken relation
of intimacy between Father and (Incarnate) Son, an intimacy that
would be impossible if Christs human will were even slightly out
of harmony with the Fathers, and his, divine will. This, in fact, is
why Christ does not say Father, I will not do this, but Father,
all things are possible to you, let this chalice pass me by (ibid.);
there is no abrupt shift of tone when he immediately adds yet not
what I will, but what you [will] (ibid.). Maximus, then, is surely
right that the deprecation of the chalice and its acceptance are
both expressions of Christs natural human volition, just as they
conjointly express his undivided, indeed, indivisible free human
obedience of love. By deprecating the chalice, he does justice
to our natural desire for life, and so to Gods gift of it, while his
acceptance of the chalice brings out something implicit in the
desire to live (when it is not distorted by concupiscence), namely:
the readiness to acknowledge the Creators gift of life as a gift by
returning it into his handsconfident that he will keep the gift
safe, preserving it from ultimate destruction and making its surrender fruitful in his own time. If Christ is the source, model, and
end of undivided self-motion, it is because he is the source, model, and end of the paradoxical truth that we find our life by losing
it and that, if the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it
bears much fruit.
Adrian J. Walker is an editor of the journal.