On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St Maximus the Confessor #25

Publication Data: Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003
Format: softcover
Number of Pages: 188
Dimensions (l × w × h): 18.4 cm × 12.7 cm × 1.4 cm
ISBN: 0‒88141‒249‒X
ISBN: 978‒0‒88141‒249‒9

   
Translated by Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken

Number 25 of Popular Patristics Series

“Maximus has been called a cosmic theologian, and rightly so. For Maximus the Confessor, the world—the natural world and the ‘world’ of the scriptural revelation—is the broad and complex theater in which God’s incarnational mission is playing itself out to full completion. Both the cosmos and the Bible tell the same glorious story, as it were: the story of the Logos who, in his historical incarnation and in his gradual eschatological epiphany ‘in all things’ (cf 1 Cor 15:28), discloses through the logoi, the providential ‘principles’ of creation and Scripture, the magnificent intricacy and beauty of the transfigured cosmos. At the center of this cosmic drama, the true play-within-the-play, is the hypostatic union of divine and human natures and wills that is not only operative ‘in’ Jesus Christ but which truly is Jesus Christ. [...]The present volume includes representative texts from Maximus’s corpus which have heretofore not appeared in English translation. They provide the reader with a relatively comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, portrait of some preeminent themes in his cosmic theology and spirituality. Most of the texts come from Maximus’s two largest works, the Ambigua and the Quaestiones ad Thalassium.”
—“Introduction”

CONTENTS

   Preface
   Abbreviations
   Introduction
The Texts
   Ambiguum 7: On the Beginning and End of Rational Creatures
   Ambiguum 8: On How the Creator Brings Order out of the Chaos of Bodily Existence
   Ambiguum 42: On Jesus Christ and the “Three Births”
   Ad Thalassium 1: On the Utility of the Passions
   Ad Thalassium 2: On God’s Preservation and Integration of the Universe
   Ad Thalassium 6: On the Grace of Holy Baptism
   Ad Thalassium 17: On Spiritual Progress in Virtue
   Ad Thalassium 21: On Christ’s Conquest of the Human Passions
   Ad Thalassium 22: On Jesus Christ and the End of the Ages
   Ad Thalassium 42: On Jesus Christ, the New Adam Who “Became Sin”
   Ad Thalassium 60: On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ
   Ad Thalassium 61: On the Legacy of Adam’s Transgression
   Ad Thalassium 64: On the Prophet Jonah and the Economy of Salvation
   Opusculum 6: On the Two Wills of Christ in the Agony of Gethsemane
   Select Bibliography