Thank God for friends. They are always trying to get my education started again, particularly Alan, who mailed yesterday:
‘Have you read Maximus’ Mystagogia (ET in Berthold’s Classics of
Western Spirituality edn.) – absolutely superb, esp. ch 24 which is
the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian
understandings of communion.’
When he comes I will ask Alan what ‘the ecclesiastical exterminator of all Thomist-Aristotelian understandings of communion’ means. But meanwhile, here is Maximus, summing up what he has said in The Church’s Mystagogy. The first paragraph is not easy to take, but the second is just extraordinary. Just hang onto this little phrase: ‘by grace and participation’:
The holy Church, we said, is the figure and image of God, inasmuch as through it, he effects in his infinite power and wisdom an unconfused unity from the various essence of beings, attaching them to himself as a Creator at their highest point, and this operates according to the grace of faith for the faithful, joining them all to each other in one form according to a single grace and calling of faith, the active and virtuous ones in a single identity of will, the contemplative and gnostic ones in an unbroken and undivided concord as well. It is figure of both the spiritual and sensible world, with the sanctuary as symbol of the intelligible world and the nave as symbol of the world of sense. Sons are the ones who out of neither fear of threat nor desire of promised things but rather out of character and habit of the voluntary inclination and disposition of the soul towards the good never become separated from God, as that son to whom it was said ‘Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.’
For if the Word has shown that the one who is in need of having good done to him is God – for as long, he tells as, as you did it for one of these least ones, you did it for me – on God’s very word, then, he will much more show that the one who can do good and who does it is truly God by grace and participation because he has taken on in happy imitation the energy and characteristics of God’s own doing good. And if the poor man is God, it is because of God’s condescension in becoming poor for us and taking upon himself by his own suffering the sufferings of each one and ‘until the end of time’, always suffering mystically out of goodness in proportion to each one’s suffering. All the more reason then will that one be God who by loving men in imitation of God heals by himself in divine fashion the hurts of those who suffer and shows that he has in his disposition, safeguarding all proportion, the same power and of saving Providence that God has.
Zizioulas learned everything he knows from Maximus, so it looks as though it is time to school with Maximus (humbling, this theology lark) and see what we can learn from him.
