Maximus the Confessor

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 1998 by Constas, Nicholas

Maximus the Confessor. By Andrew Louth. The Early Church Fathers. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. ix 230 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Maximus the Confessor (580-662) is one of the most imposing figures in the entire canon of patristic literature, and has been called the "father of Byzantine theology," and "one of the greatest thinkers in the whole history of Christianity." Living at a time of harrowing political collapse and profound social transformation, Maximus produced comprehensive refutations of Origenism and Monotheletism-the latter denying the presence of a human will in the Savior, thereby truncating his humanity and undermining the basis for human salvation.

The chief merit of this work, consistent with the purpose of the series in which it has been published, is to make a significant number of Maximus's writings available in English translation. The eight translated texts (ep. 2; Ambigua I.10, 41, 71; II.1, 5; and Opuscula 7;3), which constitute more than half the volume, have been well chosen and are illustrative of Maximus's theological development across the range of his entire writing career. The translations are supported by an introduction and extensive notes.

Maximus is a notoriously difficult writer, and even the most learned of his medieval Greek readers found his labyrinthine prose to be somewhat dizzying. The task of the translator is thus formidable. Particularly vexing is the word logos (discussed in the introduction on pp. 37, 57-58, 68), and readers may disagree with the way Louth has chosen to deal with (or ignore) its broad range of signification. In some instances, Louth has chosen to translate or paraphrase logos into English, followed by a bracketed transliteration: "a universal meaning [logos]" (p. 86); "reason [logos]" (p. 89); "singular reason [logos]" (p. 89); "inner reason [logos]" (p. 89); "absolute meaning [logos]" (p. 89); "theological understandings [logoi]" (p. 105); "spiritual meanings [logoi]" (p.109); "meanings [logoi]" (p. 112); "meaning [logos]" (p. 131); "highest attributes [logoi]" (p. 153); "spiritual meaning [logos]" (p. 167); "primary meaning [logos]" (p. 168). In addition to this approach, there are at least fifty instances in which the word logos, in either its singular or plural form, is simply left untranslated. This can, at times, result in a rather unhappy medium: "[T]o speak concisely, the logoi of everything that is divided and particular are contained, as they say, by the logoi of what is universal and generic, and the most universal and generic logoi are held together by wisdom, and the logoi of the particulars, held fast in various ways by the generic logoi, are contained by sagacity" (p. 161). There are, of course, dozens of other occurrences of the word logos which have been simply translated into English (e.g., as "reason," "word," or "doctrine") without comment or note.

Despite the perils of polysemy, the translations are, on the whole, highly faithful to the original Greek, and, at the same time, rendered in clear and straightforward English. There are, as a matter of course, the inevit able changes of tense, the transposition of participles into verbs, and shifts of voice from passive to active, but none of this impinges on the sense of the original Greek. On the contrary, it generally serves to bring out the flow and force of the argument. These fine translations are all the more valuable inasmuch as Louth was able to consult an unpublished critical edition of the Opuscula currently in preparation for Corpus Christianorunt. Series Graeca (p. 83). Professor Louth is to be congratulated for his clear and faithful renderings of some of the most difficult Greek theological works of late antiquity.

With respect to the prefatory matter, Louth's presentation of the historical background is somewhat overly schematized, and would have profited by reference to John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), who is quite good at reading the theological issues in light of their cultural and political contexts. The introduction to Maximus's theology is quite good at locating Maximus within his own tradition, and at delineating his links to the Cappadocians and Dionysius the Areopagite.

There is no biblical index, which is unfortunate given Maximus's extensive use of Scripture, evidenced in the broad range of biblical passages that he either cites, alludes to, or otherwise comments on, a fact which Louth himself points out: "Scripture is absolutely primary" (p. 222); "[T]he most important source for Maximus is the Bible" (p. 82). The bibliographies contain some notable omissions (e.g., Joseph Farrell's English translation of Maximus's Disputation with Pyrrhus [South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 1992], Guido Bausenhart's German translation of the same [Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald, 1992], and Ignatius Sakalis's 1978 Greek translation of the Ambigua with an excellent introduction and notes by Demetru Staniloae [Athens: Apostolike Diakonia]). There is a minor error on p. 44, where Photius's Amphilochia is said to be a "commentary on difficult passages in the Fathers, especially St. Gregory the Theologian," but this work is almost exclusively devoted to difficult passages in Scripture.