Religious Studies

Western theology struggles with the rise of secularism and postmodernism. The Radical Orthodoxy
sensibility asserts that the ancient principles of methexis (participation) and theosis (deification) presents
an alternative metaphysical narrative to the narrative of secularism and the onto-theological tradition.
This article addresses the problems of the onto-theological metaphysical tradition in Western theology by
analyzing Radical Orthodoxy’s rediscovery of the philosophical and theological principles of
participation and theosis as articulated in the patristic tradition and in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Using historical and analytical methods, this article will survey the biblical and patristic literature on
theosis, as well as John Milbank’s understanding of methexis and theosis in Thomas Aquinas. The result
of this study will be to offer theosis, rooted in participation in God, as not only a soteriological model to
reclaim for the West, but also a core metaphysical principle for Christian ethics that contravenes both
onto-theology and the materialistic reduction of ontology in secularism.

During the Patristic Period, there was a profusion of perspectives on the given task and relationship between Theology and Philosophy. From Justin Martyr’s (c. 100 – c. 165) famous affirmation that Socrates was a Christian before Christ, or better that Christ was at least partially known by the Logos Spermatikos before the Incarnation, to the candid declaration of Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220), “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does the Academy have to do with the Church?”, there were differing opinions about how much the Church should, in the opinion of St. Augustine, “despoil the Egyptians.” Many of the Church Fathers saw all truth as the truth of God, and the Hellenic philosophers and literary figures had “unlawful possession of it.” Philo, commenting on Plato’s Timaeus, even said that Moses anticipated Plato in his account of the creation of the world through intellect and matter and thus was not original.

In the apologetical maelstrom of Greek Hellenic thought with Christian theology, there emerged a perspective in which the insights of philosophy intersected the concerns of orthodox theology. More than just a “hand maiden,” philosophy was utilized in an essential way to give elocution to Christian metaphysics and truth. To present this union and distinction of philosophy and theology, I will discuss today the metaphysics of sixth and seventh century monk Maximus Confessor as a mature model of Christian theology intersecting Hellenic philosophy. We will first look at Maximus’ metaphysics of creation, then his Christology, and finally his ecclesiology. Maximus consistently uses a metaphysic of Neoplatonic participation in his theologizing on creation, Christ and the Church. In sum, Maximus’ philosophical theology weaves together philosophy and theology into an irreducible relationship that is still distinct because theology calls the Christian beyond the limits and boundaries of philosophic speculation.

Maximus the Confessor is a figure of renewed interest in recent times. His synthesizing of Cappadocian, Pseudo-Dionysian, and Evagrian theology was a tremendous achievement in Byzantine thought, and his cosmic metaphysics rooted in the Incarnation provides a framework for current discussions of ontology and Christology. This article will look at how Maximus uses cosmology and metaphysics to contemplate on the Church and its liturgy. Maximus' philosophical theology of the logos/logoi and the universal/particular will be analyzed within the context of the "Church Mystogogy", and the cosmic ramifications for humanity's mediatory role in this metaphysical drama will frame Maximus' ecclesiology. Next, Maximus' reflection upon the three levels of the contemplation of the Church symbolically as world, Scripture, and an individual human being will set the stage for the meaning of the liturgy. Using current research on the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus and the place of theurgy in the Divine Liturgy, this article will argue that Maximus uses theurgy as well in his reflection upon the liturgy, but with a transition from magical initiation in Iamblichian sense to participatory worship in the acts of God in the doxalogical sense. The article will conclude with reflections upon Maximus' cosmic and theurgic mediation for the Church of England today.

“Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created…Was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning, or created, and had it a beginning?”

--Timaeus 28b

This introductory question spawns a whole dialogue devoted to the creation of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus. Causality and purpose, not in the modern logical sense, underpins one of Plato’s final accounts of cosmology in his dialogues. Many readers of Plato find it unusual that Plato would develop a teleologically theistic cosmology when, as Aristotle remarks in his Metaphysics, Socrates was more concerned about ethics. Knowledge and truth underlies Plato’s view of the world in his famous doctrine of the forms or ideas, and these are mirrored in the material world of becoming to be discovered through dialectic. Plato attempted to grasp the metaphysical through many different avenues and theology was one of them. Theology in Plato’s dialogues generates a lot criticism from modern interpreters, and non more so than the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus. The goal of this paper is to present and analyze Plato’s presentation of the creator of the universe or the Demiurge in his dialogue the Timaeus and then argue for his transcendence. Our first focus will be the rudiments of Plato’s cosmology as offered in the Timaeus, then the creator Demiurge itself, and conclude with some comparisons from other dialogues as well as some reflections.

‘What I am saying is that in the beginning sin seduced Adam and persuaded him to transgress God's commandment, whereby sin gave rise to pleasure and, by means of this pleasure, nailed itself in Adam to the very depths of our nature, thus condemning our whole human nature to death and, via humanity, pressing the nature of (all) created beings toward mortal extinction.’


To a Western theologian, such a quote by Maximus Confessor, a sixth and seventh century Byzantine theologian, may be very surprising. There have sometimes been coarse characterizations of the Christian East by the West—such as Adolf von Harnack—that sinfulness and fallenness, in particular ‘original sin,’ are not a part of its theological anthropology, but this type of claim is narrow in perspective and should be reduced to an ignoratio elenchi. According to the Eastern Christian tradition, which prefers the phrase ‘ancestral sin’ over ‘original sin,’ human fallenness is situated within the greater narrative of creation, incarnation, resurrection, and cosmic recapitulation and divinization. Sin and the Fall are a part of the human condition, but they are not a part of the human makeup as an essential quality; nor are they the final chapter of the cosmic story. Humanity also does not stand guilty of Adam's sin as one massa damnata; as Jean-Claude Larchet notes, ‘only the consequences of Adam's sin on nature are transmitted, which are essentially more or less radically.’ Guilt, or culpability, is not something transmitted from generation to generation through our fallen nature—as in the Augustinian tradition—but instead what is considered ‘inherited’ is the subjugation to death and passibility. In the Greek Patristic tradition, it is the fear of death and it's avoidance that is generally seen as instigating the false use of the passions, by which sin enters into the life of every human being.

Abstract. This article uses the writings of Alfred Schutz as catalysts to analyze three dis-tinctive modes of transcendences operative in human experience. Particular attention is given to the role symbolic awareness plays in the formation and embodiment of moral value. I ar-gue ...