PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

THE HUMANITY OF CHRIST IN THE THEOLOGY OF

CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA AND MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR

SUBMITTED TO PROFESSOR BRUCE L. MCCORMACK IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF IS001 – CHRISTOLOGY AFTER CHALCEDON

BY DAVID W. CONGDON NOVEMBER 18, 2007

Congdon 1

1. Introduction

The modern debate1 over whether Christ assumed a fallen human nature has again become a heated controversy in the last several years.2 While most of the new participants in the debate have sought a kind of via media between a simplistic “unfallen”-vs.-“fallen” dichotomy,3 Oliver Crisp stands out as a vigorous opponent of the “fallenness” position. In his recent book, Crisp argues against a fallen human nature on the following grounds: (1) Jesus would be sinful by virtue of sharing in original sin (i.e., original guilt); (2) even without sharing in original sin, Jesus would be liable to damnation by virtue of sharing in original corruption; (3) it is “metaphysically impossible for the impeccable divine nature of the Word to be joined in hypostatic union with a fallen human nature”; and (4) holding to the “fallenness” account requires jettisoning the Chalcedonian definition and adopting a version of Nestorianism.4 The first two assertions concern the doctrine of original sin, and they rest upon his assumption that “classical” theology is identifiable with “Augustinian” theology, which he calls the “majority report in the Christian tradition.”5 The third and fourth assertions are grounded in his scholastic understanding of the incarnation and presuppose what

1 The modern debate goes back to the controversial arguments of Edward Irving and Thomas Erskine of Linlathen in favor of the fallenness position. See Edward Irving, The Collected Writings of Edward Irving, ed. G. Carlyle, vol. 5 (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865) and Thomas Erskine, The Brazen Serpent, or Life Coming Through Death (Edinburgh, 1831). Irving’s position later received a more persuasive presentation in the work of Karl Barth and, more recently, T. F. Torrance and J. B. Torrance. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 volumes in 13 parts, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1956-75), I/2, 147-59; II/1, 397-8; James B. Torrance, “The vicarious humanity of Christ,” in T. F. Torrance, ed., The Incarnation (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1981), 141. 2 See Kelly M. Kapic, “The Son’s Assumption of a Human Nature: A Call for Clarity,” IJST 3:2 (2001), 154-66; Oliver Crisp, “Did Christ have a Fallen Human Nature?” IJST 6:3 (2004), 270-88; W. Ross Hastings, “‘Honoring the Spirit’: Analysis and Evaluation of Jonathan Edwards’ Pneumatological Doctrine of the Incarnation,” IJST 7:3 (2005), 279-99; R. Michael Allen, “Calvin’s Christ: A Dogmatic Matrix for Discussion of Christ’s Human Nature,” IJST 9:4 (2007), 382-97. For a Catholic argument for the fallenness of Christ’s humanity, see Thomas Weinandy, In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993). 3 Kapic lays out the basic arguments on both sides in order to clarify the debate. He argues that the standard accusation against the fallenness position—viz. that Jesus is thus a sinner—is “a mistaken charge,” but one that has a strong basis in the Protestant tradition (160). R. Michael Allen expands upon and corrects Kapic’s brief treatment of Calvin and argues that Calvin’s doctrine of original sin and his understanding of the relation between the two natures of Christ leaves ample room open for the “fallenness” position, though Calvin himself sticks with the traditional account of Christ’s impeccability. Neither Kapic nor Allen attempts to offer his own view on the matter, but rather each clears a little more ground for the fallenness position. Allen, in particular, critiques Crisp’s appeal to Reformed orthodoxy by demonstrating that Calvin does not fit within this scholastic tradition. 4 Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111-13. 5 Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 95n10. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 2

Marilyn McCord Adams, in her study of medieval christology, calls the metaphysical “size-gap” between God and creatures.6 With these four christological claims, Crisp seeks to place himself within a long theological tradition that denies the possibility of God assuming a fallen human nature in Jesus Christ.

In this paper, I challenge Crisp’s argument on two grounds: (1) while he may represent one important tradition within the church, Crisp’s position is thoroughly “Western” and “scholastic” in character and thus neglects the contributions of the Greek fathers; and (2) his position on the human nature of Christ is metaphysically, rather than systematically, driven,7 and therefore unlike the doctors of the church, Crisp articulates his christology in isolation from soteriology. Both of these criticisms apply to almost everyone in the current debate over the fallenness of Christ’s humanity, but they are especially relevant to Crisp. In this paper, I place his “reconsideration” of the incarnation in conversation with the soteriologically determined christology of Cyril of Alexandria and Maximus the Confessor for the purpose of highlighting the relevant contribution of patristic theology to contemporary christological debates. Whereas Crisp engages in a “metaphysics of the incarnation,”8 Cyril and Maximus always ground their doctrines of Christ’s person in his saving work: Cyril posits an incarnational soteriology in which the human flesh is the instrumental medium for the presence of divine life, while Maximus posits a recapitulational soteriology which grounds redemption in the human obedience of Christ. I conclude by offering some brief reflections on the future of the debate over the fallenness of Christ’s humanity.

2. Cyril of Alexandria: Jesus Christ as the presence of divine life

6 Marilyn McCord Adams, What Sort of Human Nature? Medieval Philosophy and the Systematics of Christology, The Aquinas Lecture 1999 (Milwaukee: Marquette, 1999), 11. 7 I have adopted the language of “systematically driven” from Adams, whose thesis I wish to apply here to Cyril and Maximus: “My hypothesis in this paper is that conclusions about Christ’s human nature are systematically driven, and vary principally with a theologian’s estimates of the purposes and proprieties of the Incarnation on the one hand and of the multiple and contrasting job-descriptions for Christ’s saving work on the other” (9). 8 Ibid., 69. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 3

Cyril of Alexandria is well known for his involvement in the fifth century christological controversies that resulted in the Council of Ephesus and the Council of Chalcedon. He has been both praised and criticized for his (in)famous slogan, “one incarnate nature of the Logos.” The champion of Chalcedonian orthodoxy to some, to others he is the progenitor of the monophysites.

While these broader debates will be left to others, here I will examine Cyril’s understanding of

Christ’s human nature in light of his soteriological presuppositions. As John McGuckin notes,

Cyril’s christology is “fundamentally about soteriology and worship”; his doctrine of Christ’s unified person serves his understanding of Christ’s redemptive work.9 Cyril’s single subject christology leads him to conceive of Christ’s humanity as the medium or “economic instrument” through which God gives Godself to humanity, thus deifying humanity in the “dynamic soteriological event” of the incarnation.10

2.1. The Economy of Grace. Cyril’s soteriology—and thus his christology—is grounded in the patristic axiom formulated most famously by Athanasius: “The Son of God was made man that we might be made God.”11 Deification (theopoeisis) and incarnation are intimately linked in Cyril’s theology: the kenosis12 of the Son is the actualization of humanity’s plerosis.13 The event of

9 John McGuckin, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 175. 10 Ibid., 184, 195. 11 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, ¶54 in Edward R. Hardy, ed., Christology of the Later Fathers (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1954), 107. 12 The doctrine of kenosis has a complicated theological history. In Protestant orthodoxy, the debate over the doctrine of kenosis concerned whether the Logos divested himself of certain divine attributes in becoming a human person in Jesus and, if so, which attributes and how. Cyril’s doctrine of kenosis, however, has nothing to do with a limitation of divinity and everything to do with the addition of humanity. In other words, it is a kenosis not by subtraction but by addition. God does not give up or limit any divine attributes; rather, God takes on the humility of human flesh. Cyril makes this especially clear in his Scholia on the Incarnation, where he comments at length on Philippians 2:6-11: “Since [God the Word] was fullness, as God, this was why he was emptied out for the sake of our likeness. He was humbled on account of the flesh, but even so he did not descend from the height of divine majesty for he kept his lofty throne. . . . He is one, therefore, who was true God before the incarnation, and even in the manhood remained what he was, and is, and shall be” (¶12-13 in McGuckin, 305, 307). On the doctrine of kenosis, see Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Christology as a Resource for a Reformed Version of Kenoticism,” IJST 8:3 (2006), 243-51. McCormack argues for a Reformed version of kenosis “by addition and not by subtraction” (248). A Cyrillian doctrine of kenosis would also be by addition, but unlike the eternal kenosis of the Son posited by Barth, Cyril locates the kenosis of the Logos only in the economy of the incarnation. Paul Gavrilyuk rightly describes Cyril’s doctrine of kenosis as a doctrine of divine appropriation: “Kenosis, for Cyril, was ἰδιοποιήσις and οἰκείωσις, God’s appropriation Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 4 deification is grounded in the union of the two natures in the incarnation; God’s assumption of flesh is the occasion for humanity’s redemption, according to Cyril. Donald Fairbairn identifies the central element in Cyril’s doctrine of deification as God’s giving of Godself to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ.14 For Cyril, grace is not the giving of some substance or power; rather, it is

God’s own self. In his commentary on John 1:14, Cyril writes:

He descended into bondage, not thereby giving anything to himself, but graciously giving himself to us, so that we through his poverty might become rich [2 Cor. 8:9], and by soaring up through likeness to him into his own proper and remarkable good, we might be made gods and children of God through faith. For he who is by nature Son and God dwelt among us, and as a result, in his Spirit we cry, Abba, Father [Rom. 8:15].15

Grace is Christ, and thus charitology is christology.16 The incarnation is the event of grace, in that the Logos enfleshes himself in order to effect humanity’s restoration. The Christ-event is a narrative of God’s descent and humanity’s ascent, God’s self-emptying and humanity’s redemption and adoption as children—what the tradition calls the admirabile commercium. Cyril calls this

“wonderful exchange” the “economy”17 of the incarnation: God becomes poor in order that humanity might become rich; God assumes the poverty of human flesh so that humanity might partake of the immortality and holiness of God’s being in the incarnate Word.

Within this christological economy, Cyril sharply distinguishes between divinity and humanity. Humanity is defined by poverty and emptiness, divinity by fullness and richness of life.

Human nature is mortal, mutable, passible, and corrupt—the “form of a slave,” according to the

of human characteristics” (162). See Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 151-67. 13 John 1:16 is a central text in Cyril’s soteriology: “From his fullness ( τοῦ πληρώµατος αὐτοῦ) we have all received, grace upon grace.” 14 Donald Fairbairn, Grace and Christology in the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John 1.9 (c. 425 CE), quoted in Fairbairn, 69. 16 I owe this insight to Fairbairn, whose study seeks to illuminate the dogmatic relation between grace and christology in the theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cyril, and John Cassian. 17 Cf. McGuckin, 184: “the word [‘economy’] means a ‘working-out’ and carries the pregnant soteriological connotation of the deification of human nature, by virtue of the divine presence within it.” Because Cyril defines the economy in terms of the “wonderful exchange,” I use the term “economic exchange” to highlight the kenotic-plerotic movement in the event of the incarnation. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 5

Christ-hymn in Philippians; the divine nature is immortal, immutable, impassible, and incorruptible.

While Christ, according to Cyril, is one hypostasis “out of two natures” (ἐκ δύο φύσεων),18 Cyril never wavers from his conviction that divinity remains divine and humanity remains human—not only in Christ but also in those who are deified by grace. That is, the Son’s kenosis implies no change in his divinity but rather the assumption of human flesh,19 and humanity’s deification implies no change into the divine nature of the Godhead but rather participation in the divine life:

“It would be just as foolish an idea to talk of the body being transformed into the nature of Godhead as it would to say the Word was transformed into the nature of flesh.”20

In addition, Cyril differentiates in the economy between what is “by nature” and what is “by grace.” The incarnate Word is “God by nature”21 and “Life by nature”22 who economically assumes human nature, while deified human beings are humans by nature who become “gods by grace.”23

Cyril can even say that those who are anointed as believers “may rightly be Christs,” while

18 The emphasis on “out of two natures” was later viewed as the basis for the monophysite heresy, especially in light of Cyril’s ambiguous phrase: “one incarnate nature of God the Logos.” For the sake of clarity, Chalcedon dropped Cyril’s “out of two natures” in favor of “in two natures” (ἐν δύο φύσεων). There are, however, no shortage of passages in Cyril’s writings which demonstrate his concern to properly differentiate between the two natures of Christ. By speaking of “one incarnate nature,” Cyril refers to what later became known as the hypostasis. In the eighth anathema against the so-called “Three Chapters,” the Second Council of Constantinople (553) makes this interpretation orthodox by anathematizing anyone who does not interpret “one incarnate nature” as “one incarnate hypostasis (in two natures).” Cf. John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 35. One must also remember that Cyril was battling Nestorianism, and so he emphasizes the personal unity of Christ; Chalcedon was battling monophysitism, and so it emphasizes the distinction between the natures. 19 Cf. Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter of Cyril to Nestorius (430 CE), ¶3; McGuckin, 268: “even when [God the Word] came as man in the assumption of flesh and blood even so he remained what he was, that is God in nature and in truth. We do not say that the flesh was changed into the nature of Godhead, nor indeed that the ineffable nature of God the Word was converted into the nature of flesh, for he is entirely unchangeable and immutable . . . . Even when he is seen as a baby in swaddling bands still at the breast of the virgin who bore him, even so as God he filled the whole creation and was enthroned with his Father, because deity is without quantity or size and accepts no limitations.” Here we see the basis for what later became known in Protestant orthodoxy as the extra Calvinisticum. As David Willis argues, the doctrine that the divine nature of Christ existed etiam extra carnem (“even beyond the flesh”) extends throughout patristic theology and is certainly not limited to Calvin. According to Willis, the doctrine would be more aptly titled the “extra Catholicum.” See E. David Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-Called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). 20 Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus (c. 434-38 CE), ¶10; McGuckin, 357. Cyril goes on to say, “It is not possible that any creature could be converted into the essence or nature of Godhead.” 21 Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Succensus (c. 438), ¶2; McGuckin, 360. 22 Cyril of Alexandria, Letter to the Monks of Egypt (c. 429), ¶23; McGuckin, 259. 23 Letter to the Monks of Egypt, ¶11; McGuckin, 251. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 6

“Emmanuel is the only Christ who is true God.”24 The fact that the incarnate Word is “true God” is essential for Cyril, because God alone can rectify the human condition through the economy of grace.25 In other words, only the one who is “God by nature” can then make others “gods by grace”:

“He is not made God in the way that others are ‘by grace’, rather he is true God revealed for our sake in human form.”26 The nature-grace distinction thus preserves the soteriologically essential difference between divinity and humanity within the economic exchange.

Regardless of how indebted Cyril is to a presupposed metaphysical framework, the divine- human distinction serves his christologically grounded soteriology. Cyril’s basic affirmation is that humanity is redeemed by the presence of divine life among us. In other words, salvation occurs in and through God alone—in and through the incarnate Word who is “God by nature.” The sharp distinction between divinity and humanity in the economy of grace and the true union (ἕνωσις27) of both natures in the “one incarnate nature of the Word” preserves the salvific quality of the Son’s incarnation. If there were any mixing of the two natures, then Christ would not be truly God in the flesh and humanity would not be assumed; if any division between the two natures, then God would not be truly present among us in Jesus Christ. In light of this proto-Chalcedonian distinction,28 the human nature of Christ has no independent identity apart from the Logos; that is, the human nature has no subjectivity apart from the divine Word who assumes it as his very own. When assumed by the Logos, humanity does not exist alongside the Word, but instead becomes “en-hypostasized” as the humanity of the Word. The humanity of Christ becomes the unique “economic instrument” of

24 Ibid., 250-51. 25 Cf. Commentary on John, 5.5; Fairbairn, 72: “one cannot be master of the power of freeing others if he . . . received [freedom] from another.” 26 Letter to the Monks of Egypt, ¶18; McGuckin, 255; emphasis added. 27 Cyril used this term against Nestorius’s use of the word συνάφεια (conjunction). 28 I agree with McGuckin that the Chalcedonian Definition is thoroughly Cyrillian: three out of the four terms in the Chalcedonian Definition derive from Cyril’s writings. See Cyril’s First Letter to Succensus, ¶6; McGuckin, 354: “And so, we unite the Word of God the Father to the holy flesh endowed with a rational soul, in an ineffable way that transcends understanding, without confusion, without change, and without alteration.” Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 7

God’s redemptive presence in the unified person of the incarnate Word.29

2.2. Incarnation and the Humanity of Christ. While Cyril focuses on the cross more than most patristic theologians,30 his christology is rooted in the incarnation. The economic exchange occurs in the event of God’s assumption of human flesh,31 while the cross and resurrection of Christ are the necessary outworking of this original divine act. The incarnation finds its fulfillment in the crucifixion, and the crucifixion would not be salvific apart from the incarnation. In stressing the importance of both events, Cyril is in line with the whole of the Christian tradition, but he orders his doctrine of the atonement such that the stress falls on the incarnation. This priority follows from three christological presuppositions: (1) that “the Son of God was made man that we might be made

God,” (2) that the deification of humanity only occurs when the assumed flesh is made God’s own—i.e., made life-giving, and (3) that this making-flesh-his-own occurs in the incarnation.

Cyril’s single subject christology and economic soteriology results in an interpretation of the incarnation as the event of salvation, in which Christ’s humanity is sharply differentiated from humanity in general. Cyril repeatedly speaks of the human nature of Christ as “his own flesh,” in distinction from human flesh in general.32 He emphasizes this because only the Godhead is life-

29 This is the Apollinarian tendency within Cyril’s theology, that is, the tendency to make the human nature “something to be acted upon by the Logos.” See Bruce McCormack, “The Ontological Presuppositions of Barth’s Doctrine of the Atonement,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical & Practical Perspectives, eds. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James, III (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 355. Hans Urs von Balthasar sees the tendency of the logos-sarx model to reduce the human nature of Christ to an “instrument of flesh” to be “the most dangerous tendency of patristic Christology,” one which “was not really abandoned by Cyril.” See Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 228. 30 As J. N. D. Kelly argues, Cyril focuses a significant amount of attention on the saving death of Christ. See Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York: Harper, 1960), 397-99. Cf. Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius (¶6; McGuckin, 270): “He surrendered his own body to death even though by nature he is life and . . . trampled upon death with unspeakable power [in the Resurrection] so that he might . . . lead the way for human nature to return to incorruptibility.” 31 In this, Cyril follows the theology of Gregory Nazianzen, who writes in Letter 101 to Cledonius: “for God is made man, and man is made god.” In a footnote after this statement, McGuckin writes: “The incarnation of God is the deification of man; in particular in Christ, but by implication generically for the race; thus incarnational theology, for Gregory, is soteriological throughout” (392). The same can be said for Cyril. 32 Making the flesh his own is a distinct form of deification. The human nature of Christ is not deified by grace in the incarnation, because deification by grace is how other human beings are brought into communion with God. If this were the case for Christ’s human nature, then Jesus Christ would not be unique in relation to those who are “Christs” by grace. Moreover, only one who is “God by nature,” rather than “by grace,” can communicate the divine life to others. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 8 giving, and thus the incarnate Word can only give life to the world through the flesh if the assumed humanity is truly joined to the Word. According to Fairbairn, the Logos gives himself to his own humanity, thus bringing humanity into a “natural union” and “natural sonship” with God within the incarnate Word.33 Cyril explains his position in his First Letter to Succensus:

[I]t was necessary that the Word of God should be incarnated for the salvation of us who are on this earth. This was so he could make his own that human flesh which was subject to corruption and sick with its desires, and destroy corruption within it since he is Life and Life-giver, bringing its innate sensual impulses to order. This was how the sin that lay within it was to be put to death . . . . From the time that human flesh became the personal flesh of the Word it has ceased to be subject to corruption, and since he who dwelt within it, and revealed it as his very own, knew no sin being God, as I have already said, it has also ceased to be sick with its desires.34

A few things are worth noting from this passage. First, Cyril makes it clear that we are saved by the divine life that dwells with us in the flesh. We are not saved primarily by anything that God does in the flesh, but rather by the fact that it is God in the flesh. Second, human flesh in its natural sinful condition—“subject to corruption and sick with its desires”—is incapable of being the medium for

God’s divine presence. A fallen human nature only obstructs the redemptive presence of the divine

Logos, and thus God must make the flesh “transparent” to the divine life by destroying its corruption. Third, God accomplishes this transformation of human nature in the incarnation, in which “human flesh became the personal flesh of the Word.” In the process of personalizing—i.e., deifying—the flesh, the Logos “appropriates all that belongs to [human nature] while introducing to it the power of his own nature.”35 As a result of the economy of the incarnation, in which the Word

For Cyril, the human nature of Christ is not transformed into the Godhead—this would undermine the divine-human distinction—but rather it is brought into a “natural union” or a “true union” with the Logos (Cyril’s “Third Anathema”; see McGuckin, 273, 285-86). We could say that it is deified by (hypostatic) union, rather than deified by grace. 33 Fairbairn, 100-01. Fairbairn discusses the important Cyrillian distinction between “two modes of sonship, natural (φυσικῶς) and by grace (κατὰ χάριν)” (100). The humanity joined to the Logos is adopted into a “natural sonship,” while humanity in general is adopted in a “sonship by grace.” This distinction follows from the fact that the subject of Jesus Christ is the eternal Logos, and therefore the humanity joined in hypostatic union to the Logos bears a unique relation to God which is not shared by any other human being. 34 First Letter to Succensus, ¶9; McGuckin, 356. 35 Scholia on the Incarnation, ¶9; McGuckin, 302. Cyril’s statement is an early version of “nature-perichoresis,” or what later came to be known as the communicatio idiomatum. By “nature-perichoresis”—as opposed to the “person- Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 9 shares “the power of his own nature” with humanity, the human flesh which is naturally destitute is now replete with God’s life: “We maintain, therefore, that Christ’s body is divine in so far as it is the body of God, adorned with unspeakable glory, incorruptible, holy, and life-giving.”36

Cyril’s soteriology requires the humanity of Christ to be unfallen in order to bring life to others. In the epigraph to his chapter arguing against the fallenness view, Crisp quotes Cyril from his book On the Unity of Christ: “To condemn sin does not belong to someone with a nature like ours, under the tyranny of sin, an ordinary man.”37 The full context of this quote is illuminating:

For how could his body possibly give life to us if it were not the very own body of him who is Life? And how could it be that the “blood of Jesus cleanses use from all sin” (1 Jn 1:7) if it was in reality only that of an ordinary man subject to sin? . . . To condemn sin does not belong to someone with a nature like ours, under the tyranny of sin, an ordinary man. But insofar as it became the body of the one who knew no transgression, how rightly it could shake off the tyranny of sin to enjoy all the personal riches of the Word who is ineffably united with it in a manner beyond all description. Thus it is a holy and life giving thing, full of divine energy. And we too are transformed in Christ, the first-fruits, to be above corruption and sin.38

Cyril’s christology is clearly funded by his soteriology: How can Christ give life if he has a body of death, and how can he free from sin if his body is still under the condemnation of the flesh? In response to this dilemma, Cyril posits an incarnational christology in which the Logos brings human nature into union with himself, makes our nature his own by sharing his own holiness and life—i.e., himself—with it, lives a life of holiness and “obedience unto death” in the flesh, and then by grace gives this holiness and life to us through the Holy Spirit.

But is it really true that Cyril rejects the fallenness account? Is Crisp right to quote Cyril at

perichoresis” among the persons in the Trinity—I refer to the mutual indwelling of each nature in the other, such that the flesh participates in the Logos (so that we can attribute suffering and death to the divine Word) and the Logos participates in the flesh (so that we can attribute the life-giving glory of God to the flesh). While Cyril does not use the term “perichoresis” in his writings, he employs the basic concept, taken from Gregory Nazianzen: “the names [or properties of the natures] being mingled like the natures, and flowing into one another, according to the law of their intimate union” (Letter 101; Hardy, 218). Cf. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 3f. 36 First Letter to Succensus, ¶10; McGuckin, 357. Emphasis added. 37 Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 90. 38 Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John A. McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 60-61. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 10 the start of his chapter in favor of the unfallen position? Answering this question depends on whether we see Cyril’s christology in light of his incarnational soteriology. Certainly, if we focus on the redemption accomplished by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we encounter a humanity that is unfallen and without corruption, holy and life-giving.39 But if we focus on the humanity originally assumed by the Logos in the event of the incarnation, Cyril makes it clear that this humanity is indeed fallen and corrupt. He says that this nature is “subject to corruption,” “under the tyranny of sin,” and “sick with its desires.” Yet the moment this nature is joined to the Logos it becomes “a holy and life giving thing, full of divine energy.” Cyril thus remains faithful to the axiom of Gregory Nazianzen: “that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved.”40 God can deify humanity by grace because God has first deified human nature in the hypostatic union of flesh with the Word.41

By first locating deification in the hypostatic union, Cyril undercuts Crisp’s first two arguments against the fallenness account which were based on the “traditional” doctrine of original sin: Christ does not sin because his life is governed by the holiness of the Word. The third and fourth arguments—that divinity cannot be united with fallen humanity without Nestorianism—are

(1) affirmed in that divinity cannot remain united with fallen humanity, but (2) nullified in that

39 Weinandy obscures this point in trying to make the argument that the church fathers, including Cyril, supported the view that Christ shared in our corrupted human nature. He writes that “the Word took on the reality of our humanity blemished by sin” (34), but he does not make clear the soteriological significance of the union which destroys the corruption of the flesh in order to make it life-giving. 40 Letter 101; Hardy, 218; McGuckin, 393. 41 Cyril’s doctrine of the incarnation as a redemptive event results in a soteriology that is almost indistinguishable from Osiander’s doctrine of “essential righteousness.” In Book III of his Institutes, Calvin rejects Osiander’s soteriology because it locates salvation in the righteousness of Christ’s divine nature (3.11.8). Calvin strongly opposes the notion that “we are made partakers in God’s righteousness when God is united to us in essence” (3.11.5), which is to say, that we are made righteous by our participation in the divine nature. But this is precisely Cyril’s view, and it follows quite naturally from the fact that redemption primarily comes from the divine life being united with human nature, and then only secondarily from what Christ himself accomplishes. Even then, it is not what Christ does in the flesh which redeems but rather the fact that God has entered into every dimension of human existence, because it is the divine presence which alone restores our fallen condition. Calvin thinks that Osiander bypasses the role of the Mediator, but Cyril would answer this objection by arguing that the life and righteousness of the Godhead can only save by virtue of the flesh becoming the medium for God’s redemptive presence. Cyril differs from the Reformed tradition, therefore, in emphasizing the incarnation as the focal point of his christology. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 11 humanity’s corruption is destroyed in the union itself. Whereas the later scholastic tradition requires that human nature be “deiform” prior to hypostatic union, Cyril makes “deiformity” a product of the union.42 The event of the incarnation conforms human nature to the grace and glory of divinity, redeeming human fallenness in Christ for the sake of redeeming human fallenness universally. In other words, Cyril’s proto-Chalcedonism subverts any recourse to Nestorianism, and consequently he fits neither within the modern “fallenness” camp nor within the camp arguing for a strictly unfallen (i.e., deiform) human nature.

3. Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ as the New Adam

Because Cyril was battling Nestorianism in a pre-Chalcedon era, his theology occasionally emphasized unity at the expense of clear christological distinctions, most notably in the way he often used physis and hypostasis as synonyms (as in the “µία φύσις” formula). Maximus the

Confessor, on the other hand, faced different theological opponents in his post-Chalcedon era, and thus his theology is marked by an abundance of distinctions. The theological history of the post-

Chalcedonian period has been told many times, so a brief summary of the main points will suffice here.43 In short, Chalcedon left the church fragmented, with Cyril’s more radical supporters making the “µία φύσις” formula the centerpiece in their christology. Over the next two hundred years, the church faced three main christological positions: monophysitism (one nature), monenergism (one

42 Adams, 28ff. In her account of Bonaventure’s christology, Adams identifies “the cornerstone thesis of his spirituality: viz., that union with God presupposes deiformity,” and later specifies that this deiformity “is not posterior but prior in the order of explanation to hypostatic union” (28, 30). The human nature of Christ must be deiform in order to be united hypostatically to the divine Logos. Crisp follows this medieval presupposition regarding deiformity, since he (along with Bonaventure and others) assumes the metaphysical “size-gap” between divinity and humanity. Cyril can certainly be read as a progenitor of this later scholastic christology, but he clearly reasons from the deifying power of the divine nature which rectifies human fallenness in the incarnation rather than from any metaphysical “size-gap.” In this sense, Cyril is a not a proto-scholastic despite his own metaphysical assumptions; he is rather a truly evangelical theologian who begins from the actuality of the incarnation as the basis for our salvation. 43 The best summary in English can be found in the excellent study by Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), in particular, pp. 9-98. For a study of the monophysite movement after Chalcedon including translations, see Iain R. Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1988), esp. 1-14, 59-74. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 12 activity or energy), and monothelitism (one will). Each of the latter two positions was an attempt to restore unity to the church: monenergism through the Nine Chapters of Cyrus (633) and monothelitism through the Ecthesis of Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius (638). Maximus argues against all three heresies, but primarily engages in the debate over the “one will” of Christ.

In the end, it was his doctrine of dyothelitism which was finally declared orthodox at the Sixth

Ecumenical Council in 680-81, almost twenty years after his death, even though he is not mentioned in the council’s proceedings.44 Whereas Cyril’s christology is rooted in the incarnation as the economic event of human redemption, Maximus grounds deification in the entire scope of Christ’s incarnate existence as the recapitulation of humanity’s original fall.

3.1. Radicalizing Cyril and Chalcedon. Maximus appropriates and radicalizes the tradition in a way that defies easy categorization. Cyril was fond of speaking of Christ as “one incarnate nature” formed “out of two natures” (ἐκ δύο φύσεων), in order to emphasize the unity of Christ’s person. The Council of Chalcedon spoke instead of Christ as “one hypostasis in two natures” (ἐν

δύο φύσεων) in order to properly differentiate between person and nature. After Chalcedon, there was an anti-Chalcedonian response by loyal Cyrillians, many of whom leaned monophysite, whose creed was “there is no nature without a hypostasis.”45 The post-Chalcedonian response strengthened the opposition to Nestorianism by appealing to Cyril while retaining the distinction between person/hypostasis and nature/essence promulgated at Chalcedon. This response has been given the name “neo-Chalcedonism” or “Cyrilline Chalcedonism,” and its origin is traced to the writings of

John the Grammarian, Leontius of Jerusalem, and Leontius of Byzantium.46 The basic ecumenical- theological move involved using both the Cyrillian µία φύσις formula and the Chalcedonian δύο

44 Cf. Melchisedec Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84-86. 45 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 34. 46 Cf. ibid., 35f; Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, II.2, trans. John Cawte and Pauline Allen (London: Mowbray, 1995), 430; Balthasar, 208. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 13

φύσεις formula—“one to ward off Nestorianism, the other to exclude Eutychianism.”47 As

Bathrellos points out,48 Grillmeier employs a further distinction between “extreme” neo-

Chalcedonism and “moderate” neo-Chalcedonism, the former demanding “the simultaneous use of both formulae” and the latter supplementing Chalcedon’s terminology with certain Cyrillian concepts.49 In general, neo-Chalcedonism argued that Cyril and Chalcedon were two aspects of the same christology, and this view eventually received conciliar acceptance at the Fifth Ecumenical

Council in 552.

Maximus confirmed, deepened, and radicalized the post-Chalcedonian christology through use of a tripartite formula: “Christ is out of two natures, in two natures, and two natures.”50 He emphasizes the need to use the first two clauses simultaneously: the first to preserve the hypostatic union, and the second to preserve the distinction between the natures. Both are basic to orthodox

47 Grillmeier, 431. 48 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 36. 49 David Yeago’s account of neo-Chalcedonism does not make this further distinction between “extreme” and “moderate,” but he essentially identifies neo-Chalcedonism with what Grillmeier calls “extreme neo-Chalcedonism.” See David S. Yeago, “Jesus of Nazareth and Cosmic Redemption: The Relevance of St. Maximus the Confessor,” Modern Theology 12:2 (1996), 166-68. Yeago lists three characteristics of neo-Chalcedonian christology: (1) christology begins with the person of Jesus and then explicates the relation between the natures, rather than beginning with the natures and attempting to understand the person (the movement, in other words, is from actuality to possibility); (2) christology explicates “the logic of Christian claims about Jesus of Nazareth,” instead of forming a speculative account of the incarnate Son; and (3) the technical language used in neo-Chalcedonian theology is “formal- grammatical” in character, not the carrier of a presupposed ontology or metaphysical system. By identifying the terminology as “open-textured” rather than “heavily determined,” Yeago brings neo-Chalcedonism in line with Grillmeier’s “extreme neo-Chalcedonism,” which is characterized by an indifference to the “incompatibility of the conceptual systems” to which Cyril’s and Chalcedon’s formulae belong. Yeago’s overall point is that neo-Chalcedonian christology is governed by the actuality of the gospel, not by Hellenistic philosophy and metaphysical ontologies which predetermine the meaning of words like “nature” and “person.” Maximus, he says, “perfects” and epitomizes this evangelical neo-Chalcedonian theology. 50 Cf. Opusculum 6, Patrologia Graeca 91:68A (hereafter referred to as PG) in St Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 174: “[Jesus] admits of no opposition between [the two natures], even though he maintains all the while the difference between the two natures from which, in which, and which he is by nature” (emphasis added); hereafter Cosmic Mystery. Cf. Ambiguum 5; PG 91:1052D in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 175: “. . . from which and in which and which he is.” Bathrellos notes, contrary to most Maximian scholarship, and that of Pierre Piret in particular, that the tripartite formula was first used by Leontius of Byzantium, though Maximus popularized it and made it central to his christology in way that was not true before him (Byzantine Christ, 108). Cf. Pierre Piret, Le Christ et la Trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur, Théologie historique 69 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1983), 203-39; Aidan Nichols, Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993), 91-95. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 14 christology and neither is sufficient without the other.51 The addition of the third clause serves to prevent turning the person of the Logos into a tertium quid alongside the two natures.52 The tripartite formula precludes any “abstract”53 doctrine of the Logos by affirming that “Christ is not anything external or additional to his two natures.”54 Maximus therefore applies to christology an insight operative in his doctrine of the Trinity as well—viz. that the divine essence is not a quartum quid external to the three persons, turning the Trinity into a Quaternity.55 The person of Christ is nothing other than the natures of Christ. As Nicholas Madden and Demetrios Bathrellos both argue,

Maximus identifies the “who” (Christ as one person) with the “what(s)” (Christ as two natures), but he gives ontic priority to the former—i.e., to the hypostasis—following the Cyrillian emphasis on the unity of Christ’s incarnate person.56 Like Cyril, Maximus identifies the Logos with the divine nature of Christ, and thus the Logos remains the same subject before and after the incarnation. What changes is that the Logos assumes human flesh, so that the Logos “is identical with the human nature according to hypostasis,” though only identical with the divine nature according to nature.57

Maximus not only represents “extreme neo-Chalcedonism,” but he radicalizes the tradition in his creative expansion of neo-Chalcedonism beyond nature and into the controversies over energy and will in support of a recapitulational soteriology.

3.2. Adam and Christ—Original Sin and Recapitulation. In seeking to explicate how

Maximus understands Christ’s humanity in relation to human fallenness, we must explore his

51 Cf. Epistula 18, PG 91:588B; Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 113. 52 Crisp claims to avoid positing a tertium quid, but he provides no argumentation in his defense (22). 53 McCormack, “Ontological Presuppositions,” 355. 54 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 109. 55 See Ep. 15, PG 91:552A. 56 Nicholas Madden, “Composite Hypostasis in Maximus Confessor,” in Studia Patristica 27 (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), 184; Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 110. The ontic priority of the “who” over the “what” is related to Yeago’s argument that Maximus begins with the actuality of the one person rather than with metaphysical presuppositions about divinity and humanity. 57 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 111. Cyril makes this same distinction by differentiating between “according to nature” and “according to economy,” so that the Word who is “God by nature” is “God made man . . . on account of his economy in the flesh” (Explanation of the Twelve Chapters, ¶14; McGuckin, 287). Cyril also writes: “before the incarnation while he is without flesh he is the Word, and after the incarnation he is the self-same in the body” (Explanation, ¶8; McGuckin, 285). Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 15 unique doctrine of original sin.58 Maximus’ doctrine of original sin is part of a broader theological ontology rooted, as with all of his doctrines, in christology. According to Maximus, humanity was created in a state of impassibility without any physical pleasure or pain, designed by God only to experience “spiritual” pleasure, “whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably.”59

With the immediate use of his senses,60 however, Adam “squandered this spiritual capacity”61 and fell into sin, which is a fall into the dialectics of creaturely existence: pleasure and pain, knowledge and ignorance, body and soul, male and female, etc.62 The fall from human perfection is a fall into passibility, corruption, and death—a fall into mutability—marked especially by the introduction of the passions and a gnomic will (γνώµη) as the new mode of human existence and of sexual engendering as the new mode of human reproduction. According to Maximus, pain and death were instituted as God’s punishment for our desire and pursuit of sensible pleasure.63

Maximus’ doctrine of humanity’s fall into corruption results in a complex view of sin. Jean-

Claude Larchet locates the distinction between Eastern and Western doctrines of original sin in that the West connects guilt with the transmission of human corruption, while the East separates guilt

58 See the seminal study by Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 95-168. 59 Ad Thalassium 61, PG 90:628A; Cosmic Mystery, 131. See Jean-Claude Larchet, “Ancestral Guilt according to St Maximus the Confessor: a Bridge between Eastern and Western Conceptions,” Sobornost 20 (1998), 28. 60 Cf. Amb. 42, Ad Thal. 1, Ad Thal. 61; Cosmic Mystery, 85 (fn. 10), 97, 131. Maximus makes it clear that the fall occurred “at the instant [humanity] was created,” probably in order to answer the question as to why Adam fell if he enjoyed perfect communion with God for any length of time in the garden. Maximus makes the Eden narrative logically but not historically necessary as a way of differentiating between true humanity and fallen humanity, a distinction which is integral to his christology and soteriology. Cf. John Boojamra, “Original Sin According to St. Maximus the Confessor,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 20 (1976), 22. 61 Ad Thal. 61, PG 90:628A-B; Cosmic Mystery, 131. 62 Maximus identifies five basic divisions in Amb. 41 (PG 91:1304D-1305B; Louth, 156-57), each of which are then elements of Christ’s work of mediation and recapitulation: (1) between God and creation, (2) between intelligible and sensible creation, (3) between heaven and earth, (4) between paradise and inhabited earth, and (5) between male and female. Thunberg organizes his study of Maximus around these five distinctions in Microcosm and Mediator, 142-43, 331-432. Joseph Farrell speaks about the fall as a “fall into the dialectic of oppositions,” in which each of the five distinctions “are rendered by man as oppositions, which begin to tear apart from each other and to introduce death.” See Joseph Farrell, The Disputation with Pyrrhus of our Father Among the Saints Maximus the Confessor (South Canaan, PA: St Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1990), xviii. 63 Ad Thal. 61, PG 90:628B; Cosmic Mystery, 132. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 16 from corruption so that only the latter is transmitted.64 Along these lines, Maximus himself explicitly distinguishes between “two sins”:

The first sin, culpable indeed, was the fall of free choice from good into evil; the second, following upon the first, was the innocent transformation of human nature from incorruption into corruption. For our forefather Adam committed two “sins” by his transgression of God’s commandment: the first “sin” was culpable, when his free choice willfully rejected the good; but the second “sin,” occasioned by the first, was innocent, since human nature unwillingly put off its incorruption.65

Because Maximus identifies human mortality as a kind of sinfulness, Maximus must make this distinction between “culpable” and “innocent” sin or else the Logos would be guilty of sin in becoming incarnate. Larchet goes on to identify three different notions of sin in Maximus’ theology:

(1) sin as mortal human nature (inclusive of passibility and corruptibility), (2) sin as personal act

(resulting in guilt), and (3) sin as the “tendency to sin” resulting from the gnomic will inherited at birth.66 In short, Maximus distinguishes between sin as nature, act, and will.67

The underlying logic in Maximus’ doctrine of sin is christological: Christ was “made sin” for our sake (2 Cor. 5:21) and yet was “without sin” (Heb. 4:15). In his fidelity to Scripture,

Maximus seeks to uphold a recapitulational soteriology in which Christ fully assumes humanity and reverses Adam’s original sin while retaining the doctrine of Christ’s sinlessness and impeccability.

The doctrine of recapitulation is generally attributed to Irenaeus who turned Paul’s Adam-Christ typology into the centerpiece of his soteriology in Against Heresies.68 Maximus develops a similar doctrine of recapitulation, but in reaction to Origen’s doctrine of apokatastasis and the preexistence

64 Larchet, 26-27. 65 Ad Thal. 42, PG 90:405C; Cosmic Mystery, 119. 66 The second and third types of sin form the actual and potential dimensions of human guilt; the gnomic will is the potential to commit sin in distinction from the actualization of this will in a particular sinful act. The point is that while a person with a gnomic will is certainly peccable, she is not guilty. The corrupted nature and the sinful will are both inherited, but since guilt is not inherited, it must be differentiated from the other two forms as the consequence of a particular historical act by a particular person. 67 Larchet, 37. 68 Against Heresies, III.18.7: “He passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God . . . For it behoved Him who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man . . . . For as by the disobedience of the one man who was originally moulded from virgin soil, the many were made sinners, and forfeited life; so was it necessary that, by the obedience of one man, who was originally born from a virgin, many should be justified and receive salvation.” Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 17 of souls. Maximus qualifies apokatastasis as a three-fold restoration inclusive of human freedom69 while rejecting the doctrine of the soul’s preexistence in favor of distinctions between Logos-logoi70 and logos-tropos.71 Maximus uses these distinctions to affirm both (1) that all creation is ontologically united in the eternal Logos and (2) that there remains an ontological distinction between the Logos and the individual modes of existence (τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως). The term logos is functionally equivalent to the term ousia, while tropos is functionally equivalent to hypostasis.

Maximus thus speaks of the Trinity as one logos of essence in three tropoi of existence.72 Similarly,

Jesus Christ is two logoi in one tropos. The logoi of essence (λόγοι τῆς φύσεως) refer to the eternal principles or ideas which constitute all created existence. All of the logoi subsist eternally in the being of the Logos, but they do not exist as created beings until they take on their distinct modes

(tropoi) of existence.73 Because the Fall occurs on the level of tropos rather than logos, the principle of human nature remains pure while the concrete tropos of post-lapsum humanity is marked by corruption. While the logoi all subsist in the Logos, the Logos must take on the tropos of existence

69 See Quaestiones et Dubia 13, PG 90:796A-C: “τρεἴς ἀποκαταστάσεις οἶδαν ἡ Ἐκκλησία.” Cf. Balthasar, 354f.; Farrell, xxviii-xxxii. Maximus differentiates between three apokatastases: (1) an apokatastasis of each individual through the fulfillment of virtue, that is, the recapitulation of Christ’s perfect virtue in oneself; (2) an apokatastasis of all human nature in the resurrection; and (3) an apokatastasis of the soul’s powers which have fallen into corruption. Maximus does not reject the restoration of all things in the Logos, but he qualifies it by focusing on the importance of human free will and the participation of each person in the virtues and sacraments of the Church. He says that God “loves all people equally” (Centuries on Love 1:61) but he also talks frequently of hell (cf. Mystagogia 14); see Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George Berthold (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 41, 201; hereafter Selected Writings. The restoration of all is not entirely resolved into the person of Christ, and so Maximus speaks of the need to honor the eschatological hope of creation “by silence.” See Brian Daley, “Apokatastasis and ‘Honorable Silence’ in the Eschatology of Maximus the Confessor,” in Maximus Confessor, ed. Felix Heinzer and Christoph Schönborn (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1982); Hunsinger, 242-43. 70 See Torstein Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor: A Study of his Metaphysical Principles (Oslo: Unipub forlag, 2000), 86-118. 71 The best analysis of the logos-tropos distinction is in Felix Heinzer, Gottes Sohn als Mensch: Die Struktur des Menschseins Christi bei Maximus Confessor, Paradosis 26 (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag, 1980), 29-145. Heinzer rightly connects this distinction to the Trinity as the ground for its use in christology, and argues for understanding “der innertrinitarische τρόπος τῆς ὑπάρξεως des Logos als prägender Grund des Menschseins Christi” (132). 72 Commentary on the Our Father; Selected Writings, 111: “God is truly Unity and Trinity: Unity according to the principle of essence and Trinity according to the mode of existence.” This way of defining the Trinity lends support to Karl Barth’s preferred definition of God as “one subject in three modes of being.” 73 Cf. Amb. 7, PG 91:1081B: “the one Logos is many logoi and the many logoi are One.” Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi existing in the Logos differs from Origen’s preexistence of souls because the logoi do not actually exist until they take on their concrete tropos of existence in history. Whereas Origen is indebted to a Neoplatonic trivialization of historical existence, Maximus affirms such existence and gives it meaning. Maximus is, in this sense, closer to Hegel than to some of his patristic forebears, a point not lost on Balthasar. Cf. Balthasar, 207; Boojamra, 20. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 18 in order to restore and deify human nature. Crucially, however, the Logos does not need to share in our fallen tropos in order to be truly human, since he shares in the logos of humanity.74 This distinction thus ensures that the recapitulation of all things is ontologically grounded in the Logos, who takes on a human mode of existence in order to restore the fallen tropos of humanity to its original and proper tropos.

In order to understand how Christ remains “without sin,” however, we need a further distinction between genesis (γένεσις) and birth (γέννησις).75 According to Maximus, humanity’s genesis refers to the primeval state of impassibility in which Adam was originally created—a state which, if not historical, is at least part of humanity’s original principle of essence. With Adam’s fall into passibility and death, however, humans are enslaved to a process of engendering by sexual intercourse. Maximus’ innovation is to argue that Jesus Christ shares in humanity’s original genesis by being born of a virgin,76 while freely and graciously assuming the consequences of Adam’s transgression. By participating in both γένεσις and γέννησις, the Logos restores the human condition “without selling out his freedom or compromising his sinlessness.”77 Through the impassibility of human genesis, the Logos lives obediently where Adam lived disobediently; through the passibility of human birth (and the entire history of life that follows), the Word restores humanity via recapitulation to its original impassibility. The Logos does not assume the tropos of fallen humanity simpliciter; rather, the Logos assumes passible human flesh in the tropos of the

“New Adam,” the one who is wholly obedient, whose human nature is truly human (that is, deified)

74 Cf. Ian A. McFarland, “‘Willing Is Not Choosing’: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology,” IJST 9:1 (2007), 11. 75 Cf. Larchet, 38. 76 Christ came from a virgin woman just as Adam came from virgin soil. In both cases, there is no natural passing on of transgression, and whereas Adam fell immediately, Christ remains pure and undefiled. But in order to redeem human nature, the Logos had to assume the human nature corrupted by Adam: “His birth from a woman within time was not preconditioned in any way by the pleasure derived from the transgression, but, in his love for humanity, he willingly appropriated the pain which is the end of human nature, the pain resulting from unrighteous pleasure” (Ad Thal. 61; Cosmic Mystery, 134). 77 Amb. 42, PG 91:1316D; Cosmic Mystery, 80. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 19 in its “impeccable passibility,” as opposed to the “peccable passibility” that marks humanity in general.78 In short, the Word assumes “fallen” human nature—in the sense of physical mutability— without being guilty of any actual sin or being corrupted by the fallen human will, in order to complete the full recapitulation of human existence.79

3.3. The Human Will of Christ. Much has been written about Maximus’ theological creativity in light of the monothelite controversy. His contribution here is to define the will as “the most proper and primary property of every rational nature,”80 as opposed to the property of a person or hypostasis. As a result, if Christ does not have a natural human will in addition to the divine will, then he is not truly human and “the economy would be a mere fantasy.”81 A dyothelite christology affirms that Christ shares both in the one divine will proper to the Trinity and in the natural will proper to humanity, without which he would “begrudge us the healing of our will, depriving us of complete salvation.”82

Complications arise, however, in identifying what kind of will Christ actually has. Over the course of his career, Maximus came to reject common terms for the will which he once used himself—especially γνώµη and προαίρεσις—in favor of a more biblical, and thus philosophically neutral, term: θέλησις/θέληµα. He accepts the general notion of the will as self-determining and conditioned by certain natural desires, such as for food, water, and life.83 But as a result of the monothelite controversy, he rejects γνώµη and προαίρεσις on the basis that they compromise

Christ’s impeccability. For Maximus, these terms presuppose deliberation between various

78 Larchet, 36; cf. Amb. 42, 1317A; Cosmic Mystery, 81: “For, in being formed as a human being, he condescended to . . . the creaturely origin of Adam prior to his fall . . . . [I]n his voluntary abasement, . . . he assumed the natural liability to passions but not sinfulness. He became the New Adam by assuming a sinless creaturely origin and yet submitting to a passible birth. . . . [H]e effectively rectified the deficiency of the one with the extreme of the other.” 79 Ibid., 1316D; Cosmic Mystery, 80: “He . . . demonstrated by his creaturely origin that he was condescending to him who had fallen, and by his human birth that he was voluntarily emptying himself for him who stood condemned.” 80 Opusc. 3, PG 91:56A; Louth, 197. 81 Ibid., 49B; Louth, 194. 82 Disputatio cum Pyrrho, PG 91:325B; Farrell, 47. Maximus, like Cyril, quotes Gregory Nazianzen’s axiom: what is not assumed is not healed (εἴπερ τὸ ἀπρόσληπτον, ἀθεράπευτον); ibid., 325A. 83 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 122-26. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 20 possibilities, both good and evil, and thus they are inappropriately applied to Christ:

[T]hose who say that there is a γνώµη in Christ . . . are maintaining that he is a mere man, deliberating in a manner like us, having ignorance, doubt and opposition . . . . Because of this, then, the gnomic will is fitly ascribed to us, being a mode of use (τρόπος χρήσεως), and not a principle of nature (λόγος φύσεως) . . . . But the humanity of Christ does not simply subsist in a manner similar to us, but divinely, for he who appeared in the flesh for our sakes was God. It is thus not possible to say that Christ had a gnomic will.84

The gnomic will belongs to the tropos of fallen human existence and is not a constitutive element in the logos of human nature. The γνώµη is a will which deliberates between good and evil instead of obediently choosing the good; it is an abstract freedom-from rather than a concrete freedom-for.85

More importantly, as Cyril insisted, the incarnate Word is a single divine subject in which the human will of Christ is “moved and shaped by his divine will.”86 Two wills means distinction but not division, just as two natures does not imply two persons but only one differentiated person.

Maximus’ rejection of γνώµη and προαίρεσις is thus based on three theological presuppositions: (1) the divine Logos assumes the logos of humanity including the nature corrupted by Adam’s sin, but in the tropos of the New Adam who is obedient; (2) the subject of both the divine and human willing is the Logos, who does not deliberate between good and evil as humans do in accordance with free choice; and (3) the human nature, once assumed, is deified87 by virtue of its union with the Logos: “If [the will] is deified, it is clearly deified by its coming together with the

One who deifies. What deifies and what is deified are certainly two, and not one and the same by

84 Disputatio, PG 91:308C-309A; Farrell, 31-32. Cf. Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 157. 85 Crisp is right then to criticize those who argue for Jesus’ “sinlessness” rather than “impeccability” on the basis that the abstract possibility of Christ sinning raises serious problems. Christ’s freedom is not the freedom to choose evil as well as good; this is a depraved “freedom” which is actually bondage. While the sinlessness view allows for “alternate possibilities open to Christ,” the impeccability position argues that Christ is incapable of sin by virtue of the hypostatic union. See Crisp, “Was Christ Sinless or Impeccable?” Irish Theological Quarterly 72 (2007): 168-86. 86 Opusc. 3, PG 91:48A; Louth, 193. 87 Maximus follows Cyril very closely in making the incarnation a central element in his christology. Both speak of deification as grounded in the assumptio carnis. Maximus affirms that the Logos granted “to human nature through his own incarnation the supernatural grace of deification” (Cosmic Mystery, 135). The difference is that Cyril is only concerned with the unity-in-distinction of the two natures, and thus his christology and soteriology are determined entirely by the event of the incarnation. Maximus, on the other hand, is concerned additionally with the unity-in- distinction of the two wills, and thus his christology and soteriology focus on Christ’s incarnate life. The history of Christ plays a much more significant role in Maximus’ theology than in Cyril’s. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 21 nature.”88 The two natures necessitate two wills (and two energies), while the assumptio carnis establishes one divine subject in accordance with the Chalcedonian Definition. The Logos became incarnate so that human nature “might be thoroughly deified” while remaining ontologically distinct. As a result, “he willed what is divine by nature and belongs to the Father” and “as man, he willed those things that are naturally human.”89

The classic test case for this unity-in-distinction of Christ’s two wills is the Gethsemane

Prayer of Jesus. Matthew 26 is at the heart of the doctrinal disputes extending back to the Arian controversy in the fourth century. The exegetical problem became much more acute, however, during the monothelite controversy, in which Sergius rightly argued against two opposing wills in

Christ but then denied the existence of two natural wills altogether.90 Maximus agrees that any

Nestorian division between the two natures is unacceptable, but at the same time he insists on the

“soteriologically indispensable human obedience of the Son.”91 His christological innovation is to attribute the acceptance of the Father’s will to the Logos as human, as opposed to the Logos as divine, while always maintaining a single subject. The incarnate Word “humanly begged to be spared from death” as part of the natural human inclination toward survival, but at the same time he

“submitted this [will] in accordance with the economy and constrained it to union with the Father’s will.”92 Rather than explain away the Savior’s “shrinking in the face of death,” Maximus incorporates it into the economy of salvation in a way that Cyril could not. Christ thus “shows his eager desire, putting death to death in the flesh, in order to show as a human being that what is natural is saved in himself.”93 According to Maximus, the fear of death is natural to the logos of

88 Ibid., 48B; Louth, 193. The distinction between the deifying and the deified corresponds to Cyril’s distinction between the Logos as “God by nature” and the human flesh as that which is “made his own.” 89 Opusc. 7, PG 91:77C-80A; Louth, 185. 90 Cf. Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 146. 91 Demetrios Bathrellos, “The Relationship between the Divine Will and the Human Will of Jesus Christ according to Saint Maximus the Confessor,” in Studia Patristica 37 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 350. 92 Opusc. 7, PG 91:80C, 81A; Louth, 186. 93 Opusc. 3, PG 91:48B-C; Louth, 194. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 22 humanity and therefore is not opposed to the divine will; the submission to the Father is then a reversal of Adam’s disobedience through the New Adam’s conformity to the will of God. The faithful obedience of the Son thus “demonstrates harmony between the human will of the Savior and the divine will shared by him and his Father,” confirming that the human will is deified in its assumption by the Logos for the sake of willing and effecting our salvation: “As God, he approved that salvation along with the Father and the Holy Spirit; as man he became for the sake of that salvation obedient to his Father unto death, even death on a cross [Phil. 2:8].”94 Finally, in imitation of Christ, we too should “surrender voluntarily to God,” so that in our being-moved we might become “gods by deification,” and in moving us, “God will be all in all.”95

3.4. A Fallen Human Nature? Maximus presents a radical neo-Chalcedonian theology rooted in a recapitulational soteriology, which not only concretely identifies Jesus Christ with his two natures, but also grounds the deification of the cosmos in the history of his incarnate existence:

Because [Christ’s] free choice was incorruptible, he rectified our nature’s liability to passions and turned the end of our nature’s passibility—which is death—into the beginning of our natural transformation to incorruption. In turn, just as through one man, who turned voluntarily from the good, the human nature was changed from incorruption to corruption to the detriment of all humanity, so too through one man, Jesus Christ, who did not voluntarily turn from the good, human nature underwent a restoration from corruption to incorruption for the benefit of all humanity.96

In the “drama of redemption,”97 the incarnate Word recapitulated the history of Adam’s fall into passibility by becoming the New Adam, willing in accordance with the Father’s will, and accomplishing our deification through his death and resurrection. Like Cyril, Maximus’ christology is grounded in his soteriology, but his emphasis falls on the passion and death of Christ as the center of the drama: “in exchange for our destructive passions he gives us his life-giving Passion as a

94 Opusc. 6, PG 91:68C-D; Cosmic Mystery, 176. 95 Amb. 7, PG 91:1076B-C; Cosmic Mystery, 52-53. 96 Ad Thal. 42; PG 90:405D-408A; Cosmic Mystery, 120. The affirmation of “free choice” (προαίρεσις) in Christ is an indication that this was written before the monothelite controversy, in which Maximus adjusts his terminology. But the basic theological point that he is making here remains: Christ rectifies the corruption of our will—and thus our whole human nature—by willing the good in our place and on our behalf. 97 Balthasar, 263. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 23 salutary cure which saves the whole world.”98 Jesus Christ stands in our place as the one who

“became sin” by assuming “the corruption of human nature that was a consequence of the mutability of my free choice” in order to drive corruption from human nature.99 He “became sin” without “knowing sin”100 in order to defeat sin, and he “converted the use of death so that in him it would be a condemnation not of our nature but manifestly only of sin itself.”101 In his kenotic obedience, the Son accomplishes the healing of human nature that is the telos of the incarnation.102

Where then does Maximus fall in terms of the modern fallenness debate? Let us compare

Maximus to the arguments against the fallenness position proffered by Crisp. The first argument— that original sin entails original guilt—does not hold for Maximus, because the Eastern tradition breaks the connection between these two concepts. Crisp then claims, appealing to “scholastic theology,” that if the first argument does not hold, original corruption would in itself be damning for Christ, because his human nature would be “loathsome” and “morally vitiated,” even though not

“morally culpable.”103 Crisp’s account lacks clarity on this point, since he asserts that “exemplifying the effects of the Fall is not the same as being fallen,” and therefore, “Christ takes on the infirmities of fallen humanity, but did not take on the condition of fallenness.”104 Such a distinction depends upon a restrictive—and strictly Western—notion of fallenness, which does not see the effects of the fall as a kind of “sin,” as Maximus does. Crisp seems to interpret “original corruption” and “fallen” in terms of being naturally inclined to sin—i.e., having a corrupted will. If we accept this definition, then Maximus will be the first to reject the fallenness account, since the impeccability of Christ’s

98 Mystagogia 8; Selected Writings, 198. 99 Ad Thal. 42; PG 90:408A; Cosmic Mystery, 120. 100 Ibid.; PG 90:408A-410A; Cosmic Mystery, 120-22. 101 Ad Thal. 61, PG 90:633D; Cosmic Mystery, 137-38. 102 If Cyril’s christology—focused as it is upon the union of the two natures—results in a kind of proto-“essential righteousness” soteriology, then Maximus’ christology—with its emphasis on the human obedience of Christ—results in an “acquired righteousness” soteriology. According to Calvin, Jesus Christ “abolished sin, banished the separation between us and God, and acquired righteousness . . . by the whole course of his obedience” (2.16.5). 103 Crisp, Divinity and Humanity, 112. 104 Ibid., 116. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 24 will stands at the center of his soteriology. For this reason, Bathrellos says that Maximus’ exclusion of γνώµη and προαίρεσις is an exclusion of “a fallen human person . . . from Christ.”105 But if we focus not on the will but on the human nature itself, then we might instead agree with Larchet:

“Maximus intends to show that Christ . . . assumed [human nature] in its fallen state of passibility, corruptibility and mortality, but without the peccability (or the tendency to sin).”106 Crisp does not seem cognizant of such a distinction, since fallenness equals peccability in his account. According to Maximus, however, the Logos assumes what Larchet calls an “impeccable passibility,” which is likely a view that Crisp himself would endorse. With his tripartite definition of sin, Maximus either expands the notion of fallenness or requires more precise terminological distinctions than are available to Crisp. Either way, the advantage of Maximus’ account is that he can make better sense of the scriptural passages which speak of Christ “becoming sin” while remaining “sinless.”

From one perspective, then, the difference between Crisp and Maximus comes down to whether one accepts a Western or Eastern doctrine of original sin. From another perspective, however, the difference is methodological: does one define Christ’s person according to a metaphysical “size-gap” or according to systematic and soteriological concerns? This is the issue raised by Crisp’s third and fourth arguments against the fallenness account. Unbeholden to any philosophically constructed metaphysic, Maximus develops his doctrines of original sin and the two natures of Christ on the basis of his scripturally grounded recapitulational soteriology. Crisp’s notion that it is “metaphysically impossible for the impeccable divine nature of the Word to be joined in hypostatic union with a fallen human nature” would be incomprehensible to Maximus, because his theology, as David Yeago argues, begins with the actuality of the gospel rather than with any speculative presuppositions.107 Instead of beginning with what is possible, Maximus

105 Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 161. 106 Larchet, 36. 107 Yeago, 167. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 25 redefines possibility in light of the actuality of Christ “becoming sin” for our sakes (2 Cor. 5:21).

He affirms Christ’s impeccability not because it is metaphysically impossible for him to sin, but because only a Christ who remains obedient to the end could be the New Adam in our place. Crisp’s final argument that only a Nestorian christology could allow for a union between the Logos and a fallen human nature is simply an extension of his third argument. Again the debate comes down to how we define certain terms. If we define fallenness in terms of a fallen (or gnomic) will, then

Maximus and Crisp are basically in agreement. Maximus was often accused of being Nestorian because of the dualistic overtones in his dyothelitism,108 but ironically, Crisp is far more Nestorian than is Maximus.109 Against Nestorius, and in distinction from Crisp, Maximus posits an “extreme neo-Chalcedonian” union between the two natures that rejects any tertium quid and affirms Christ’s impeccability as the New Adam, while still defining Christ’s human nature in solidarity with our own according to the effects of Adam’s fall.

4. Conclusion: beyond Cyril and Maximus

In their own ways, Cyril and Maximus represent the best of the Chalcedonian tradition.

108 A common argument against Maximus is that “will” implies “person,” therefore two wills in Christ means two persons, which was the position of Nestorius. But Maximus argues that if will implied person, then there would either be three wills in the Trinity (as some modern “social trinitarian” theologians seem to accept) or only one person (cf. Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, 130). Moreover, Nestorius himself argued for one will, because this was what ensured the unity of the two natures—viz. that they each shared one will. Maximus argues thusly in his Disputation with Pyrrhus (cf. Farrell, 57). He also rejects the gnomic will position because of its Nestorian qualities. For example, a will that could choose good or evil is indicative of a “mere human,” one who is not truly assumed by and united with the Logos. Whereas Nestorius allowed for the human nature of Christ to be indwelled by the Logos just like other humans are indwelled, Maximus followed Cyril in arguing for a real ἕνωσις (union), in which the human nature is moved, shaped, and deified by the divine nature of the Logos. 109 Crisp rather remarkably states that the divine nature penetrates the human nature of Christ in the same way that the divine nature penetrates all human beings by virtue of God’s omnipresence—the only difference being “one of degree rather than kind” (19), though Crisp insists that it is “a significant degree of difference” (25). He uses the analogy of the sword in the fire, and differentiates between Christ and us in terms of how long the sword is in the fire: “The difference is one of quantity of heat, not quality of heat” (24). Christ’s human nature, according to Crisp, “is ‘indwelt’ by his divine nature,” which is nearly Nestorius’ position. Crisp avoids adoptionism by asserting that this indwelling begins with conception, but he does not offer any satisfactory rejection of Nestorianism, and he comes as close as one possibly can to saying that the Logos assumed a man rather than human nature, as Nestorius did. For Crisp, Christ is unique, but not unique in kind. This is perhaps related to Crisp’s admission that he is defending an “Antiochene” rather than “Alexandrian” christology (40). Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 26

Cyril describes Christ’s human nature as “deiformed” by the event of the incarnation, while

Maximus states that the Logos assumes an already “deiform” nature which bears the passibility resulting from the fall. Unlike the later scholastics, however, the deiformity of Christ’s human nature is not an answer to any metaphysical “size-gap” between God and creatures, but is rather developed soteriologically on the basis of the redemption accomplished in the person of Jesus

Christ. Whereas Cyril locates salvation in the transformative power of divine life made present through the “transparent” medium of human flesh, Maximus locates salvation in the faithful human obedience of Christ throughout his incarnate life, which includes the death of death on the cross and the restoration of humanity’s original being in the resurrection.110 For Cyril, the Logos drives out all corruption in the assumptio carnis; for Maximus, the Logos “put off the principalities and powers, removing them from human nature” by his obedience, starting with “his initial experience of temptation” and culminating in “the moment of his death on the cross.”111 The economy of salvation in Maximus’ theology thus rests on what Christ has done pro nobis: “This, it seems to me, is the gospel of God: that the incarnate Son is God’s ambassador and advocate for humanity, and has earned reconciliation (καταλλαγῆς µισθὸν) to the Father for those who yield to him.”112

What, then, is the future of the debate over the fallenness of Christ’s humanity? I suggest there are four things we can learn from Cyril and Maximus. First, the Christian tradition is not nearly as uniform or simplistic as it is often made to appear in contemporary surveys. There are many subtle differences which are based on significant soteriological decisions and have important systematic ramifications. It will not suffice to presuppose one particular tradition because it is the

“majority report,” which is itself a questionable claim. Second, as Kelly Kapic notes, the debate is

110 Boojamra, 29. 111 Ad Thal. 21, PG 90:313D-316B; Cosmic Mystery, 112. 112 Ad Thal. 61, PG 90:637D; Cosmic Mystery, 141. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 27 hampered by differing definitions of key terms.113 The word “fallen” itself is unclear, which is a result of the fact that other terms like “sin,” “guilt,” “corruption,” and “nature” are also ambiguous.

Rather than assume an established set of definitions, future engagements with this issue will need to examine how these words are employed in the tradition and what factors influence their meaning.

For example, Maximus differentiates between “culpable sin” and “innocent sin” in order to faithfully explicate Scripture and to clarify how Christ truly identifies with us while remaining the

New Adam. Third, I have sought in this paper to show the interrelation between soteriology and christology in Cyril and Maximus. Future discussions of Christ’s humanity must attend to this connection in more detail, as well as to more general ontological questions. While original sin is certainly central to the debate, focusing on this doctrine will not elucidate, for example, the inner logic at work in Karl Barth’s christology. Fourth, this debate has so far remained systematic and historical without being exegetical, and this will need to change. On this point, we should follow in the example of Maximus and Barth, among others.

Modern christology has much to learn from the ancient patristic controversies over the identity of Jesus Christ. Cyril and Maximus demonstrate that the question of Christ’s human nature is not only thoroughly soteriological, but also far more complex than one might expect based on the arguments of Crisp. Both Cyril and Maximus illustrate the abiding relevance of Chalcedonian christology, and they do so as exemplary theologians who eschew any “metaphysics of the incarnation” in favor of a truly evangelical theology that begins and ends with the gospel of Jesus

Christ as attested in Holy Scripture. In an age of ever-widening church divisions, those looking to the future of the church would do very well by first looking to the past.

113 Kapic, 166. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 28

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