“THE SUBSTANCE OF THE VIRTUES”: DEIFICATION ACCORDING TO MAXIMOS THE CONFESSOR AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ARISTOTELIAN ETHICS BY Luis Josué Salés BA, Wheaton College, 2010 MA, Wheaton College, 2010 MTS, Boston College, 2012 ThM, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, 2013 DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF THEOLOGY AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY NEW YORK DECEMBER, 2018 ProQuest Number:10744253 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 10744253 Published by ProQuest LLC ( 2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. 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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 A la memoria de mi padre, Sergio Salés Reyes (1952–2016) 2 CONTENTS Introduction . 4 Part One: Maximos’ Historical-Social and Personal Background . 13 Chapter One: Specters of Aristotle: Christian Intellectual Identity Formation and the Transformation of Aristotle’s Philosophy . 14 Chapter Two: Maximos of Alexandria: An Unread Life of Maximos the Confessor . 42 Part Two: Maximo’s Metaphysics, Ethics, and Doctrine of Deification . 70 Chapter Three: Aristotle, Maximos, and the Logic of Being . 71 Chapter Four: Becoming a Divine Human: The Confessor’s Moral Psychology and the Ethical Dialectics of Person and Nature . 101 Chapter Five: The Day after the Sabbath: Virtue, Active Passivity, and Deification. 145 Conclusion . 164 Bibliography . 171 Abstract Vita 3 INTRODUCTION This dissertation studies the relationship between virtue and deification in the thought of the ascetic intellectual Maximos the Confessor (580–662). It would be no exaggeration to note that Maximian studies enjoyed a renaissance in the twentieth century on which the twenty-first century built an impressive collection of outstanding monographs and articles. So, while I concur with Aidan Nichols that the (western European) modern study of Maximos the Confessor can be traced to 1857, when Karl Joseph Hefele published “Sophronius und Maximus über die zwei Willen in Christus” in the Theologische Quartalschrift and Klaus Oehler released his edition of the Confessor’s most important work, the Difficulties (or Ambigua), concerted intercontinental interest in his work only developed in earnest in the wake of the Second World War. For the following decades, the work of Maximos was studied from a wide variety of historical, theological, and philosophical subfields or for thematic threads, including Christology, spirituality, ecclesiology, anthropology, the essence-energies distinction, the politics of the seventh century in the Roman Empire, deification, and the perennial question regarding his relation to Classical and Hellenistic thought and, specifically, to so-called “Neoplatonism.”1 To date, however, no study extensively considers the interrelationship between his aretology (i.e., doctrine of virtue) and deification despite their prominence in his theological and philosophical system. Certainly, studies of one or the other theme, largely in isolation from each other, have been penned. For instance, Jean-Claude Larchet’s encyclopedic La divinisation de l’homme selon Saint Maxime le Confesseur (1996), a volume nearly eight hundred pages in length, remains a field-defining piece of Maximian scholarship, specifically with regard to deification. But even here, Larchet does not explore the relationship between virtue and deification in depth.2 Needless to say, far from being a shortcoming of his study, this absence bespeaks Larchet’s regard for a manageable scope. Regardless, the gap remains. Further, the methodological approaches to Maximos’ work have, with a few very recent exceptions, remained in the tradition of an exclusively historical-theological mode of analysis. This method certainly enjoys considerable explanatory power for some, but surely not all, aspects of the Confessor’s oeuvre. Thus, while numerous other aspects and figures in early Christianity have been explored by means of critical-theoretical modes of analysis, these modes’ usefulness for illumining Maximos’ thought-world have yet to be substantively probed.3 Accordingly, in what follows I avail myself of a 1 For Christology see: Tollefsen, Christocentric Cosmology, Bathrellos, Byzantine Christ, García, “Seréis como dioses,” Zañartu, “Las naturalezas.” For spirituality, see: Völker, Maximus Confessor, Blowers, Exegesis, Dalmais, “L’anthropologie spirituelle,” “L’oeuvre spirituelle,” and “La doctrine ascétique,” Hausherr, Philautie, Montmasson, “La doctrine,” 36–41, Viller, “Aux sources,” 156–184, 239–68, 331–336. Wilken, “Maximus the Confessor,” in Wimbush and Valantasis, 412–423. For ecclesiology see: Riou, Le monde et l’église. For anthropology see: Prado, Voluntad y naturaleza, Renczes, Agir de Dieu, Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, De Angelis, Natura, persona, libertà, Mondin, L’uomo secondo il disegno di Dio, Kattan, Verleiblichung und Synergie. For the essence-energies distinction, see: Larchet, Le théologie des énergies divines, Karayiannis, Maxime le Confesseur. For his involvement in seventh-century politics, see: Lackner, “Der Amtstitel,” 63–65, Booth, Crisis of Empire, Pareti, “Verdi e azzurri,” 305–315, Olster, The Politics of Usurpation, Riedinger, “Die Lateran Synode,” in Heinzer and von Schönborn. For his doctrine of deification see: Savvidis, Die Lehre, Larchet, La divinisation, Perl, “Methexis,” Jili, “The Doctrine of Theosis.” For his relationship to “Neoplatonism”, see: Moore, “The Christian Neoplatonism,” Von Ivánka, Plato Christianus, Wolfson, Philosophy of the Church Fathers. 2 See e.g., Larchet, La divinisation, 482–488. 3 Paul Blower’s recent monograph, Maximus the Confessor (2016) is perhaps a pioneer in this regard in that he uses Jean- Luc Marion’s “saturated phenomenon” to illumine Maximos’ liturgical theology. 4 constellation of methods, including certain features of historical theology, critical and comparative philology, and literary analysis. But I will also adapt the critical angles of Hispanic post- and decolonial theory, as constructed, for example, by Leopoldo Zea, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Santiago Castro- Gómez, to expose an array of colonial assumptions and prejudices at work in the historiography of philosophy in late antiquity. I also turn to some of Michel Foucault’s and Michel de Certeau’s insights into “technologies” or “practices” of the self to elucidate Maximos’ ascetic doctrine and will combine this analysis with Derridean grammatology to explain the dynamic model of virtue as Maximos envisions it. The methodological salience of these choices requires some elucidation. Foucault and de Certeau investigated, in their own way, the various acts that the self can perform on the self to pattern the self on a certain desirable model. In this regard, Foucault’s idea of “technologies of the self” is especially important, because he believes that the human subject can “attain” certain states by means of these technologies.4 As we will see, that is true for some early Christians and late ancient non-Christian philosophers, but it does not aptly describe the constitutive dynamism of Maximos’ aretology. Rather, Michel de Certeau paints a somewhat different picture (though, admittedly, for a different context). In La invention du quotidien, de Certeau describes the scene of a tightrope balancing act where the appearance of stability can only be achieved by an incessant process of adjustments and interventions. Thus, stability is a paradoxically-formed illusion that relies on an incessant dynamism and process of recalibration to create the semblance of fixity.5 This image bears striking resemblances to Derridean grammatology and poststructuralist linguistics generally.6 On Derrida’s analysis, language does not signify by an ontological or necessary link between signifier and signified; rather, following de Saussure’s “first principle” articulated in his Cours de linguistique générale,7 Derrida held that the link between these two is entirely arbitrary. Accordingly, signification is made possible by an infinite network of differences that mark a language’s simultaneous sedimentation and correlative insufficiency. While repeated use of certain phrases and linguistic conventions creates the appearance of fixity by the sedimentation of linguistic practices, language is always liable to change and can thus be otherwise. In my study, I ask whether such a model of linguistics may also share a parallel with Maximos’ ethics that can by extension illumine the dynamics at play in “becoming virtuous.” In other words, what does it mean “to be” virtuous? Can one “attain” the “state,” as Foucault called it, of virtue? Or is it, rather, that one negotiates one’s ethical identity from step to step on an infinite, heavenward tightrope of moral discourse that is both the condition of and for an elusive virtue? The fluidity of language as described by poststructuralist linguists has great appeal for elucidating this dynamic model of ethics. After all, if virtue must be interstitially negotiated by means of certain practices of the self, the teleological