Ambigva 37. Letter Six

This publication presents two works by St. Maximus the Confessor – “Ambigva 37” and “Letter Six” (detailed analysis of the Gospel saying of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane). 1. “Ambigva 37” is part of the “Difficulties to John”, which are part of the work of St. Maximus the Confessor “On the various perplexities of Saints Gregory and Dionysius” (about 628-630 or until 633-634). St. Maxim analyzes the statement of St. Gregory the Theologian: “And now it’s almost womb-bearing, and gallop, if not like John in the womb, then like David at the repose of Kyoto.” He offers an interpretation of the images of the prophet John the Baptist and King David as symbols of the spiritual path. The Prophet John appears as an example of constancy in virtue and knowledge of God, from the womb to death. He is a symbol of repentance, dispassion, contemplation, as well as the Forerunner and baptizer. For believers, this is an example of the path of continuous progress in virtue and knowledge, without retreat. King David symbolizes the path of fall and restoration. He represents the image of an active life (shepherd, king, warrior), but his life is marked by moments of weakness and retreat from God. However, through repentance he regains his joy and grace. For believers, this is an example of the path of falls and uprisings through repentance, with a constant effort to return to virtue and knowledge. In the work of Rev. Maxim gives a detailed theory about 10 paths (ways) of contemplating Scripture, which can be reduced to a single logos, and explains how this theory can be applied to the images of Saints John and David. He points out how different aspects of each of their lives (genus, dignity, place) allow for a deeper understanding of their symbolic meaning. 2. “Letter Six” (circa 628) contains an analysis of the words of Jesus Christ during prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father! if possible, let this cup pass from Me; however, not as I want, but as You want” (Matthew 26:39). St. Maxim polemicizes those who see in these words a manifestation of weakness or opposition to the human will of Christ to the Divine will of the Father. He claims that these words express perfect agreement and submission to the will of the Father. The human will of Christ, deified through the incarnation, is in complete agreement with the will of the Father. At the same time, he emphasizes that the presence of two wills and two actions corresponding to two natures does not contradict the unity of Christ. The Savior, being both man and God, voluntarily accepts suffering for the sake of fulfilling the Divine plan. To the words of St. Gregory the Theologian: “And now it’s almost womb-bearing, and gallop, if not like John in the womb, then like David at the repose of Kyoto” 1 The great John the Baptist is not only an example of repentance to dispassion in accordance with practical wisdom and Gnostic contemplation, on the one hand, a messenger and Baptist, on the other hand, as a desert dweller and withdrawn from the world in everything, as a Levite and a priest and the Forerunner of God the Word, but also a symbol of immutability, since he kept the same attitude of the soul unchanged from the mother’s womb until death. David is a model of action and contemplation, as he came from the tribe of Judah and was formerly a shepherd, and later a king and destroyer of foreigners, but he is not a symbol of immutability and staying in one and the same character. For after knowing God, he fell into human passions and did not preserve the character of virtue and knowledge immutable. Therefore, as it is written, it was so that he did not rejoice from his mother’s womb, like the great John, but only after the complete extermination of foreigners and the establishment of the Ark, that is, after moving away from passions and returning to the path of knowledge of God. John is the image of all those who are born in the spirit through virtue and knowledge through repentance and until the end retain the same character in prosperity; David is the image of all those who, after knowing God, have fallen and, through repentance, regain through virtue and knowledge the grace-filled joy and “leaping” of the soul. So, although briefly in words, but speculatively spreading the breadth of mind in spirit, the great teacher 2 depicted the height of the Divine utterances of the great John and David through the character of each of the two as one for them. As I believe, in accordance with the tropos given from each of them, for each of those who live piously and respond to the call to a virtuous life, they very clearly proclaim that you all, in whom, through repentance, virtue and knowledge, God the Word is conceived, or like the great John, from beginning to end through success, have the leap of the soul in yourself, completely not retreating into vice in thought or ignorance, or like the blessed David, even if something involuntary happens to you on the Divine path, try hardworkingly through repentance to regain virtue and knowledge, with the help of exertion of patience and exercise in Divine words, and by laziness this Divine in yourself, I am talking about virtue and knowledge, did not give in to passions, leaving Kyoto, otherwise, having fallen on your back at the gates of the church in Shiloh, you will endure the passion of the high priest Eli and you will perish, breaking the back of your work (see 1 Samuel 4:18). So, as I believe, teaching in the clearest way, this blessed Father in the “Word for the New Week” says: “We are commanded to sing a new song to the Lord (Ps. 149:1), were we carried away by sin to Babylon, into this evil unity, and then happily returned to Jerusalem, and just as there, being on a foreign land, we could not sing the Divine song, so here we composed a new song, and a new way of life or constantly continued and succeeded in goodness, and we have already accomplished some things, and we are still doing others with the help of the Holy and renewing Spirit” 3 . This, as I believe in my foolishness, is truly what the great teacher had in mind when he exclaimed: “And now it’s almost womb-bearing, and gallop, if not like John in the womb, then like David at the repose of Kyoto,” expressing the spiritual meaning of what was said through the tropos of contemplation according to dignity and kind. The true connoisseurs of such mysteries, who have devoted themselves to the contemplation of these spiritual meanings contained here, say that the general logos of the contemplation of Scripture, which is one, when expanded, is contemplated in a tenfold manner: according to place, time, gender, person, dignity or occupation; practical, natural and theological wisdom; present and future, or image and truth. When the logos contracts, it transfers the first five into the other three tropes; three into two, and two into one, then the logos is no longer reducible to anything else. In other words, logos compresses the first five tropes of time, place, gender, person and dignity into the other three - practical, natural and theological philosophy. These three boil down to the following two: the present and the future. And these last two are contained in the perfect, simple, and, as they say, inexpressible logos, which embraces them all. According to its origin, the main ten tropes are to be contemplated in Scripture, and as a containing source, the same decade is compressed, in ascending order, back again into the monad. In time, the logos of Scripture is contemplated along the following paths: “once upon a time,” “was,” “is,” “will be,” “before this,” “now,” “after this,” “from the beginning,” “past,” “future,” by years, times, months, weeks, days, nights and their parts, and everything else that makes time apparent. By place means: heaven and earth, air and sea, the universe, borders, countries, islands, cities, churches, villages, fields, mountains, gorges, roads, rivers, deserts, wine presses, threshing floors, vineyards and everything that can characterize a place. By genus, the most general - angels or orders of intelligent forces in heaven, the Sun, Moon, stars, fire and everything that exists in the air, in the earth, in the sea, or animals, or “life-growing”, or plants and everything that comes from the earth and is subject to human crafts, and everything else similar to this, that is, having its own tropos: people, tribes, peoples, languages, tribes, clans and everything like this, countable and innumerable by face, an angel or an archangel, or a seraphim, or someone else from the intelligent heavenly powers, from the same ones who are called by name - Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or anyone else about whom Scripture speaks laudably or reproachfully, manifested by name. By dignity it is a king or a kingdom, a shepherd or a flock, a priest or priesthood, a tiller, a military leader, a carpenter, or, more simply, any occupation into which the human race is divided. Logos manifests itself through the following five exhaustive tropes: essence, possibility and energy 4, first being composed around these divisions, that is, showing about each in general - whether it moves or moves, is affected or acts, contemplates or is contemplated, says or is said, teaches or learns, is attracted or repelled, or simply, in short, carries out or undergoes practical, natural or theological wisdom, in which they are manifoldly intertwined with each other and they introduce us to these three types of philosophy, considering each perceived thing from different sides by thoughts, in accordance with contemplation, whether it is praiseworthy or blameworthy, and from here revealing the logoi of what should and should not be done, what is natural and what is unnatural, what is reasonable and what is unreasonable. For the tropos of each logos is dual in accordance with the abilities of the one who studies it in contemplation in an intelligent way, so that from the affirmation of what is proper, natural and reasonable, and through the denial of improper, unnatural and unreasonable fantasies, the faithful embrace practical, natural and theological wisdom, or, what is the same thing, love of God. And these three forms of philosophy are subsequently divided into the present and the future, since they embrace both the shadow and the truth, both the image and the prototype. As far as possible, albeit in a transcendental and sublime way, man in this age, striving for the utmost measure of virtue, knowledge and wisdom in order to achieve knowledge of the Divine, still achieves this knowledge through the image of the archetype. So, indeed, on the one hand, the image is the whole truth that we achieve in the present tense, but, on the other hand, the image is also the shadow of the highest logos. And since the Logos, who creates the world, exists and manifests Himself in the world in accordance with the relationship between the present and the future, He is understood as image and truth, and since He surpasses the present and the future, He is understood as superior to image and truth, not containing in Himself anything that could be considered as opposites, since truth has only one opposite - falsehood. So then the Logos gathers all things into Himself, being both man and God, and truly being above both humanity and Divinity. The first five paths are collected in accordance with various contemplation into practical, natural and theological wisdom, these - in turn - into the present and the future, that is, into image and truth; the present and the future - into the Logos who existed in the beginning, Who made it possible for Himself to suffer and to be seen as worthy. He, for the sake of those about whom it is said that they are diligently paving the way to Him, from Himself, as from a monad, becoming a decade, as a monad, He protects them from any passionate, natural and intelligent movement and in Divine grace, according to the general disposition, depicts in them the natural property of Divine simplicity. You should also know that the logos of Providence corresponds to the natural, and the logos of the Court corresponds to practical philosophy, in accordance with the logoi related to them, which are manifested through the contemplation of what is and what is becoming. This, as it was said, was meant by that godly teacher, as I believe, appropriately naming the saints from the tropos by kind, dignity and place, counting the great John among them, calling them contemplations. Therefore, the great John, who was a preacher of repentance and as a hermit is the image of action and dispassion, and as a Levite and priest - of Gnostic contemplation, having rejoiced in the Word from his mother’s womb, is a symbol of the steadfastness of character in accordance with virtue and knowledge. Saint David, as a Jew and shepherd, portrays himself as a confession of practical wisdom, and as the king of Israel, he is introduced into contemplative secrecy. The race of Saint John is the people and tribe from which he came, his dignity is preaching and priesthood, the place is the desert in which he lived. Saint David also has a clan - people and tribe, and also an occupation, that is, dignity - shepherd and royal. By this, each of them is contemplated in proportion to itself in accordance with the appropriate logos through the paths predicated about it, thereby through itself “unfailingly” revealing the revealed sacrament. About the words: My Father! if possible, let this cup pass from Me; however, not as I want, but as You want (Matthew 26:39) If you understand the words: My Father! if possible, let this cup pass from Me; however, not as I want, but as You (Matthew 26:39) as showing cowardice and spoken on behalf of man “not understood as the Savior (for His will was in no way opposed to God, being completely deified), but understood as we, having a human will, not following God in everything, but in many ways opposing and resisting” 6 Him, which is what the divine Gregory speaks about, then what about the rest of the words Savior: however, not as I want, but as You want? What do you think they indicate: cowardice or courage, agreement or resistance? But the fact that this is not resistance or cowardice, but rather perfect agreement and submission 7, no one who has intelligence will deny. And if this is consent and submission, then from whom will it be allowed? From a person understood as us, or from a person understood as the Savior? But if understood as we are, then the words of the Teacher, that is, St. Gregory the Theologian, who speak about him, are mistaken that “the human will does not always follow the Divine will, but in many ways opposes and opposes it.” For if one follows it, then one does not oppose it, and if one opposes it, one does not follow it, for both of these statements mutually refute each other. But if the words, however, not as I want, but as You should be accepted as spoken on behalf of a person understood as the Savior, and not as from someone like us, then you recognize to the highest degree the agreement of the human will and the Divine will of the Father, and you will see that they do not contradict each other in any way, and along with the duality of natures, the duality of wills and the duality of actions corresponding to the two natures will be visible, even though he, that is, St. Gregory, affirms and in everything there is a difference between two natures, of which and in which and which He Himself, that is, Christ, is by nature 8. If, using these arguments, we further say that the words do not, as I want, refer either to a person understood like us, or to someone understood as the Savior, but because of the negation present in them, they refer to the beginningless Divinity of the Only Begotten, that He seems to desire something separately from the Father, then it will be necessary to admit that these words of prayer refer in meaning not to the one who desires, but to the desired, and this must be attributed to the Divinity of the beginningless. For in this negation there occurs the destruction of the one who desires, but not the desired object itself, since it is impossible to simultaneously negate both - the one who desires (and this is the Only Begotten of the Father) and that which is desired. And since in everything the Father and the Son have a common desire of will and the Father cannot deny the Son, then the destruction of what God desires will occur - that is, our salvation, and this, that is, our salvation is desired by God by nature itself. And if it is impossible to apply a negation to both, then it is clear that these negative words must be attributed to something one of the two, that is, to the one who desires, namely the Son as the one who desires in this case something that is different from the will of the Father, and through this negation the common will of the Father and the Son will be confirmed. Therefore, if this reasoning leading to the separation of the Father from the Son is unacceptable, then it is clear that such a denial, that is, not as I want, eliminates all opposition, and, on the contrary, affirms the agreement of the Savior’s human will with the Divine will as through the entire incarnate nature of the Word through this incarnation of the deified. When for our sake He became like us, He speaks as befits a man, addressing God and the Father: however, not as I want, but as You do, that is, having as a man the will to fulfill the Father’s will, while Himself being by nature also God. Therefore, by both of these natures, being from them and in them, from which He became a Hypostasis, cognizable by nature as both willing our salvation and accomplishing it, and as such - He, in Divinity, on the one hand, agrees with the Father and the Spirit, on the other hand, in humanity - having become obedient even to death, and death on the cross (Phil 2:8), He fulfilled the great work of building our salvation through the sacrament of His incarnation. Scholium: There are those who say that the words not as I want in a negative sense refer to the beginningless Divinity of the Only Begotten. This means, as they say, that they do not mean the one who desires something of his own in spite of the Father, and therefore what is desired, that is, the request for the cup, is raised to the beginningless Divinity itself, and that since it is absolutely impossible to deny both positions at once - both that the Only Begotten desires something in spite of the Father, and what is desired, then they apply the denial to the one who desires, and not to what is desired, which is the request for the cup, that is about our salvation; and what could be more meaningless than this 9? For it so happened that God, Who by nature establishes His own desires, wanted to come to earth for the sake of our salvation. Therefore, His words are: not as I want, and His in full - however, not as I want, but as You. Translation from Greek by P. Dobrotsvetov St. Gregory the Theologian. Homily 38. On Epiphany or on the Nativity of the Savior. Ch. 17 // Creations. T. 1. Minsk, 2000. P. 643. That is, Saint Gregory the Theologian. St. Gregory the Theologian. Homily 44. For the new week, spring and in memory of the martyr Mamant. Ch. 1 // Ibid. P. 796. These three paths add activity (effectiveness) and passivity (undergoing action), which gives the named number five. St. Gregory the Theologian. Homily 30. About theology fourth, about God the Son second // Ibid. P. 530 (Greg. Nazianz. Or. 30, 12 // PG 36, 117C-120B). “As Letel showed (L-thel. Thеologie de l'agonie du Christ: la libertе humaine du Fils de Dieu et son importance soteriologique mises en lumi-re par saint Maxime le Confesseur // Thеologie historique 52. Paris, 1979. P. 29–49, 86–99), the dilemma discussed in this letter is caused by the emergence monothelitism put forward in “Psephos” - a document issued by Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople in June 633. Sergius, without doubting his rightness, used the words of St. Gregory the Theologian from his Homily 30, which Maximus also partially quotes here. Saint Gregory, in his comments, actually sought to explain the words of Christ from the Gethsemane prayer rather in a Trinitarian (anti-Arian) sense, rather than in a Christological sense. He takes the words from John 6, for I came down from heaven, not to do My will, but the will of the Father who sent Me, as also defining the Gethsemane prayer. The subject of these words is not the man Jesus, but the Son of God, whose denial of His own will would be equivalent to the absence of His own (separate from the Fatherly and opposite to it), hypostatic will. Sergius also deduced from this the absence of human will (separate and opposite to the Divine and Fatherly) in Christ. Maxim, in his letter, comments on the words of both the Gethsemane prayer and St. Gregory exclusively in the Christological sense and, paying special attention to the saving role of the human will in Christ, follows a completely different logic. The subject of the words of prayer is precisely a person who is at the same time “like us” in the possession of a natural human will and at the same time “corresponding to the Savior,” since the human will of Christ is perceived in the manner of hypostatic union.” – Blowers P. On The Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ. N.Y., 2003. P. 173–174. “This important and revealing phrase defines the hypostasis of Christ as not only “composed” of two natures, and in two natures - Divine and human, but also existing as two natures, thereby demonstrating the full acceptance of Maximus of the definitions of the Council of Chalcedon of 451. - Right there. P. 174. For in this case the Divine will in Christ is denied, and the prayer for the cup is pronounced on behalf of the Father or the Spirit. This is, apparently, from the point of view of a scholiast, the meaninglessness of this logical contradiction.