Notes from Eclectic Orthodoxy: St Maximus the Confessor on the Cosmic Fall
This fallen world, which 'fell' from and is outside of 'another kind of time', is for that reason not yet begun (as the Gnostics regarded it all as misbegotten), because what is, was never intended to be.
(That is, the possibly of fall is a necessity with regard to free will, else the will is not really free at all. But its necessity does not mean its inevitability, it lies within the scope of choice and free action.)
The solution to the fall is the Incarnation. Maximus believes that even in a perfect world, the Incarnation would be necessary for the purpose of realising the Ever-Being end in God to which life is called. But now, in the fallen world, the Incarnation is in that sense the true Adam and of the 'true' and 'real' (and only) world. Our Alpha and Omega (Revelations 1:8, 21:6 "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the one who thirsts I will give freely from the fountain of life's water", 22:13 "It is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.")
Our world being neither ontological true nor real in itself because its end is not in its arising, but in its extinction.
God's acceptance of our false beginning is at once his act of creation and his reaction to the fall – in the same act (such is the case in the aevum). Maximus identifies Divine Providence with the Incarnation, and Divine Judgement with the Crucifixion.
The Incarnation is simultaneously the ground and goal of God’s universal providence. The cross is the condition and consequence of sin. On the cross the Son suffers the very 'principle' (logos) of the false world – death – and thereby grants hypostasis to even that possibility, by His kenosis, He takes it all into Himself and sacralises it (again by virtue of hypostasis) and calls it to the end, in Himself, to which it was always intended.
Christ is thus the bearer and destroyer of the false world. His kenosis is the sign of His love that knows no limit. He incorporates the totality of this illusory existence into Himself, and overcomes it. We are in a world in which, in its most profound depth, lies the logoi of God’s true word, God's true world, for Christ lies there "as if in a womb" (Ambiguum 6), awaiting His birth in all.
This fallen world, which 'fell' from and is outside of 'another kind of time', is for that reason not yet begun (as the Gnostics regarded it all as misbegotten), because what is, was never intended to be.
(That is, the possibly of fall is a necessity with regard to free will, else the will is not really free at all. But its necessity does not mean its inevitability, it lies within the scope of choice and free action.)
The solution to the fall is the Incarnation. Maximus believes that even in a perfect world, the Incarnation would be necessary for the purpose of realising the Ever-Being end in God to which life is called. But now, in the fallen world, the Incarnation is in that sense the true Adam and of the 'true' and 'real' (and only) world. Our Alpha and Omega (Revelations 1:8, 21:6 "I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the one who thirsts I will give freely from the fountain of life's water", 22:13 "It is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.")
Our world being neither ontological true nor real in itself because its end is not in its arising, but in its extinction.
God's acceptance of our false beginning is at once his act of creation and his reaction to the fall – in the same act (such is the case in the aevum). Maximus identifies Divine Providence with the Incarnation, and Divine Judgement with the Crucifixion.
The Incarnation is simultaneously the ground and goal of God’s universal providence. The cross is the condition and consequence of sin. On the cross the Son suffers the very 'principle' (logos) of the false world – death – and thereby grants hypostasis to even that possibility, by His kenosis, He takes it all into Himself and sacralises it (again by virtue of hypostasis) and calls it to the end, in Himself, to which it was always intended.
Christ is thus the bearer and destroyer of the false world. His kenosis is the sign of His love that knows no limit. He incorporates the totality of this illusory existence into Himself, and overcomes it. We are in a world in which, in its most profound depth, lies the logoi of God’s true word, God's true world, for Christ lies there "as if in a womb" (Ambiguum 6), awaiting His birth in all.