Imitation, Knowledge, and the Task of Christology in Maximus the Confessor

Description

Maximus the Confessor’s combustive historical era, committed doctrinal re flection,and loud and infl uential voice took him on a turbulent career of traveling andwriting around the Mediterranean. Maximus was a spiritual teacher, an asceticand a contemplative, but he was also a polemicist, a crafter of dogma, anembattled Christologian, a premeditating rhetorician. In this study, Luke Steven binds togetherthese two disparate sides of the man and his writings by showing thatthroughout his oeuvre the Confessor positions imitation as the key toknowledge. This lasting epistemology characterizes his earlier ascetic andspiritual works, and in his later works it prominently defines his dogmaticChristological method – that is, the means by which he communicates andpersuades and brings people to understand and encounter Jesus Christ, the onewith two natures, divine and human. This multifaceted study offers a deepassessment of Maximus’s forebears, new insight on the animating assumptions ofhis thought, and an unprecedented focus on the rhetoric and method of hischristological writings.