After Chalcedon Oneness of Christ Dyothelite Mediation of Theandric Unity - Riches

Modern Theology 24:2 April 2008
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
AFTER CHALCEDON: THE ONENESS
OF CHRIST AND THE DYOTHELITE
MEDIATION OF HIS THEANDRIC
UNITY
AARON RICHES
He performs the “alchemy” which melts down human nature and
infuses it into the being of God.
Joseph Ratzinger
Introduction
L’union différencie.1 With this phrase Henri de Lubac articulated a logic counter
to what he perceived as the parallelism inherent in neoscholastic theology,
which presumed the gratuity of the supernatural to be best preserved by
conceiving “grace” and “nature” in terms of two discrete spheres. For de
Lubac, union is established through a differentiated communion that confirms
the doctrine of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): whatever the similarity
between Creator and creature, the difference between them is always greater.2
Therefore, de Lubac reasoned: “There is a fear of mixing, confusing; there must
be a fear of not uniting enough. . . . It is in fact when one does not know how
to unite things well that one particularly fears confusing them.”3
De Lubac’s paradox of differentiated unity is, of course, axiomatic of the
communion of different natures in the Person of the Incarnate Son. Orthodox
Christological reflection is bound to a labour of learning to “unite things well”,
learning to navigate the Scylla of Nestorianism (which would seek to “protect”
the unconfused natures of Jesus through paralleling their difference); and the
Charybdis of Eutychianism (which would achieve the oneness of Christ
through mixing the divinity and humanity of the Son in a “hybrid” third).
Patrick Aaron Riches
Centre of Theology and Philosophy, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University
of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK atxpar@nottingham.ac.uk
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
200 Aaron Riches
The Definitio fide of the Council of Chalcedon (451) is usually taken to be the
normative articulation of Christology’s differentiated unity. In what follows,
however, I suggest that the dyophysitism (two natures) of Chalcedon risks a
certain parallelism of the natures in Christ insofar as it leaves the communicatio idiomatum in the One Christ unspecified. Thus, as long as dogmatic
Christology limits itself to Chalcedon, it remains vulnerable to a misconstrual
of Christology (and therefore Catholic theology tout court) in a quasiNestorian direction.
In this article I propose that the middle paradox of the differentiated unity
of Christology is decisively articulated in the dyothelite (two wills) Christology of Maximus the Confessor, which was given doctrinal status at the Third
Council of Constantinople (680–681). Here, I submit, the circumincession of
difference in Jesus is specified in the unified prayer of the Incarnate Son.
Therefore I reason: if Chalcedon is taken as the normative Christological
articulation of the Church, the Definitio fide yet needs to be normatively
supplemented with the dyothelite doctrine of the Terminus of Constantinople
III. Thus I conclude that dyotheletism fulfils the paradox of Chalcedon
because it “unites things well”; it makes concrete the communicatio idiomatum
of difference in the Son’s theandric unity.
***
The argument here consists of five parts. In the first, “Crisis in Christology”, I sketch the contours of a quasi-Nestorian crisis in theology, taking up
the International Theological Commission’s injunction for a remedy: a turn
in Catholic Christology from Chalcedon to Constantinople III. In the second
part, “Maximian Dyotheletism”, I argue that it is necessary to read the doctrine of Constantinople through the relevant texts of Maximus the Confessor, which yield a full “narrativisation” of the ontology of Chalcedon in the
personal enactment of the unity of the filial prayer of Gethsemane. In the
third part, “Against Dualism”, I take up the charge of Joseph Ratzinger: that
Maximus is “the most determined conqueror of Nestorianism.”4 Here I
read Ratzinger’s charge in light of his proposal that Chalcedonian Christology only retains its meaning if the mode of unity in Christ is clarified, as
indeed it is by the Terminus of Constantinople III. Further, I argue, the
dyothelite specification of the mode of unity of divinity and humanity in
Christ involves a non-Chalcedonian debt to the Syriac Christology of Denys
the Areopagite. In the fourth part of the essay, “Desire for God”, I outline
the double movement of desire for God in the human heart as articulated
in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and by Maximus the Confessor. I do
this in order to propose this double movement of desire as itself the created
condition of the possibility of the fittingness of Christ’s dyothelite unity.
Finally, in the fifth part, “Pneumatology and the Church”, I suggest that
the “possibility of the fittingness of Christ’s dyothelite unity” is pneuma© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 201
tological, a work and ingression appropriated to the Person of the Holy
Spirit. Christ’s dyothelite unity, thus, is the mode of ecclesial participation
in the Incarnate’s differentiated communion, the liturgical perpetuation of
the latria of Jesus’s personal communication with the One he calls “Father”.
I. Crisis in Christology
In 1979 the International Theological Commission encouraged a dogmatic
turn in Catholic Christology toward the dyotheletism of the Third Council of
Constantinople.5 In “Quaestiones selectae de Christologia”, the Commission
argued that in the Maximian Christology of the Terminus of Constantinople
III, “the church demonstrated her ability to clarify the Christological problem
better than she had already done at the Council of Chalcedon.”6
According to the Terminus, the soteriological labour of the Incarnation is
accomplished through the harmonious union of created and uncreated desire
in Jesus, in whom “the two natural wills and principles of action are reconciled in correspondence for the salvation of the human race (d υo fusikα
qel ηmatα te ka ι εnerge ιaς doxαzomen prος swthr ιan toυ αnqrwp ιnou
gε nouς katall ηlwς suntrε conta).”7 On the view of the Commission, the
achievement of Constantinople III is that it makes doctrinally specific the
work of Christ’s humanity in salvation, “declaring that our salvation had been
willed by a divine person through a human will.”8
***
“Quaestiones selectae de Christologia” addresses a perceived crisis in Christology: a preoccupation in academic research that has tended to privilege the
“human” Jesus in a way that has lead to an “antidogmatic sentiment”.9 This
predicament, so claims the Commission, is based on a dualistic sensibility
that fissures and/or juxtaposes “the Jesus of history” to “the glorified
Christ”.10 On the one hand, a historical-critical Biblicism illustrates this
binary sensibility in its “quest for the historical Jesus”; on the other hand,
there is a tendency to read Christ’s humanity as pre-eminently an identification with our humanity—an error that necessarily inverts the prime
analogate of Christology, as if “our” humanity could be the criterion by
which to judge the Incarnation of God. Against this binary sensibility,
“Quaestiones selectae de Christologia” seeks to affirm the intrinsic unity of
divinity and humanity in Jesus. In this way, the text can be read as warning
against a contemporary Nestorianism that diminishes the fullness of the
hypostatic union by assuming that what is “created” or “human” in Jesus can
be discretely apprehended as a “natura pura” dissociated from the supernatural illumination of humanity in the Son’s divine personhood.
Against this parallelism in Christology, the Commission points to John Paul
II’s encyclical, Redemptor hominis. The Commission specifically highlights
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
202 Aaron Riches
paragraphs 8–10 where John Paul is said to argue that, “Jesus Christ illustrates
and illuminates to the highest possible degree the ultimate measure and
concrete essence of man.”11 What the encyclical definitively shows, on the
view of the Commission, is that Christ’s solidarity with the human race does
not detract from his divinity. On the contrary, the divinity of Christ’s Person
establishes the condition by which his perfect intimacy with humanity is
possible, in which the “concrete essence of man” in the mystery of the
theandric life of the Incarnate Logos is revealed.12
John Paul II writes:
Christ, the Redeemer of the world, is the one who penetrated in a unique
unrepeatable way into the mystery of man and entered his “heart”.
Rightly therefore does the Second Vatican Council teach: “The truth is
that only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man
take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come
(Rom 5:14). Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation
of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and
brings to light his most high calling”.13
Here John Paul makes his own the crucial de Lubacian paraphrase of
Gaudium et spes.14 He then goes on to link this passage with the fact that Christ
“acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved”—which, for
John Paul, concretely discloses the “deep wonder” that is constitutive of who
Adam is called to be, so that “in a hidden and mysterious way [the Incarnate
Logos] . . . vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism”.15 On the reading of
the Commission, John Paul’s encyclical decisively “precludes all pseudoopposition between the humanity and divinity of Jesus.”16 Thus, if the divine
Person of the Incarnate Logos uniquely “reveals man to himself”, then
authentic humanity is revealed as a created nature integrally fulfilled in
theandric union. On this view, there is only authentic humanity where there
is theosis: “deification is the truest and ultimate hominization of man”.17 Thus
it follows: Jesus is the “True Man” because he is God. And so, the patristic
axiom, “God became man that man might become God”,18 can with equal
truth be rephrased: God became man that man might become truly human.
Out of the theology of Redemptor hominis and the specification therein of the
act of “human will” in Christ’s revelation of “man to himself”, the Commission prepares a context in which to argue on behalf of the Terminus as the
means of articulating the “organic relation” of divinity and humanity. This
organic relation, according to the Commission, is grounded in the Pauline
doctrine of the two Adams (cf. 1 Cor. 15.21; Rom. 5.12–19), which has a double
consequence: (i) Christ cannot be understood in abstraction from the first
Adam; and (ii) the first Adam only emerges “in the truth and wholeness of his
humanity” in the revelatory light of the Incarnate Word, “Christ who saves and
divinizes us by his life, death, and Resurrection”.19 Christ, therefore, uniquely
accomplishes the eternal-divine vocation of the creature created ad imaginem et
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 203
similitudinem nostram (Gen. 1.26), the creature created for the vocation squandered by Adam in the Garden (cf. Gen. 3.1–7). Thus Christ, the New Adam,
fully reveals Adam because he is by nature all that the first Adam was eternally
predestined to become by grace. On this view, the convenientia of the Incarnation is the vocational/analogical interval between the imago Dei borne by
Adam and the similitudo Dei accomplished in Christ. And this leads back to the
advantage of dyothelite Christology, wherein “the Church declares that our
salvation had been willed by a divine person through a human will”.20
***
The dyotheletism of Constantinople III was encouraged by the Commission in
order that we might better understand the “mysteries” of Christ’s life.21 The
Commission names the baptism, the temptations, and the agony—of course
these “mysteries” are not exhaustive, to these we could add the transfiguration, the last supper, the crucifixion, and so on. In all cases the “mysteries” are
narrative events in the economy of the divine dispensation, events that disclose the communicative correspondence of the divine and human wills in the
life of this first-century Palestinian Jew. More specifically, these “mysteries” of
Christ’s life can be understood as “states of adoration” (to borrow the language
of Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle). The “mysteries” are thus liturgical acts of filial
doxology that manifest Jesus’s communicative relation to the Father as the
total content of who he is: “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16.16).
If the “mysteries” of Christ’s life initially reveal the filial unity of his Person
and his relation to the Father, they yet reveal a second and profound reality:
the path of humanity into its deiform vocation. If, as Gaudium et spes states, the
“invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes
into being”,22 then the “mysteries” of Christ’s life are the formal pattern of the
communication for which the human person was made. On this reading, the
“mysteries” establish the liturgical path of humanity back to the Paternal
Source who is the content of every human longing.
Being human, therefore, is not a mere sequela creationis, rather it is a sequela
supra-creationis, a pattern rooted in the supernatural latria such that only the
divine Son can give the Father. Being human involves a pattern of desire rooted
in nature, yet only fulfilled in a graced metanoia-beyond-nature. Only the
God-Man “tells us who man truly is and what a man must do in order to be
truly human.”23 The content of the human state of adoration—of authentic
humanism—is the theandric pattern of the Incarnate God’s filial doxology.
Being human is Sequela Christi.
II. Maximian Dyotheletism
Marie-Joseph le Guillou has argued that Constantinople III is “not merely a
corollary to Chalcedon”, but rather a crucial extension of the ontology of
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
204 Aaron Riches
Chalcedon into the narrative sphere of historical contingency.24 And yet, as
Guillou points out, Constantinople III makes not a single mention of the
prayer of Gethsemane, that text on which the monothelite (one will) crisis
centred (cf. Matt. 26.39; Mk. 14.36; Lk. 22.42). He contends that, if Constantinople III is to be understood in its full profundity, it must be read through the
texts that underpin its doctrine: the relevant texts of Maximus the Confessor
and the acts of the Lateran synod of 649.25 Here, in attending to Gethsemane,
the real Christological contribution of Constantinople III becomes apparent.
Guillou writes:
This historical understanding of Christology, in light of the agony of
Christ, presupposes the ontology of Chalcedon, as the Lateran texts
made plain. However, the human freedom of Christ consists concretely
in the history of the nature assumed by the Word into the personal centre
of who he is. There is, therefore, a complementarity between the ontological dimension and the historical dimension, which means there is
[in the doctrine of the Terminus] a truly human history of the Word
Incarnate.26
In this way, a Maximian reading of Constantinople III yields a full “narrativisation” of Chalcedon ontology, a blending of historical event and metaphysical speculation, of story and ontology. In so doing, Constantinople III
affords a dogmatic mode of Christology that is at the same time both a
semiotic reading of narrated events-as-signs and a labour of speculative metaphysics.27 This is part of the unique ontology of Christianity, its “narratological” character.28
***
“Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will,
but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26.39).29 The newness of the Maximian reading of the
prayer in Gethsemane lies in the weight of ontological meaning brought to
bear on both petitions: the petition to “let this cup pass” and the petition for
the Father’s will to be done. Maximus sought to articulate the irreducible
duality of wills on the level of nature, coupled with the absolute unity of the
act of willing on the subjective level of Son’s divine Person. In a Cyrilline
sense, Jesus—because he is the Incarnate Logos—is the True Man, but he is
never a “pure man” (yilος α nqrwpoς).30 Christ’s humanity subsists divinely
in the Person of the Son.31 Therefore, everything Jesus is and everything Jesus
wills, both “is” and is “willed” in the unity of his divine Person. And this
raises the question of the meaning of the palpable resistance of the first
petition of Gethsemane: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me”
(Matt. 26.39).
For Maximus the resistance of the first petition is integral to the ontology
of Christ having become like us in all things but sin.32 The depth of the
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 205
Incarnate’s assumption is made plain in Ad Thalasassium 21, which deploys
the logic of the patristic axiom, quo non est assumptum non est sanatum.33
Responding to the question of how the sinless One can put on the passions
that result from Adam’s sin, Maximus argues that only in putting on these
passions has Christ truly “inaugurated a complete restoration”.34 Being God
and Sovereign, Jesus was under no compulsion to experience the passions
indigenous to the fallen condition. Yet he willingly assumed this condition,
submitting himself to every temptation of fallen humanity, in order that he
might heal the sin of Adam from within, in order that “he might provoke
the evil power and thwart its attack, putting to death the very power that
expected to seduce him just as it had Adam in the beginning.”35
For Maximus, the perpetuation of humanity’s sinful condition lies concretely in the mode by which human desire has become determined by
bodily/material pleasure ( ηdon η) and bodily/material pain (οd υnh). This
determination destabilises the pneumatic reality of rational nature, which is
meant to desire spiritual ends by spiritual means. Human desire is thus
enslaved by a false-sequela, and this slavery, for Maximus, is specifically
grounded in fallen humanity’s fear of death.36 In the Incarnation the Logos
descends into the false-sequela of Adam’s fear of death in order to redeem the
form of human nature from within the economy of the “lifelong bondage”
(Heb. 2.15).
In Ad Thalasassium 61, Maximus writes:
He [the Incarnate Logos] brought to light the equity of his justice through
the magnitude of his condescension, when he willingly submitted
himself to the condemnation of our nature to passibility, and thereby
made that passibility itself the tool (οplon) with which to destroy sin and
death, and the bodily pleasure ( ηdon η) and pain (οd υnh) that are its
consequence.37
In this way, the passibility of fallen nature is assumed into the divine Person
of the Son as the pattern of salvation itself.38 God “desires all men to be saved”
(1 Tim. 2.4), and this divine desire is humanly willed when Jesus becomes
obedient unto death (cf. Phil. 2.5–11).39 And so by his wilful obedience, Christ
takes the condemnation of Adam to death and transfigures it into the immortal victory. All this is part of the logic whereby Christ’s “not what I will”
becomes the icon of the “perfect harmony and concurrence” of the two wills
in the economy of the fallen cosmos.40
***
In Disputatio cum Pyrrho, Maximus shows how the resistance (sustolη)
of the human will in the prayer at Gethsemane purifies the fallen mode of
human desire. Jesus heals Adam’s wound from within. And so at Gethsemane there is a “both/and”: Jesus truly drew back from his voluntary death,41
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
206 Aaron Riches
and his human will was always fully deified in perfect communion with the
divine will of the Trinity. This paradoxical “willing while resisting” is possible because the fear from which resistance issues can be either natural or
unnatural depending on whether it is motivated by the good and right desire
to preserve being or by a resistance counter-the-logic-of-being.42 Since Jesus
fully assumed what is good, and since what is not assumed is not healed,
Jesus fittingly assumes the natural fear and resistance that desires the preservation of the gift of being: “the Logos, by virtue of his humanity, had of his
humanity the self-preserving power that clings to existence.”43
Gethsemane, however, is not merely an icon of Christ’s human fear; in the
agony Jesus wilfully subjects the passions of the fallen nature to the divine
will of God in his obedience to the Father (cf. Phil. 2.5–11). He transfigures the
meaning of fear of death into an act of filial adoration. As Paul Blowers writes:
“the Savior’s deliberate demonstration of the new superior tropos of human
fear, [is] a real transformation of the passion of fear within the mode of the
hypostatic union.”44 In this way, the resistance in the prayer of Gethsemane is
precisely the theandric work by which the Son purifies the anguish of death,
making it the tool by which death and sin are destroyed. Christ takes the
wage of Adam’s sin and offers that wage itself as the pattern of filial adoration, revealing authentic humanity in the realm of fallen nature, which means
that Christ was truly afraid. Maximus writes:
He [Jesus] was truly afraid, not as we are, but in a mode surpassing us.
Because all things that are natural in Christ are natural both according to
our nature’s rational principle and also as having this rational principle of
our nature in accordance with his [Christ’s] supernatural mode of existence. This was so, in order that both our nature, by means of its rational
principle, and the economy [of our nature in Christ], by means of its
supernatural mode of existence, might be made trustworthy (pistwq η).45
Christ’s human fear is trustworthy (pistwq η), from the Greek “p ιstiς”, that
word so dear to the New Testament Gospel. This fear of Jesus in Gethsemane
is a pattern of fear one can trust. Christ’s fear is therefore “true” in two senses.
(1) The fear of Jesus in Gethsemane really is, in such a way that it overcomes
every Apollinarian reduction of the Incarnation, which would suppose the
impassible God cordons him to a realm extrinsic to the finitude of human
suffering. (2) The human fear of Christ is uniquely authentic: it is the pattern of
true human fear such as only the True Man can experience it. Thus the Son’s
anguished resistance at Gethsemane—because it is the experience of a divine
Person—is a “trustworthy” experience of the fear of death, surpassing in
authentic humanity every other so-called experience of “human” fear. And
this because it is a state of adoration, the agony of death lived within the Son’s
perfect filial communication with the Father. Only thus is it fully human, and
only thus is it the trustworthy pattern, the doxological path, of our own
humanity. Gethsemane hereby recapitulates the anguish of death into a sight
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 207
of that filial communication for which the inquietum cor essentially longs.
Gethsemane is the pattern of theandric love for the Father impassibly suffering the wage of Adam’s sin (cf. Rom. 6.23).
III. Against Dualism
The “wondrous exchange” (kal η αntistrof η)46 in Christ is the content of the
Mystery of the Incarnation. On one level this is the deep logic of Chalcedon:
two natures in One Person. On another level, this is the weakness of the
Definitio fidei, for in as much as Chalcedon states the fact of the two natures in
the One Christ, it yet leaves the ontological mode of the circumincession of
difference in Christ (the wonder of the exchange) unspecified.
The injunction of the International Theological Commission has been more
forcefully reiterated by Joseph Ratzinger (himself a member of the Commission that drafted the 1979 document). Ratzinger’s charge: if Christological
reflection comes to an end with Chalcedon then “dogmatic Christology
comes to a stop with a certain parallelism of the two natures in Christ.”47 In
this way Ratzinger diagnoses a residual binary logic in Chalcedonian Christology which is only overcome through a deepened theology of the communicatio idiomatum in the Son.
According to Ratzinger, “the affirmation of true humanity and true divinity
can only retain its meaning if the mode of unity of both is clarified.”48 For him,
this is the achievement of the Maximian Christology of Constantinople III,
which centres on the heart of who Jesus is, the divine personhood of the Son
rooted in “his constant communication with the Father.”49 The unity of natures
in Jesus occurs here, where, as the Terminus states, “the two wills and principles of action are reconciled in correspondence.”50 In this way, a theology of
the filial prayer of Jesus specifies the mode of mutual indwelling of divinity
and humanity in the Son’s singular synthetic Person. Therefore, speculative
reflection on the prayer of the Son concretely abolishes whatever latent binary
logic is unwittingly preserved at Chalcedon. For this reason Ratzinger is
decisively less interested in how Maximian Christology might overcome
monophysitism or monotheletism. Rather, for him, the Maximian achievement lies pre-eminently in the abolition of every dualism of the two natures in
Christ: Maximus is “the most determined conqueror of Nestorianism.”51
Ratzinger’s attraction to the Maximian overcoming of Nestorianism is
connected to his theology of the Liturgy and to his critique of its postConciliar form. On his view, the Liturgy is intimately bound to Christology,
and therefore “[o]nly a close connection with Christology can make possible
a productive development of the . . . practice of liturgy.”52 Liturgy is imitatio
Christi, the mode of participating in the unity of Christ’s divine personhood.53
As such, a crisis of Liturgy is a crisis in Christology. Here Ratzinger’s insistence on the integral relation between Liturgy and Christology links up with
our understanding of Christ as the initiator of the authentic human pattern of
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
208 Aaron Riches
doxology and communication, our understanding of Jesus as the one who
embodies and is the “exemplar” of the Liturgy of the divine-filial state of
adoration for which the human was made.
According to Ratzinger, the contemporary Liturgy suffers on account of a
dualism in Christology, a discretely dissociated anthropology that presumes
it is possible to imitate the “human” Jesus apart from the “divinity” of the Son
of God.54 Under this condition, the Liturgy becomes increasingly focused on
“our” humanity (the self-evident “given” of our nature). The Liturgy is thus
inclined to become a “self-enclosed” parody of latria, a parody that fails to
doxologically open in metanoia to the divine horizon of the filial-union Jesus
gifts to the world in gifting himself (i.e. his own personhood).55 In this way,
the contemporary form of the Liturgy is posited as betraying a Nestorian
dissociation of humanity and divinity in Christ. Attempting to discretely
follow the “pure” humanity of Jesus, the Liturgy loses the Person of the Son
and in so doing loses the personal pattern of humanity’s divine sequela.
Underpinning Ratzinger’s diagnosis of this Nestorian parallelism at the
heart of the liturgical crisis is a rejection of the judgement associated with
J. A. Jungmann, Karl Rahner, Karl Adam and F. X. Arnold, who, in the
mid-twentieth century, thought they perceived a “factual monophysitism
among pious people.”56 For Ratzinger, to the contrary, the most persistent
and threatening heresy of modernity (and perhaps post-Chalcedon Christology tout court) is not so-called “monophysitism”, but the Nestorianism that
has now become pronounced in the degradation of the Liturgy.57 Thus the
quasi-Nestorianism that expressed itself in neoscholasticism before Vatican II
(paralleling “grace” and “nature”) is reincarnated after the Council among
those theologians who would dispense with the impassible Logos and
attempt to find comfort in the dissociated “humanity” of a Jesus who merely
“suffers with us”. For Ratzinger this heresy is the abolition of the very reality
of who Christ is: the One who has torn the veil of the Temple (cf. Matt. 27.51)
and gifted a sequela into the Holy of Holies (cf. Heb. 10.19).58 In Jesus there is
no humanity that suffers apart from the impassible divinity of the Word. In
the Son there is no “natura pura” that can be dislocated from the deified
revelation of true humanity. Jesus is the communio of humanity with God—
the site of created and uncreated communication—or else he is nothing at all:
“He performs the ‘alchemy’ which melts down human nature and infuses it
into the being of God.”59
Thus, for Ratzinger, the dyothelitism of Maximus and Constantinople III
solves the real problem of Christology: the one-sided Christology of Nestorianism, which dissolves the unity of Christ’s divine Person.60 He writes:
The Council of Constantinople analyzed the question of the two-ness and
the one-ness in Christ by reference to the concrete issue of the will of
Jesus. It resolutely maintains that, as man, Jesus has a human will which
is not absorbed by the divine will. But this human will follows the divine
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 209
will and thus becomes one with it, not in a natural manner but along the
path of freedom. The metaphysical two-ness of a human and divine will
is not abrogated, but in the realm of the person . . . the fusion of both takes
place, with the result that they become one will, not naturally, but personally. This free unity—a form of unity created by love—is higher and
more interior than merely natural unity. It corresponds to the highest
unity there is, namely, trinitarian unity.61
The mode of mutual indwelling in Christ is specified by Ratzinger in the
personal communion of Love which is the communicatio idiomatum of the two
natures. Hereby, in emphasising the son’s perfect communication of differentiated unity, Ratzinger’s dyotheletism mobilises Christology in a decisively
“Cyrilline” direction.
***
In Opusculum 7, Maximus writes of Jesus, “as a man, experiencing his divine
nature, he acts humanly”; but “as God, according to his human nature, he acts
divinely”.62 In Jesus, the human by nature works to will divinely what God by
nature works to will humanly.
Maximus’s emphasis on the ontological interpenetration of divinity
and humanity in Christ is Cyrilline, in the sense that it is soteriologically
grounded in the communicatio idiomatum. As Cyril of Alexandria writes: “If
he conquered as God, to us it is nothing; but if he conquered as man we
conquered in him (E ι mε n gα r εn ιkhsen ως Qeος, prος ηmας oυdε n, e ι dε ως
α nqrwpoς, ηme ι ς εn aυtω nenik ηkamen).”63 It is precisely this “exchange” in
Christ that is specified by Maximus in Opusculum 7, where the divine nature of
the Son acts and wills humanly while the human nature in Christ acts and wills
divinely.64 If, however, Maximus’s specification of the interpenetration of
natures bears witness to a certain Cyrilline sensibility, it is more concretely an
indigenous post-Chalcedon “miaphysite” debt.65 The specification of the
mode of mutual indwelling in Opusculum 7 is a direct paraphrase of the
non-Chalcedonian Syriac Christology of Denys the Areopagite.66
According to Denys’s Epistola 4, the reality of who Jesus is consists in
the fact that “he neither does divine things divinely nor human things
humanly”.67 Rather Jesus, according to Denys, manifested a “new theandric
energy”: he does divine things humanly and human things divinely.68 The
theandric Christ is Maximus’s source in Opusculum 7.69 To go even further,
however, underpinning Denys’s specification of the mutual indwelling of
divinity and humanity in the theandric Christ, there is a not so thinly veiled
miaphysite rebuke of the Christology of the Tome of Pope Leo the Great,
which stated that in Christ each nature performs the act that belongs to that
particular nature.70 As Leo put it: “the Word performs what belongs to the
Word, and the flesh accomplishes what belongs to the flesh.”71
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
210 Aaron Riches
In 449 (living in exile as a condemned heretic) Nestorius read the Tome Leo
had sent to Flavian and rejoiced.72 He discerned therein a papal vindication of
own position. Nestorius’s judgement was perhaps optimistic; nevertheless,
one cannot help but notice in the Tome something of the latent parallelism
Ratzinger warns against. As Thomas Weinandy puts it:
. . . Pope Leo in his famous Tome to Flavian . . . stated that some things
Jesus did he did as God and some things Jesus did he did as man. . . . Leo
wished, in so saying, to uphold the two natures in Christ in opposition to
Eutyches. While this is not the most apt form of expression (Leo may be
great, but this, hopefully, was not the apex of his greatness), it must be
remembered that he said this within the context of noting how Jesus
revealed himself. Some actions revealed that he is man—eating, grieving,
suffering, etc. Some actions revealed that he was God—working
miracles. This is true. What Leo failed to note is that the actions which
revealed that Jesus was God were done as a man.73
The theological limit of the Tome is precisely what Denys recapitulates, and
through Maximus the Dionysian recapitulation becomes the doctrinal specification of the mode of mutual indwelling of the two natures in Jesus, who
works to will divine things humanly and human things divinely. It is important, however, to read the Dionysian rebuttal of Leonean parallelism not
simply as a rejection of Leo’s Tome, nor as a Christology set over and against
the Christology of the Pope of the Council of Chalcedon. In Denys there is
something subtler happening.
Hans Urs von Balthasar has named Denys an “irenical discerner of the
whole in all partial formulations.”74 This irenical discernment is evident not
least in Denys’s recapitulation of Leo. The style of the synthetic non-binary
Christology of Denys’s Epistola 4 is embodied in his faithful radicalisation of
a certain “weak” communicatio idiomatum already latent in the Tome. For Leo
did write that the catholicity of the Church lives and grows by the profession
“that neither humanity is without true divinity nor divinity without true
humanity.”75 Which means that there is a sensibility in the Tome that runs
somewhat counterwise to the parallelism it did not fully overcome—and
there is evidence that Denys may signal to this effect in his declaration of the
“newness” of the theandric Christ. For in the very paragraph of the Tome in
which the phrases recapitulated by Denys appear, Leo writes of Christ as a
novo ordine and a nova nativitate.76 In this way, Denys should be read as
enacting a more irenical resistance to the parallelism of the Tome than that
offered by the most famous spokesman of miaphysite Christology, Severus of
Antioch.
I have recalled the discernment of Denys to show how a certain sensibility
of the non-Chalcedon miaphysite tradition concretely gifted Chalcedonian
Christology with the crucial resource by which the parallelism of the two
natures was overcome. If, as Ratzinger states, “the affirmation of true human© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 211
ity and true divinity can only retain its meaning if the mode of unity of both
is clarified”,77 then Chalcedon retains its meaning insofar as it draws into
itself a certain miaphysite logic. Denys is the presence of non-Chalcedonian
miaphysitism in the heart of orthodox Chalcedonian Christology.78 And this
Dionysian presence is at the heart of the Christological unity given doctrinal
status at Constantinople III: “declaring that our salvation had been willed by
a divine person through a human will.”79
IV. Desire for God
Karl Rahner once described the Definitio fidei as “not [an] end but [a] beginning”, or more precisely, an “end and . . . beginning”.80 Sarah Coakley has
taken up this Rahnerian claim in order to offer a reading of Chalcedon that
goes beyond Rahner: she suggests that “Chalcedon is strictly neither end nor
beginning, but rather a transitional (though still normative) ‘horizon’ to which
we constantly return.”81 Her proposal seeks to establish a “more expansive”
approach to Chalcedon that neither falls into the closure of “literalism” nor the
ontological minimalism of a merely “linguistic”/“metaphorical” reading.
For Coakley, the notion of Chalcedon as a “horizon” can be read as offering
a “phenomenological” approach (although Coakley does not call it this). The
“horizon” of Chalcedon, for Coakley, is grounded in the word for “definition” that is the title of the Greek manuscript of the Definitio fidei: “οroς”.
Drawing on Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Coakley argues that οroς
signifies something in a “range from ‘boundary’, ‘horizon’, and ‘limit’, to
‘standard’, ‘pattern’, and (monastic) ‘rule’.”82 She contends that this meaning
is integral to the text, and that the “semantic clarity, linguistic precision, or
careful circumscription” we are accustomed to associate with a “definition”
is rather foreign to the logic of Chalcedon.83 In this context, she reminds us
that Gregory of Nazianzen named Christ himself the οroς of God.84 The οroς
of Chalcedon is pre-eminently a Person, which means there is no discrete or
circumscribable knowledge of “Jesus” outside the intentionality of spirit/
mind that goes after, or follows, the action of this Person.
This reading correlates with the “spiritual Christology” Ratzinger articulates as overcoming the parallelism of natures in Jesus.85 For Ratzinger, this
Christology again involves an intentionality of mind/spirit, a focused meditation on the phenomenality of Christ: “Jesus’s activity proceeding from the
core of his personality . . . his dialogue with the Father.”86 If Jesus is unintelligible apart from his filial communication, for us Jesus is only manifested in
the existential act of our own following into that communication itself: following in order to see. Only by tracing the Son’s personal communication do
we apprehend who he is. Ratzinger writes: “The way that God is seen in the
world is by following Christ; seeing is going, is being on the way . . .”.87 And
being “on the way” means “participating in the prayer of Jesus.”88 Thus, for
Ratzinger, as for Coakley, Jesus is not a definably fixed or circumscribable
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
212 Aaron Riches
“thing”. On the contrary, he is a Person, the οroς of the communication for
which the human is created, the One in whom we are caught up into the
“horizon” of his own filial following in communication with the Paternal
Source who sent him into the world.
Coakley’s justification for reading the Definitio fidei in the direction of this
expansive οroς is rooted in what she perceives as the intention of the Council
Fathers. Her claim is substantiated by the fact that the bishops initially
charged with authoring the formula were resistant to the Byzantine Emperor’s pressure to produce a document with greater precision and clarity.89 In
an act of orthodox recalcitrance the bishops settled on a “horizon”, a purview
that draws the mind toward the One who is the οroς and the Way. The
bishops thus rejected the “imperialism” of fixity, eschewing the semantic
stasis of a-temporal precision. However, if the οroς opens a semantic field of
meaning toward who Jesus is, the Terminus provides the crucial speculative
means of articulating the manner in which the communication of the
God-Man is irreducibly One. In this way the Terminus of Constantinople III
partakes in the οroς of Chalcedon, placing it now in the field of the action of
the “united double desire” of theandric communication. In this way, Ratzinger’s Constantinoplean Christology completes Coakley’s Chalcedonian
Christology: the οroς opens through the Terminus into the Sequela Christi.
***
The first topic of Section One of the Catechism of the Catholic Church—on
“Man’s Capacity for God”—concerns human desire. The Catechism states:
“The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by
God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.”90 The
human person is posited as a being constituted by a desire for God “written
in the human heart”, which, in turn, is constituted in the call of God “who
never ceases to draw man to himself.”91 The Catechism thus conceives the
essential capacity of the human person to communicate with God within a
“double mediation of desire”,92 a dual movement “of” and “for” interplaying
in the midst of the inquietum cor.
The Catechism’s statement on the desire for God correlates with a remarkably un-translated text of Maximus, Ambiguum 48. There the Confessor specifies an ingression of God in the middle of every human longing such that the
dunamis of the human eros for God can be understood already as a kind of
theandric participation. Maximus writes:
God having made all nature according to wisdom, secretly placed in each
being of rational nature a primary dunamis of knowledge of him. He is a
gracious Lord, for in giving to us humble humans—according to our
nature—this yearning and eros for him, God himself naturally partakes in
the dunamis of the principle of our being. By this [the fact that the principle
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 213
of our being involves an eros for God in which God himself partakes] we
are reassured that we are able to recognise the means of the full measure
of our desire, and so indeed we do not go astray to miss the mark which
we are going to hit.93
The “mark” for which the human is made to “hit”—the full measure of
human desire—is deification: the theandric reciprocity of created and uncreated Love.
Out of the logic of the double interplay of human desire, as it is articulated
in the Catechism and by Maximus, the “not yet” of finite desire is specified as
an anticipated participation in the theandric exchange only perfected in the
full deification of the human creature. This is part of the reality of the double
nature of this desire: the longing “for” God that is rooted in the constitutive
call “of” God in which “God himself naturally partakes.” And here I propose
that what Christ purifies and recapitulates in his dyothelite prayer at Gethsemane is precisely this interplay of desire which God has “secretly placed in
each being of rational nature”. Further, this double mediation of desire can
be specified as part of the divine convenientia of Christ’s human work of
salvation: “willed by a divine person through a human will.”94 The theandric
reciprocity of human desire is thus already internal to the communicatio
idiomatum of Christ’s own dyothelite Love for the Father. Indeed the double
mediation of the communicatio idiomatum can even be said to be the divine
condition of the possibility that this first-century Palestinian Jew might, as
John Paul II claims, “with a human will” and “with a human heart” reveal
“the mystery of the Father and of his love”.95
The human desire for deification is “the inner motive” of all the human
does. It is the yearning “rooted in man’s being.”96 Original Sin plays off of this
constitutive human desire, but the “sin” is all in the “grasp”, in the attempt
to be “a god” apart from God.97 As Ratzinger summarises:
[T]he sin of Adam was really not his wanting to be like God; this, after all,
is the call of the Creator himself has given to human beings. Adam’s
failure was to have chosen the wrong way of seeking likeness to God and
to have excogitated for himself a very shabby idea of God. Adam imagined that he would be like God if he could subsist solely by his own
power and could be self-sufficient in giving life to himself as he saw fit.
In reality, such a mistaken quest of an imagined divinization leads to
self-destruction, for even God himself, as the Christian faith teaches us,
does not exist in isolated self sufficiency but is fully divine only as
infinitely needing and receiving in a dialogue of love and as giving
himself freely and without limit. Humans become like God only when
they enter into this same movement.98
Adam’s attempt to “grasp divinity” enacts his “shabby idea of God”. In
this way, the constitutive desire of the human is manipulated through
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
214 Aaron Riches
sin in such a way that it actually works to foreclose deification, which
only arrives in the “infinitely needing and receiving” of the “dialogue of
love” that is both “of” and “for”. By reaching for the apple, Adam took hold
of the one thing he could grasp apart from God: the nihil from which he was
drawn.99
In Christ the divinity Adam sought to take by force is revealed to be what
God eternally wills the human to receive by grace. The Son embodies the
divine vocation of Adam: learning to live by Gift in the unencompassable
communio of triune Love. In this way, the pattern of the Sequela Christi leads to
the gifted reception of oneself in the generous opening out of the “self” for
the Other. Or, as Pavel Florensky puts it, the authentic “self” only emerges
when it “incorporates its I in the I of another”—which means that the “I” is
also “not-I”, but rather (and most authentically) “Thou”.100 On this view,
personhood is analogically grounded in the pattern of the trinitarian perichoresis, which means that “self”-renunciation for the Other is not a kenosis
that exhausts the “I”; rather, in “this ‘emptying’ or ‘kenosis’, there occurs a
reverse restoration of I in the norm of being proper to it”.101 And this unlocks
the paradox of theosis: becoming deiform involves receiving all one is from
another in the “dialogue of love”.
Deification is coming to live by Gift.
V. Pneumatology and the Church
Few twentieth-century theologians apprehended the value of the dyothelite
doctrine more keenly than Vladimir Solovyov.102 For Solovyov, the achievement of Godmanhood, of theandric participation in Christ’s divine personhood, is constituted by the dyotheletism of a “free spiritual act”.103 Thus, the
felicity with which dyothelite Christology articulates the unified circumincession in Christ is also the means by which it articulates the differentiated
unity of the creature’s deification; and this in such a way that Christ’s divine
personhood can now be fully participated and repeated in the life of the
Church. Solovyov writes:
[F]or the harmonization of the two natures in the Divine-human person
to be a free spiritual act, human will has to take part in it—a will that is
distinct from the divine will and that, through the rejection of any possible contradiction with the divine will, freely submits to the latter and
brings human nature into complete inner harmony with Divinity. Thus,
the conception of spiritual humanity presupposes a single divine-human
person, uniting two natures and possessing two wills.104
For Solovyov, dyotheletism is thus bound to a “conception of spiritual
humanity”—an actualisation of the freedom that makes possible the unity
of human participation in the new theandric life. Solovyov’s insistence
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 215
shares much with Ratzinger’s “spiritual Christology”, especially insofar
as it intimates a pneumatological aspect integral to dyothelite
Christology.
The emphasis on the “spiritual” in the Christologies of Solovyov and
Ratzinger points to a common appropriation of the work of dyothelite correspondence to the Person of the Holy Spirit. This pneumatological dimension is the “synergism” of divine-humanity, what Sergei Bulgakov calls the
“complete inner harmony” of God and humanity in the theandric receptivity
of the person to the Spirit of God.105 Thus, if Christology is a sustained
reflection on the Son’s prayer, then with equal force it can be said to be a
meditation on humanity’s liturgical reception of the Spirit. And if the language of Constantinople III can be read as specifying the communicatio idiomatum in terms of Jesus’s filial prayer, it can further be read as specifying the
pneumatological correspondence of created and uncreated desire in the latria
of Liturgy.
Here I substantiate the pneumatological aspect of my claim through the
correlative value of the second and third petitions of the Matthean version of
the Pater noster: “thy Kingdom come” and “thy will be done” (Matt. 6.10). The
petition of Gethsemane in the Pater noster follows a petition for the Kingdom’s coming which is both (i) for the Reign of the Spirit begun at Pentecost,
and (ii) “Marana tha”, the dyothelite cry of the Spirit and Bride saying,
“Come, Lord Jesus” (cf. Rev. 22.17–22).106 In the Lukan version of the Pater
noster, these two Matthean petitions are collapsed into a single petition for
the coming of the Kingdom (cf. Lk. 11.2). Certain old manuscripts of Luke’s
Gospel replace the petition with a plea for the Holy Spirit: εlε tw tο pneυma
soυ (Lk 11.2).107 Further, in his commentary on the Pater noster, Maximus the
Confessor points to this old manuscript as the key to understanding the
petition for the Kingdom.108
All this works to reveal a pneumatology underpinning dyotheletism—
both the dyotheletism of the hypostatically united wills of the Son, and the
dyotheletism of the liturgically united divine and human wills of the ecclesia
(Spirit and Bride). Thus, if the Church is constituted and overshadowed by
the Spirit—Dominum et vivificantem—this is because her own dyothelite
reality corresponds by the grace of the Spirit to the union of the created and
uncreated wills in Jesus. That the dyothelite correspondence of the ecclesia
and Christ is pneumatological is further substantiated by St Paul’s dyopneumatic theology of prayer. In prayer the created spirit is reconciled in
correspondence with the uncreated Spirit: “When we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ it is
the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of
God . . . and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8.15–17; cf. Gal. 4.6). Further,
this dyo-pneumatic theology of prayer is evocative of the Markan version of
Gethsemane (the only record of Jesus using the Aramaic “Abba”, cf. Mk.
14.36). In this way Paul’s dyo-pneumatism is correlative to Gethsemane’s
dyotheletism—emphasising the double interplay of desire “of”/“for” the
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
216 Aaron Riches
Paternal Source, the theandric yearning of the human heart in the constitutive
call of God to the theandric state of adoration.109
***
The Augustinian designation of the Spirit as “Donum” is integral to the
theandric communication to which humanity is called.110 This has been forcefully argued by John Milbank, for whom the Augustinian designation is the
key to understanding the ecclesial participation of humanity in the triune
life of agape.111 For Milbank, naming the Spirit “Donum” specifies the Spirit as
both the “freedom of charity” and “the bond of desire”, the one-way gift
and the “perpetual exchange between the Father and the Son”.112 Thus for
Milbank, intra-trinitarian reciprocity is not purely symmetrical: all the Father
has he gives to the Son and the Son perfectly returns this “all” to the Father.
And yet, in the ineffabilis quidam complexus of the Donum there is an asymmetrical exceeding: a paradoxically perfect return that is also a “passing
beyond”.113 The interval between Father and Son is the surprising occasion of
something unpredictably new in the spiration of the Spirit. David Hart writes:
“In the Spirit the infinite richness that passes from Father to Son is also the
infinite openness of the divine distance, the endless articulation of the inexhaustible content of the Father’s likeness in the Son.”114
The “openness of the divine distance” and the “inexhaustible content of the
Father’s likeness in the Son” is the pneumatological openness of the Trinity,
the ecstatic interval by which God “opens out” from himself in Gift.115 On this
view, the Spirit is the “desire for communion” that “exceeds the closed
communion of a dyad”.116 Gratuity and interval, grace and exchange are
correlative, the “bond of desire” is tensively united to the “freedom of
charity”. By exceeding the closed communion of the dyad the Spirit makes
possible the Church, the mathexis of the cosmos in the trinitarian life. In
Milbank’s words:
[The] constantly renewed asymmetry within the reciprocal relation of the
Father and Son . . . constitutes the “moment” of unilaterality that renders
the Donum truly Donum and not just formally equivalent exchange, and at
the same time a Donum (as Augustine declared) receivable by us as the
“extra” and yet necessary (if we are to realize our supernatural end) gift
of deifying grace—just as the Spirit within the Trinity is at once superfluous and yet fundamental.117
The ecclesia receives the Donum of the Son’s perfect imaging of the Father as
the always-already-present interplay of Christ with his Bride.118 The interval
of trinitarian exchange, superfluous and yet fundamental, is thereby the
condition of the possibility of the ecclesial continuation of Jesus himself in the
latria by which the Church makes oblation of herself as “a living sacrifice” (cf.
Rom. 12.12) to the God to whom nothing can be added.
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 217
In our own context, we can say that it is the Spirit who makes possible the
Sequela Christi, our dyothelite participation in the latria of Christ’s filial communication. In the necessary delays of the interval of the Donum’s alterity, the
heterogeneous members of the ecclesia are graced to enter the trinitarian
exchange ipse Christus. And yet the labour of deification is not reducible to a
simple mimesis of Jesus. On the contrary, the labour of deification is “nonidentical”: the Bride’s labour with the Spirit is a “passing beyond” that
prepares ever anew a body for the Lord (cf. Heb. 10.5; LXX Ps. 40.6).119 The
saints are one with Christ because they are wholly different: union in Christ
differentiates. The followers of Jesus are pneumatically transfigured in God’s
self-revelation of the Son in the communio Spiritus Sancti. By the Spirit, the
Sequela Christi gratuitously discloses afresh the inexhaustible filial alterity of
the unity of the Son’s divine Person. The Spirit transfigures the saints into
further revelations of the One Christ, that the Son might be revealed in
different histories and other geographies. As alter Christus, the defied communion of saints is the true revelation of Jesus Christ. There is no “pure” life
of Jesus that can discretely serve the normative function of an “original text”,
there is no “humanity” of Jesus that can be manifested apart from his divine
Person, and there is no “pure nature” of humanity that can be revealed apart
from the theandric Christ who “reveals man to himself”.
Conclusion
“Jesus Christ continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church
and by means of the Church, which is his body.”120 With these words the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared afresh that the Church is
the living continuation of Christ’s divine personhood. I have tried to suggest
that this ecclesial continuation is only accomplished by a non-dualistic Christology, a Christology rooted in the unity of the personal revelation of humanity and divinity in the communication the Incarnate Son makes with the One
he calls “Father”. Only a non-dualistic Christology yields the “Son”. Christology, therefore, must take up Ratzinger’s challenge to overcome the parallelism of natures in Christ. Herein I have proposed a certain “miaphysitism”
is indispensable; indeed without it, Christology threatens to fall into the
parallelism of Nestorian heresy, demolishing both the fullness of the hypostatic union and the condition of the possibility of Church. The differentiated
unity of Jesus Christ is the personal unity of his ecclesial continuation, the
dyothelite prayer of the Son extending in the latria of the Liturgy: et Spiritus
et sponsa dicunt veni.121
NOTES
1
Henri de Lubac, S.J., Catholicisme: Les aspect sociaux du dogme, Unam Sanctam 3 (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf, 1938), p. 257; ET: Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans.
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
218 Aaron Riches
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Lancelot C. Sheppard and Sister Elizabeth Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius
Press, 1988), p. 331.
Cf. Constitutiones, 2. De errore abbatis Ioachim, in Norman P. Tanner, S.J. (ed), Decrees of the
Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1, Nicea I–Lateran V, (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), pp. 231–233.
Henri de Lubac, S.J., Letter to Maurice Blondel, April 3, 1932, in At the Service of the Church:
Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings, trans. Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pp. 183–185, here at p. 185.
Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha
M. Matessich (London: Crossroads, 1996), p. 27. Throughout I have referred to Pope
Benedict XVI as “Joseph Ratzinger”, following both the standard custom of using his
given name in reference to his earlier work and Benedict himself, in his effort not to
confuse his work as a theologian with the teaching office of the papacy. Cf. Joseph
Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: from the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian Walker (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. xxiii f.
The text published as “Quaestiones selectae de Christologia” received unanimous
endorsement from the Commission’s theologians, in forma specifica. Published in English
as “Select Questions on Christology”, in Michael Sharkey (ed), International Theological
Commission: Texts and Documents 1969–1985 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp.
185–206. For the fullest treatment of the history and theology of Constantinople III, see
F.-X. Murphy and Polycarp Sherwood, Constantinople II et III, Histoire Des Conciles Oecumeniques 3 (Paris: L’Orante, 1973). For the text of the Terminus (in Greek and Latin with
an English translation by John Miffatt, S.J.), see Norman P. Tanner, S.J. (ed), Decrees of the
Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1, Nicea I–Lateran V (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), pp. 124–130.
References to the Terminus give the page and line numbers of Tanner’s Greek text.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 191.
Terminus, 129.43–130.1.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 192.
Ibid., p. 186.
Ibid., p. 187.
Ibid., p. 188.
Ibid.
John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, para. 8 (quoting Gaudium et spes, para. 22); emphasis in the
original.
Henri de Lubac’s original reads: “En révélant le Père et en étant révélé par lui, le Christ
achève de révéler l’homme à lui-même. En prenant possession de l’homme, en le saisissant
et en pénétrant jusqu’au fond de son être, il le force à descendre lui aussi en soi pour y
découvrir brusquement des régions jusqu’alors insoupçonnées. Par le Christ la Personne
est adulte, l’Homme émerge définitivement de l’univers, il prend pleine conscience de soi.”
De Lubac, Catholicisme, pp. 264–265; ET: Catholicism, p. 339. David L. Schindler, in the Preface
to the English translation of Le Mystère Du Surnaturel, points out that “nearly every
encyclical of John Paul II invokes this text [Gaudium et spes, para. 22] in a prominent way”.
Schindler goes on: “John Paul has stated on several occasions, referring to this text, that an
organic relation between ‘theo-centrism and anthropocentrism’ is perhaps the most fundamental principle taught at Vatican II. . . . [Which] is likewise the fundamental principle in
the life-work of Henri de Lubac.” Schindler, Preface to Henry de Lubac, S.J., Mystery of the
Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York, NY: Crossroads, 1998), p. xxvii. Cf. Paul
McPartlan (who to the best of my knowledge was the first to point out the de Lubacian
paraphrase in Gaudium et spes), “Henri de Lubac—Evangelizer”, Priest and People (AugustSeptember 1992), pp. 343–346.
John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, para. 10.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 188.
International Theological Commission, “Theology, Christology, Anthropology”, in Michael
Sharkey (ed), International Theological Commission: Texts and Documents 1969–1985,
p. 216.
The axiom first appears in Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus haereses, 5, preface (PG 7.1120).
Further, cf. Athanasius of Alexandria, Oratio de incarnatione verbi, 54 (PG 25.192B); Gregory
of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica magna, 25 (PG 45.65D); Gregory of Nazianzen, Poema dogmatica,
10.5–9 (PG 37.465); Augustine, In Natali Domini, Sermo 128 (PL 39.1997); Thomas Aquinas,
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 219
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Summa theologiae, IIIa, q. 1, a. 2.; and (more recently) the Catechism of the Catholic Church,
para. 460.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 193. Here the Commission can be read as significantly gesturing toward Cyril of Alexandria for whom the Adam-Christ typology is the
prime exegetical framework of Christology. Crucially, in Cyril’s characteristically “High
Christology”, salvation is “recapitulation”, the vocational restoration of all that Adam was
created to be and so a fulfilment of Adam’s integral nature. On this theme, see Robert L.
Wilken, “Exegesis and the History of Theology: Reflections on the Adam-Christ Typology
in Cyril of Alexandria”, Church History 35/2 (1966), pp. 139–156.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 192.
Ibid.
Gaudium et spes, para. 19.
Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, para. 10.
Marie-Joseph le Guillou O.P., “Quelques Réflexions sur Constantinople III et la Sotériologie de Maxime”, in Felix Heinzer and Christoph Schönborn (eds), Maximos Confessor: Acts
du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur Fribourg, 2–5 septembre 1980 (Fribourg: Éditions
Universitaires, 1982), pp. 235–237, here at p. 235.
For the Acts of the Lateran Synod, see Rudolf Riedinger (ed), Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, Series 2, Vol. 1, Concilium Lateranense a. 294 Celebratum (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1984). For a history of the Synod, see F.-X. Murphy and Polycarp Sherwood,
Constantinople II et III, pp. 174–188 (which includes a French translation of the crucial
Acts of the Lateran Synod at pp. 311 f). The main texts of Maximus’s dyothelite reading
of Gethsemane are: Opusculum 3 (PG 91.45B-56A), Opusculum 6 (PG 91.65A–68D), Opusculum 7 (PG 91.69B-89B), Ad Thalasassium 21 (PG 90.312–317A), and Disputatio cum
Pyrrho (PG 91.288A-353B). English translations of these texts can be found in the following: Opusculum 6, and Ad Thalasassium 21, in On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ:
selected writings from St. Maximus the Confessor, trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis
Wilken (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), pp. 173–176, and pp. 109–
113; Opusculum 3 and 7 in Maximus the Confessor, trans. Andrew Louth (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 193–198 and pp. 180–191; and Disputatio cum Pyrrho, translated by
Joseph P. Farrell, The Disputation with Pyrrhus of our Father Among the Saints Maximus the
Confessor (South Canaan IN: St Tikhons Seminary Press, 1990). Unless otherwise noted,
all my quotations from these texts follow these translations except Disputatio cum Pyrrho,
the translations of which are entirely my own, although I have consulted Farrell’s
translation.
Guillou, “Quelques Réflexions sur Constantinople III et la Sotériologie de Maxime”, p.
236. Cf. Robert L. Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2003), p. 133.
And so I am attempting to contribute something to that “newly enhanced ‘speculation’ ”
John Milbank calls for in light of the mystical aporia of the de Lubacian surnaturel thesis
which, according to Milbank, “deconstructs the possibility of dogmatic theology as previously understood in modern times, just as it equally deconstructs the possibility of philosophical theology or even of a clearly autonomous philosophy tout court.” See John
Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural
(London: SCM, 2005), pp. 11 f.
Cf.: “The God who is, who includes difference, and yet is unified, is not a God sifted out
as abstract ‘truth’, but a God who speaks in the harmonious happening of Being. As
Dubarle argues, this is affirmed by Augustine in the Confessions, where the God of Moses
who defines himself as the God who is (est), the ‘ontological’ God, is also (as the verbal
form indicates) the God who announces himself; while, inversely, the historical God who
declares ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, is also the ontological God, the God
of what positively occurs (not a God attained through any final relinquishing or denial).
Narrative and ontology reinforce each other in an ontology of difference, because God
must be known both as the ‘speaking’ of created difference, and as an inexhaustible
plenitude of otherness”. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason
(Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2006), p. 438; citing Dominique Dubarle, “Essai sur
L’ontologie théologale de St Augustin”, in Récherches Augustiniennes, 16 (1981), pp. 248–
249; emphasis is Milbank’s.
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
220 Aaron Riches
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
Cf. François-Marie Léthel, Théologie de L’agonie de Christ: La liberté humaine de fils de Dieu
et son importance sotériologique mises en lumière par saint Maxime Confesseur, Théologie
Historique 52 (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1979), pp. 29–49, and pp. 86–99; François-Marie
Léthel, “La Prière de Jésus a Gethsémani dans la Contraverse Monothélite”, in Felix
Heinzer and Christoph Schönborn (eds), Maximos Confessor: Acts du Symposium sur
Maxime le Confesseur Fribourg, 2–5 septembre 1980 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1982),
pp. 207–214; Ivor J. Davidson, “ ‘Not My Will but Yours be Done’: The Ontological Dynamics of Incarnational Intention”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 7 (2005), pp.
178–204, especially pp. 190–197; Marcel Doucet, F.I.C., “La Volonté Humaine du Christ,
Spécialement en son Agonie: Maxime le Confesseur, Interprète de l’Écriture”, Science et
Esprit 37 (1985), pp. 123–159; Paul M. Blowers, “The Passion of Jesus Christ in Maximus the
Confessor: A Reconsideration”, Studia Patristica 37 (2001), pp. 361–377; Lars Thunberg,
Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Chicago, IL:
Open Court Publishing, second edition, 1995), pp. 208–230; and Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley, S.J.
(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2003), pp. 256–271.
Maximus, Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91.308D-309A).
Ibid. (PG 91.309A).
Maximus, Opusculum 6 (PG 91.68C).
Cf. Gregory of Nazianzen, Epistola 101 (PG 37.181C–184A).
Maximus, Ad Thalasassium 21 (PG 90.313C).
Ibid. (PG 90.313C).
Ibid. (PG 90.316A). Cf. Pierre Piret, Le Christ et le Trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur (Paris:
Les Éditions du Cerf, 1983), pp. 281 ff; and Blowers, “The Passion of Jesus Christ in
Maximus the Confessor”, pp. 361–377.
Maximus, Ad Thalasassium 61 (PG 90.629C–D). An English translation by Paul Blowers can
be found in Blowers and Wilken, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, pp. 131–144; the
translation here however is my own.
On the theme of the Son’s sinless assumption of sinful human nature cf. Thomas G.
Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). [In these comments I am also indebted to conversations
with Keith Starkenburg of the University of Virginia.]
Maximus, Opusculum 6 (PG 91.68D). Cf. Robert Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian
Thought, p. 130.
Ibid. (PG 91.65B–68C).
Maximus, Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91.297C).
Ibid. (PG 91.297D).
Ibid. (PG 91.297B).
Paul Blowers, “The Passion of Jesus Christ in Maximus the Confessor”, p. 368. Cf. Pierre
Piret, Le Christ et le Trinité selon Maxime le Confesseur, pp. 243–286.
Maximus, Disputatio cum Pyrrho (PG 91.297D-300A); emphasis is mine.
Maximus, Ambiguum 7 (PG 91.1084C); cf. Cyril of Alexandria (PG 69.325D, 368D).
Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp. 37–42; here at p. 37.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 15. Cf. Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, where Ratzinger calls the communication of Jesus with the Father “the true center of his personality” (p. xiv).
Terminus, 129.43–130.1.
Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 27.
Ibid., p. x.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.
The concrete correlation in Ratzinger’s thought between the celebration of the Liturgy
“versus populum” and a quasi-Nestorian Christology that attempts to discretely follow the
“human nature” of Christ is evidenced in Ratzinger’s description of the effect of versus
populum: “In reality what happened [when the tradition of ad orientem was lost] was that an
unprecedented clericalization came on the scene. Now the priest—the ‘presider’, as they
now prefer to call him—becomes the real point of reference for the whole liturgy. . . . Less
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 221
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
and less is God in the picture. More and more important is what is done by human
beings. . . . The turning of the priest towards the people has turned the community into a
self-enclosed circle. In its outward form, it no longer opens out on what lies ahead and
above, but is closed in on itself.” Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John
Saward (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 79–80. Cf. Aidan Nichols, O.P., Looking
at the Liturgy: A Critical View of its Contemporary Form (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press,
1996).
Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 27; cf. pp. 8–9.
Ibid.
For Ratzinger, as for Maximus, the real Mystery of the Incarnation involves the synthetic
communio of all things gathered together in Christ. East and west, majesty and lowliness,
glory and meanness, God and humanity are reconciled in the One divine Person of Jesus,
who, according to Maximus, “draws into one what is divided, and abolishes war between
beings, and binds everything into peaceful friendship and undivided harmony.” See
Maximus the Confessor, Ambiguum 41 (PG 91.1304D-1316A), in Andrew Louth (trans.),
Maximus the Confessor, pp. 155–162. Cf. Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, para. 14.
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, p. 90.
Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 10.
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, pp. 38f; emphasis is Ratzinger’s.
Maximus, Opusculum 7 (PG 91.84C); translation is my own.
Cyril of Alexandria, In Joannis Evangelium, 11.2.33 (John 16.33), (PG 74.473D); as quoted in
Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, p. 121. Cf. Wilken, “Exegesis and the History
of Theology”, pp. 143–146.
Maximus, Opusculum 7 (PG 91.84C).
I have used the term “miaphysite” to designate the Syriac, Coptic and other nonChalcedon “Oriental” Churches that based their Christologies on fidelity to Cyril’s axiom:
m ιa f υsiς to υ qeo υ l ο gou sesarkwm εnh. This should help to clarify a venerable theological tradition from the heresy known as “monophysitism”. Miaphysites have always
rejected the monophysitism and Eutychianism condemned at Chalcedon, and have always
held to the basic duality in Christ of divinity and humanly—within the “m ιa f υsiς
sesarkwm εnh” formula—a formula that was doctrinally endorsed at Constantinople II
(533). The “m ιa” of the “miaphysites” is importantly not synonymous with the “m ο noς” of
“monophysitism”—“m ιa” means “one” where “m ο noς” means “alone” or “only”, and
thus “m ιa” is capable of stressing unity in a relationship of difference, while “m ο noς”
straightforwardly signifies a collapsed singularity. See Paul Verghese, “The Monothelite
Controversy—A Historical Survey”, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 13 (1968), pp. 196–
208; and M. Jugie, “Monothélisme”, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 10–2 (Paris:
Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1929), pp. 2307–2323. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, for more
than a millennium, largely dismissed the non-Chalcedon “Oriental” Churches as “heretical”, but this is no longer the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (nor of most Eastern
Orthodox). See the Common Declaration signed by Pope John Paul II and the Syriac
(miaphysite) Patriarch of Antioch, His Holiness Moran Mar Ignatius Zakka I Iwas,
Common Declaration of Pope John Paul II and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Antioch his Holiness
Moran Mar Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, June 23, 1984, paras. 3–4. Cf. Sebastian Brock, “The Syriac
Churches and Dialogue with the Catholic Church”, Heythrop Journal, 45 (2004), pp. 466–
476; and D. Wendebourg, “Chalcedon in Ecumenical Discourse”, Pro Ecclesia, 7 (1998), pp.
307–332.
Whoever the “Pseudo”-Denys was, he was most certainly a late-fifth or early-sixth century
Syriac, and thus a member of a non-Chalcedonian tradition. He was first cited by Severian
bishops in support of their rejection of Chalcedon at the colloquy held at the imperial
palace of Hormisdas in Constantinople (532). The Severians saw in Denys a defence of
their cause against Chalcedon, which they understood as betraying Cyril’s axiom of
orthodoxy: m ιa f υsiς to υ qeo υ l ο gou sesarkwm εnh. For the Severians, the Definitio fidei
had horrifyingly made doctrine Nestorius’s formula of εn d υo f υsesin, and in so doing
had displaced Cyril’s formula εk d υo f υsesin with the words of a denounced heretic. The
specific Dionysian text cited by the Severians at the colloquy is unclear, since the Innocentii
Maronitae epistula de collatione cum Severianis habita that reported the proceedings of the
colloquy merely mentions that Denys was cited by the Severians without specifying what
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
222 Aaron Riches
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
text was cited. It is more than likely, however, that the Severians cited Epistola 4. Severus
himself refers to it in his third letter to John the hegumenos, using the formula m ιa f υsiς
qeandrik η. And in 633, at the miaphysite synod of Alexandria, in the synod’s Tome of
Union (chapter 7), Denys is invoked as acknowledging Christ’s single energy: ka ι
αnqrω pina miα qeandrik η εnerg εi α. From this quotation of Denys in the Tome of Union
the non-Chalcedonians assumed
a second axiom of miaphysite Christology (along with
the above cited axiom of Cyril). There is debate here, however, as to whether the Severians
mis-quoted the “newness” of Denys’s theandric energy as “oneness”, or whether John
Scythopolis, the first Chalcedon defender of Denys, glossed the “newness” of Denys’s
theandric energy in place of an original “oneness”. On Denys’s non-Chalcedon identity
and the colloquy of 532, see Joseph Lebon, “Le Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite et Sévère
d’Antioche”, Revue d’histoire ecclésistique, 26 (1930), pp. 880–915. On the Severian and
non-Chalcedon Churches, see Joseph Lebon, Le Monophysisme Sèvérien (Louvain: J. Van
Linthout, 1909); W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Elias Tsonievsky, “The Union of the two natures in Christ
according to the non-Chalcedonian Churches and Orthodox”, The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 13 (1968), pp. 170–80; and V. C. Samuel, The Council of Chalcedon Re-Examined
(New York, NY: Xlibris, 2001).
Denys, Epistola 4 (PG 3.1072B–C). For an English translation of the Corpus Dionysiacum, see
Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York, NY: Paulist Press,
1987). The translation here is my own. Henceforth, unless otherwise noted, I have followed Luibheid’s translation.
Cf. Ibid. (PG 3.1072B–C).
Cf. Maximus, Opusculum 7 (PG 91.84D–85A), where Maximus defends Denys’s Epistola 4
from monothelite/monenergist appropriation.
Leo the Great, Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum, 79.2.3–7, in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Vol. 1., pp. 77–82. My references to Leo’s letter give the page, column and
line of Tanner’s Latin text. My English quotations are from his text. Cf. Andrew Louth,
Denys the Areopagite (New York, NY: Continuum, 2001), p. 75.
Leo, Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum, 79.2.3–7.
George Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century, Collected Works, vol.
9, trans. Raymond Miller and Anne-Marie Döllinger-Labriolle (Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), pp. 49 ff. For a fuller account of the reception of the Tome and Chalcedon by a
non-Chalcedonian, see V. C. Samuel, The Council of Chalcedon Re-Examined, passim. Cf. John
Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969), p.
37; and F. Nau (ed), Livre d’Héraclide de Damas (Paris: Letouzy et Ane, 1910), p. 327.
Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p. 204,
n.60.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 2, Studies in
Theological Style: Clerical Styles, eds. Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John Riches, trans. Andrew
Louth, Francis McDonagh and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press,
1984), p. 153.
Leo, Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum, 81.2.30–34.
Ibid., 79.1.21–22. Cf. Louth, Denys the Areopagite, p. 75.
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, p. 38.
I am here playing on the words of Balthasar, who described Denys as “the presence of Asia
in the heart of Western theology.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A
Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 2, p. 148.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 192.
Karl Rahner, S.J., “Current problems in Christology”, Theological Investigations, Vol. 1,
trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore, MD: Helcon, 1963), pp. 149–200; quotations here at pp.
149f; emphasis is Rahner’s.
Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does it Not? Some Reflections on
the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition’ ”, in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel
Kendall, S.J. and Gerald O’ Collins, S.J. (eds), The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.
143–163, here at p. 162; emphasis is Coakley’s.
Ibid., p. 160.
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After Chalcedon 223
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
Ibid.
Gregory of Nazianzen, Oratio 38.13 (PG 36.325A–D).
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, p. 9.
Ibid., pp. 17–18.
Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco, CA:
Ignatius Press, 2005), p. 27.
Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, p. 19.
Michael Slusser, “The Issues in the ‘Definition’ of the Council of Chalcedon”, Toronto
Journal of Theology, 6 (1990), pp. 63–69, here pp. 63–65; cited by Coakley, “What Does
Chalcedon Solve and What Does it Not?”, p. 158.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 27.
The Catechism thus opens its discourse on the human person with an essential affirmation
of le désire naturel du surnaturel. Cf. Henri de Lubac, S.J., Surnaturel: Études historiques,
Théologie 8 (Paris: Aubier, 1946).
The term “double mediation of desire” is William Desmond’s. See Desmond, Perplexity
and Ultimacy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 11; and cf.
Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Maximus, Ambiguum 48 (PG 91.1361B); translation and emphasis are mine.
“Select Questions on Christology”, p. 192.
John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, para. 8.
“If man is to become free, he must be ‘like God’. Wanting to be like God is the inner motive
of all mankind’s programs of liberation. Since the yearning for freedom is rooted in man’s
being, right from the outset he is [we should say always and inescapably] trying to become
‘like God’. Indeed, anything less is ultimately too little for him.” Ratzinger, Behold the
Pierced One, pp. 33–34.
Conor Cunningham characterises the logic of the Fall as the attempt “to have a-part of the
world apart from God”. I am following Cunningham’s logic, owing a debt of metaphysical sensibility to his work. See Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing
and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), passim, quotation here at p. 172.
Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Chicago, IL:
Franciscan Herald, 1985), p. 25.
Cf. Conor Cunningham, “Suspending the Natural Attitude: Transcendence and Immanence from Thomas Aquinas to Michel Henry”, in Conor Cunningham and Peter M.
Candler Jr. (eds), Transcendence and Phenomenology, Veritas (London: SCM, 2007), pp.
260–287.
Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University, 1997), pp. 67 ff., here at p. 67. Cf. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:
The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 2003), pp. 171 f.
Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, p. 67.
This is noted by Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the
Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), p. 98 n. 206; cf. Marie-Joseph le Guillou O.P., Preface to Juan
Miguel Garrigues, Maxime le Confesseur: la charité, avenir divin de l’homme, Théologie
historiques 38 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974), pp. 11–19.
Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Peter Zouboff and Boris Jakim
(Hudson NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), pp. 155–174.
Ibid., p. 159; emphasis in the original.
Sergei Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), p. 248.
Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras. 2816–2821.
Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Orationis Dominicae (PG 44.1157C); and Tertullian, De Baptismo (PL
1.1316A).
Maximus, Expositio Orationis Dominicae (PG 90.884B).
This correlation of dyotheletism and dyo-pneumatism is further substantiated by Augustine and Aquinas who both associated the uncreated “Will” of God with the Spirit. In De
Trinitate, Augustine goes so far as to say that the Spirit alone of the persons of Trinity can
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
224 Aaron Riches
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
be personally named the “Will” of God. See Augustine, De Trinitate, 15.5.38; and Thomas
Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 27, a. 3; and q. 42, a. 2.
Augustine, De Trinitate, 4.5.29, and 15.5.33–36. Cf. Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit,
The Complete Three-Volume Work in One Volume, vol. 3, The River of the Water of Life (Rev
22:1) Flows in the East and in the West, trans. David Smith (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2006),
pp. 144–154.
See John Milbank “Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic”,
in L. Gregory Jones and Stephen E. Fowl (eds), Rethinking Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), pp. 119–161, especially pp. 144–154; and John Milbank, “The Soul of Reciprocity:
Part One”, Modern Theology, 17/3 (July, 2001), pp. 335–391, and “The Soul of Reciprocity:
Part One”, Modern Theology, 17/4 (October, 2001), pp. 485–507.
John Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity”, in Conor Cunningham and
Peter M. Candler Jr. (eds), Transcendence and Phenomenology, pp. 288–333, see especially pp.
328–333, here quoted at 238.
Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity”, pp. 331–332. Cf. John Milbank,
“The Second Difference”, in John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language,
Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 171–193.
David Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 185.
On the Spirit as the “opening out” of God, see Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Vol.
3, The River of the Water of Life (Rev 22:1) Flows in the East and in the West, pp. 148–149.
John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. xi.
Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity”, p. 332; cf. Augustine, De Trinitate,
15.5.27–39.
Milbank, “Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic”, p. 150.
Cf.: “The one who is looking at the Church looks directly at Christ, who builds himself up,
increasing his stature by joining the saved to himself”. Gregory of Nyssa, In Cantica
Canticorum, Homilia 13 (PG 44.1048C).
Dominus Iesus IV.6. Declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2000.
I would like to thank the editors of Modern Theology, Conor Cunningham, Stuart Jesson,
Karen Kilby, John Milbank, John Montag, S.J., and Melissa Riches for helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this essay. The errors are, of course, my own.
© 2008 The Author
Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd