International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Milan Đordević
Faculty of Theology “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Skopje, Macedonia; 
[e-mail]
Ideology and Virtue in the Ascetical Ethics of Saint Maximus Confessor
In the background of this paper stays an eternal but actual problem in contemporary 
Orthodox Christianity about the ascetic maximalism and the moral conformism. It seems that 
the “supernatural” character of the divine “saving virtue” does not depend on natural moral life. 
Consequently, what is needed is the openness of the Christian for the grace of God, the acceptance 
of his “supernatural intervention” – and not the “vain” practicing of natural morality. In this way we 
can differ between two “ascetic profiles”: The hardworking ascetic in the proper sense, and the one 
who accepts the symbolic order of the community, its rituals and image and waits to be transformed 
by divine supernatural intervention. The paradigmatic resolution of this issue within the Byzantine 
philosophic-ethical tradition is to be found at Maximus Confessor in his dialogue “Logos asketikos”, 
where a young brother monk and his elder discuss the possibility and the importance of achieving a 
perfect virtuous Christian life. The elder categorically asserts the obligatory character of perfection 
in following Gods commandments and asserts that the logic of the world should be completely 
subordinated to the logic of divine love. The moral minimalism is incompatible with the ascetic 
ethics of Maximus Confessor because it does exactly the opposite – it removes the unconditioned 
love from the top of the ethical hierarchy. In this way the whole system relativizes and begins to 
function as an ideology.

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390
Philippe Vallat
Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria; 
[e-mail]
The Logical and Theological Difficulty with Maximus the Confessor’s 
Doctrine of Gnomic Will
Over the past years a number of studies have been devoted to the topic of the will in Maximus 
the Confessor’s theology. Some envisage the question for itself, but more often a comparison, whether 
explicit or implicit, is drawn with Augustine of Hippo’s teaching on the same question, particularly 
in the context of his hamartiology, with which Maximus’ present some striking similarities. No 
study has been devoted yet to the logical dimension of Maximus’ contradistinction between 
Christ’s “natural” will, and men’s “gnomic” will. This logical dimension, historically related with the 
increasingly logical bent visible in Neo-Chalcedonian Christology, however is of crucial importance 
to assess Maximus’ intent and consistency on this question. A number of scholars came to think 
that the distinctions drawn by Maximus to solve the problem of Christ’s human will allows one to 
profess both that sin did not become part of humanity’s logos after the Fall and that Christ could 
save humanity without assuming men’s fallen tropos of existence. The problem with this doctrine is 
the following: on the one hand, Maximus described men’s gnomic will as an enhypostasied will, and, 
on the other hand, he described the “natural” or prelapsarian character of Christ’s will as a will with 
no human hypostasis. The problem posed by such a contradistinction can be summed up as follows: 
does the will need to be without a hypostasis in order to be “natural”? If yes, unfallen Adam could 
not have had such a will. And does the will need to be enhypostasied in order to be gnomic? If yes, 
there is no hope of salvation for fallen men. Maximus somewhere committed an all too common 
confusion between logical and ontological statements. This is the subject I will deal with if, as I 
hope, my submission does not arrive too late.

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