Modern scholars have interpreted Maximus the Confessor's conception of participation in God in different ways, emphasising his Neoplatonic background, or his strictly Christian substitution with a theory of deification, or, finally, his cosmological dimension. The aim of this paper is to outline that a synthesis of all these components is possible by resorting to a diverse method of interpretation, which takes into account both the philosophical Neoplatonic frame and the Christian anthropological assumptions of Maximus’ vision.
A closer analysis of his vocabulary, limited not only to the traditional philosophical Greek terms for participation, is coroborated with observing the transposition of the Ps.- Dionysian participation through hierarchy into the “territory” of every single human being’s experience of God. In Maximus’ neo-Areopagitic and neo-Cappadocian understanding, the hierarchy of communicating the divine light, as appears in Dionysius, is transformed into a progressive knowledge of God by the soul. Admittedly, this could explain why Maximus does not take any serious advantage of the vision of a celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy. God is the Being and every other perfection in every creature. He is all in all, wholly present to every human being and infinitely above all, yet his theophany through creation is different from deification, for the latter one is regulated by the human free will and love. In this interpretation, the role of the logoi of creatures in participation is limited and the Christological component depends very much on how the purpose of the Incarnation is conceived.
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