The renaissance in scholarly study of Maximus the Confessor that
began in the 1940s and 50s (through the work of P. Sherwood, H. Urs von
Balthasar, et al.), coupled with the growing culture of patristic
"retrieval" in contemporary theology East and West, has nurtured a
number of important theological recontextualizations of Maximus.
Stimulated by the "neo-patristic synthesis" pioneered by Georges
Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, Dimitru Staniloae, and others, contemporary
Orthodox theology has generated several recontextualized profiles of
Maximus: as ecumenical christologian; as theological cosmologist (and
ecologist); as Eucharistic ecclesiologian; etc. In the West, Hans Urs
von Balthasar, who did much to reintroduce Maximus to contemporary Roman
Catholic theology, developed his "theo-dramatic" paradigm of
constructive theology very heavily (I will argue) on a Maximian
foundation. More recently, Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenological interest
in Dionysian apophaticism has had clear ramifications for
reinterpretation of Maximus. Maximus has also become a crucial resource
in contemporary virtue ethics, and in the work ecological theologians
such as Celia Deane-Drummond, Christopher Southgate, and Willis Jenkins.
He has even been engaged in the recent Evangelical retrieval of
patristic sources. My paper will provide a comparative and critical
analysis of this broad array of profiles.
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