Saint Maximus on the Lord’s Prayer: An Inquiry into His Relationship to the Origenist Tradition

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    Abstract (may include machine translation)

    This study re-examines the much-discussed question of Saint Maximus' relationship to the Origenist tradition. It starts with the allegations of Saint Maximus' Origenism in an anti-Maximian Monothelete dossier transmitted in Syriac and discovered by Sebastian Brock, and checks this information against passages treating divinisation and the final equality of the divinised saints to Christ in Saint Maximus' commentary on the Lord's Prayer. This part also contains an analysis of his borrowings from and his rewriting of passages in Origen and Evagrius of Pontus, in order to see how much this relationship fits the image that our sources suggest about St Maximus’ alleged Origenism and what kind of structure this suggests about the Architecture of the Universe. Finally, the paper treats some quite astonishing texts in John Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow, showing that, in the later sixth century, there occurred in Palestine a rehabilitation of the monks earlier condemned as Origenist and that John Moschus and, thus, the circle of Maximus was in contact with monks surviving the anti-Origenist persecutions and played a role in this rehabilitation process. As a result it turns out that Saint Maximus and his circle indeed had a strong spiritual relationship to the monks condemned in the sixth century as 'Isochrist Origenists' and that Saint Maximus' philosophy is deeply rooted in this tradition, although it is critical of its tenets and replaces the mythological elements condemned at the fifth ecumenical council with philosophical considerations illuminating the inner structure of this thought.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe architecture of the cosmos
    Subtitle of host publicationSt Maximus the Confessor: new perspectives
    EditorsAntoine Lévy, Pauli Annala, Olli Hallamaa, Tuomo Lankila, Diana E Kaley
    Place of PublicationHelsinki
    PublisherLuther-Agricola-Society
    Pages221-278
    Number of pages58
    ISBN (Print)9789519047782
    StatePublished - 2015

    Publication series

    NameSchriften der Luther-Agricola-Gesellschaft
    Volume69

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