For Maximus (the Confessor c. 580 – 662), while it is only as a result of Christ’s incarnation and paschal victory that it is at all possible for the consequences of the fall to be reversed, for each of us this victory must be assimilated personally, and that is achieved by the way of asceticism.
In one of his so-called Ambigua, meditations on difficulties in the works of (mostly) St Gregory the Theologian (329/30-389/90), Maximos discusses what later came to be called the “divisions of nature:”
– the division of created nature from the uncreated God;
– within creation, the division between visible and invisible;
– within the visible creation, that between heaven and earth;
– within the earthly creation, that between paradise and the inhabited world;
– within the inhabited world, that between male and female.
The purpose of humankind is to mediate between these divisions and to serve as a “bond of creation” forming a rich harmony from the diversity of nature.
This purpose was frustrated by the fall, and these divisions have become fault lines, exposing the alienation and unrelatedness of fallen humankind.
So, for instance, the division closest to us, that between the sexes, meant to provide the profoundest human experience of union, has become a potent cause of separation and alienation, of brokenness and pain.
Christ, in his life, death, and resurrection, has overcome these divisions, and the way of asceticism enables us to make his victory our own.
Asceticism, then, has not just a personal goal, but a cosmic one; the healing it effects reaches not simply into the brokenness of our individual hearts and our personal relationships, but, in a way difficult to understand, out into the very cosmos itself.
– Andrew Louth, “”Beauty will save the world”: the formation of Byzantine spirituality.”
Theology Today 61, no. 1 (April 2004): 67-77.
Luminous Darkness 