Being Moved: Maximus on Gregory's Love for Lepers
Matthew Elmore, ThD Student, Duke Divinity School
Maximus the Confessor is best known for his doctrine of the Logos. While it permeates the whole of his collected works, its core is found in Ambiguum 7, where Maximus resolves a brother’s confusion over a section of St. Gregory’s Oration 14. Longstanding trends in scholarship have suggested that Maximus is primarily concerned to read Gregory toward the tradition, away from Origenist heterodoxy. This is a fair conclusion, but by implication, Maximus neglects Gregory’s whole context and intent. On such a reading, the Logos doctrine is merely spun from one or two rather esoteric worries about the St. Gregory’s choice of words. I would like to suggest the opposite: that the Logos doctrine is harvested from Gregory’s complete oration, specifically from his concern for lepers. I will therefore collate the larger concerns of both texts, asking how they relate in full.
In St. Gregory’s oration, he pleads with his listeners to care for the destitute—especially for lepers, since they embody destitution at its most extreme. Not only do they experience a rift between their body and their will; they signify the same rift societally, between the body and the will of the people. They are in the body and yet willed not to be. Hence, leprosy dismembers people from people, rendering them anomalous to the state’s economic order. It is against such an ordering of power that Gregory asserts the body of Christ: here is a different polity, a holy nation willing to incorporate lepers as vital members.
Following Gregory’s concerns, Maximus can see the form of Christ in every part of nature. Maximus renders all life-forms logoi — unique instances of God’s verbal being. Noticeably, he avoids listing the logoi in any exhaustive fashion, and he never reduces them to a taxonomy of forms. Although he speaks of logoi as species or natures, he also sees them as particular lives, located at the level of accidents. In sum, the logoi are a determinate number of things, but their existence as a ‘closed set’ is not known in such terms. Their coherence can only be expounded by the infinite and divine Logos. Therefore, when the Logos becomes the particular man Jesus, the Archetype of all things paradoxically deposes and institutes a totality. The body of Christ contradicts both Plato and Aristotle at turns, because, rather than alienating malformed humanity, the Word of God becomes alienated in form.
Maximian metaphysics are deeply inflected by the political and ecclesial sensitivities of Gregory. From this nexus, we can unfold a different sort of biological agenda. Rather than assuming medicine exists simply to relieve particular bodies, we might consider the injunction of Stanley Hauerwas: “medicine’s primary role is to bind the suffering and the nonsuffering into the same community.”
Maximus the Confessor is best known for his doctrine of the Logos. While it permeates the whole of his collected works, its core is found in Ambiguum 7, where Maximus resolves a brother’s confusion over a section of St. Gregory’s Oration 14. Longstanding trends in scholarship have suggested that Maximus is primarily concerned to read Gregory toward the tradition, away from Origenist heterodoxy. This is a fair conclusion, but by implication, Maximus neglects Gregory’s whole context and intent. On such a reading, the Logos doctrine is merely spun from one or two rather esoteric worries about the St. Gregory’s choice of words. I would like to suggest the opposite: that the Logos doctrine is harvested from Gregory’s complete oration, specifically from his concern for lepers. I will therefore collate the larger concerns of both texts, asking how they relate in full.
In St. Gregory’s oration, he pleads with his listeners to care for the destitute—especially for lepers, since they embody destitution at its most extreme. Not only do they experience a rift between their body and their will; they signify the same rift societally, between the body and the will of the people. They are in the body and yet willed not to be. Hence, leprosy dismembers people from people, rendering them anomalous to the state’s economic order. It is against such an ordering of power that Gregory asserts the body of Christ: here is a different polity, a holy nation willing to incorporate lepers as vital members.
Following Gregory’s concerns, Maximus can see the form of Christ in every part of nature. Maximus renders all life-forms logoi — unique instances of God’s verbal being. Noticeably, he avoids listing the logoi in any exhaustive fashion, and he never reduces them to a taxonomy of forms. Although he speaks of logoi as species or natures, he also sees them as particular lives, located at the level of accidents. In sum, the logoi are a determinate number of things, but their existence as a ‘closed set’ is not known in such terms. Their coherence can only be expounded by the infinite and divine Logos. Therefore, when the Logos becomes the particular man Jesus, the Archetype of all things paradoxically deposes and institutes a totality. The body of Christ contradicts both Plato and Aristotle at turns, because, rather than alienating malformed humanity, the Word of God becomes alienated in form.
Maximian metaphysics are deeply inflected by the political and ecclesial sensitivities of Gregory. From this nexus, we can unfold a different sort of biological agenda. Rather than assuming medicine exists simply to relieve particular bodies, we might consider the injunction of Stanley Hauerwas: “medicine’s primary role is to bind the suffering and the nonsuffering into the same community.”