Ever-Moving Repose

Book excerpt: Sotiris Mitralexis offers a contemporary look at Maximus the Confessor's (580-662 CE) understanding of temporality, logoi, and deification, through the perspective of the contemporary philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, as well as John Zizioulas and Nicholas Loudovikos. Mitralexis argues that Maximus possesses both a unique theological ontology and a unique threefold theory of temporality: time, the Aeon, and the radical transformation of temporality and motion in an ever-moving repose. With these three distinct modes of temporality, a Maximian theory of time can be reconstructed, which can be approached via his teaching on logoi and deification. In this theory, time is not merely measuring ontological motion, but is more precisely measuring a relationship, the consummation of which effects the transformation of time into a dimensionless present, devoid of temporal, spatial, and general ontological distance. This manifests a perfect communion-in-otherness. In examining Maximian temporality, the author not only focusses on one aspect of Maximus' comprehensive Weltanschauung, but looks at the Maximian vision as a whole through the lens of temporality and motion.