Demetrios Harper

All Articles by Demetrios Harper

Visiting Research Fellow, University of Winchester,UK

Moral Judgement in Maximus the Confessor: Reflections on an Analogical Ethic

Volume 2 – St Maximus the Confessor
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The point of departure for this paper will be an explication of Maximus the Confessor’s approach to moral judgment in light of the ancient tension between Stoic and Platonic/Aristotelian threads of thought regarding moral incontinence (ἀκράτεια) and the determination of the good. This paper shall seek, on the one hand, to account for the way in which these sometimes incongruous elements are utilized by the Confessor, and, on the other, examine the consequences of his approach for moral theory at large. Of critical importance will be the attempt to understand better how Maximus would consider the determination of moral good to be epistemically possible in the face of diverse human experience and natural circumstances, as well as the various levels of moral training. As such, this essay will attempt to derive a Maximian answer to Rousseau’s dilemma regarding the apparent human tendency to know the common good and yet disregard it.

The aporia posed by the ancients regarding knowing the good and being good has remained a perennial question and has divided ethical theorists up to our current era, resonating both explicitly and implicitly throughout the centuries in ethical thought.1 I do not think it a hasty generalization to say that the early Christian tendency to rigorously emphasize some sort of unconditioned and free will in human moral agency, though at times diverse in its expression, is at least in part directed at this question.2

1.The origin of this debate in ancient thought surrounds the question of ἀκρασία or moral incontinence, the philosophical background of which will be covered below. The original dispute is also described concisely by Terence Irwin in his The Development of Ethics, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 43.
See also Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 14– 17, 32–34, and Michael Frede, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 20–25. See generally Inwood’s Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, Frede’s A Free Will, and Richard Sorabji’s Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) for later responses to this aporia up through Late Antiquity.

 

2.The Christian emphasis on free will and moral culpability on the part of all human agents has divided commentators. The thesis of Michael Frede’s book A Free Will is that the precedents and concepts that would be taken up by the Christian thinkers of Late Antiquity can be found already in the Stoic school of thought. This is disputed by Kyle Harper in From Shame to Sin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 120–27, who argues that the notion of will and emphasis on moral freedom articulated by Christian writers is the result of the uniquely Christian world view. Another example of this conflict is manifested in the interpretation of the thought of Maximus the Confessor on the question of will. In Emotion and Peace of Mind, 337, Richard Sorabji argues against René Gauthier et al., saying that Maximus’ understanding of θέλησις is not really original but is merely the recapitulation of the Stoic notion of οἰκείωσις.