Quotes about Maximus

Maximus knows and expressly states that "faith is true knowledge based on unprovable principles, because it is the testimony to things that lie beyond both theoretical and practical reason."

Maximus remained a child of his time, a disciple of his master. But the fact that he was able to develop his own basic insight, in spite of such influences, makes him one of the greatest thinkers in Christian intellectual history.

Theology, for Maximus, is Cosmic Liturgy.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is—not his essence, or what he is.

Maximus has been called unscriptural, but Scripture is the background and the presupposition for all that he does, to a wholly different degree than in the one-sided scholastic theology or spiritual works of the sixth century. The Confessor's first major work is his set of answers to the questions of his friend Thalassius on passages in the Holy Scriptures. Maximus offers these answers from the fullness both of the exegetical and spiritual tradition and of his own personal meditation.

Maximus expressly says that the Incarnation—more precisely, the drama of Cross, grave, and Resurrection—is not only the midpoint of world history but the foundational idea of the world itself.

But if Maximus is "a mystic like Dionysius", he is surely "a mystic who is also a metaphysician, an ascetic who has reached, through his familiarity with Aristotelian philosophy, a consistency and precision of thought that one looks for in vain in the works of the Areopagite.

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity. Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

Maximus envisages a naturally lasting cosmos as the supporting ground for all supernatural divinization.