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Abstract · 1. A distinction defended, never derived · 2. Will before choice · 3. The logoi and the one Will · 4. Where gnome comes from · 5. Christ without gnome · 6. Ever-moving rest, and the two states · Works cited

The Gnomic Will, Derived

Maximus the Confessor’s distinction between natural and deliberative willing: received by the Church in 681, reached by elimination in a chain that never starts from it
James A. Burrows · ORCID: 0009-0002-6452-4842 · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22318802 · PhilArchive: BURTGW-2 · SSRN: 7414738 · PDF

Abstract

Maximus the Confessor distinguished the natural will, which belongs to a nature, from gnome, the deliberative willing of a person whose good is not secure. The Church received the distinction in 681. It has been defended since. It has not been derived. An eliminative chain of 137 resolutions reaches it. The chain begins from the observation that non-being requires being and never starts from Maximus. This paper says where each of Maximus’s claims sits on it. Will comes before choice (R.11, R.14). Will is Good (R.47, Def.13). One Will is every being’s willing, without containment (R.44): the seventh Ambiguum’s one Logos and many logoi. Gnome is what the encounter with non-being introduces into a being’s knowing (R.73). The condition carries no guilt (R.101). Misuse is the being’s own act (R.76). Christ has a real human will and no gnome, because there is no “not” in his knowing (R.74, R.111 to R.116). Ever-moving rest is the eternal modality at R.90. Where the chain parts from universalist readings it does so on the same ground: choosing is time, and when time ends the being is what its choosing made it (R.131, R.135).

1. A distinction defended, never derived

In July 645, in Carthage, Maximus the Confessor debated the deposed patriarch Pyrrhus on whether Christ has one will or two. The record of that debate, and the short treatises Maximus wrote to Marinus and others through the 640s, fixed the vocabulary the Church still uses.

A natural will, thelema physikon, belongs to a nature. It is the capacity of a rational nature to desire what accords with that nature. Deliberative willing, gnome, belongs to a person under particular conditions: the mode in which someone weighs this against that because the good is not known with certainty and the outcome is not secure.

Christ, on Maximus’s mature account, has two natural wills, divine and human, because he has two natures, and will belongs to nature. He has no gnomic will. Gnome presupposes ignorance and hesitation. There is no ignorance in him to deliberate through.

The Sixth Ecumenical Council, meeting at Constantinople in 680 and 681, defined two natural wills in Christ, “not contrary to each other,” as the faith of the Church. Maximus had been dead nineteen years. His tongue and right hand had already been removed by the emperor’s court for refusing to stop saying it.

The distinction was forged for Christology. Its reach is anthropological, and the last two decades have taken that seriously. Ian McFarland’s 2007 essay carries the whole point in its title: “Willing Is Not Choosing.” If Christ’s humanity is complete, and Christ does not deliberate, then deliberation is not what makes a will human. Choosing between alternatives is not freedom’s essence. It is a symptom. A nature whose good has become obscure to it starts weighing.

Maximus said as much of the saints. In the seventh Ambiguum he describes their willing as a “gnomic surrender”: they give up the deliberative mode and will only what God wills. The monothelites attacked him for it. They thought he was conceding their case. His reply was that the surrender is the saints’ own. It is the act of a natural will that has stopped weighing, not a will that has stopped.

The distinction has held for thirteen centuries as doctrine. It has been explained, defended, refined, and reread. What it has never been is derived.

Maximus argued for it by reductio inside received categories. If will belonged to hypostasis rather than nature, the Trinity would have three wills and Christ one. If Christ’s human nature lacked a will, it was not a human nature, and what is not assumed is not healed. Both arguments are sound inside the Chalcedonian frame. Neither reaches anyone who does not already grant the frame. And the frame does not derive why gnome exists at all.

Maximus’s answer is creaturehood: a rational nature that does not yet possess its end moves toward it, and moves by deliberating when its good is not secure. That describes the condition. It does not derive it. Adam’s misuse he places in self-love and traces through the dialectic of pleasure and pain. That too is description.

There is a derivation. It does not begin near Chalcedon. It begins with the observation that non-being requires being, and it reaches Maximus’s distinction, his claim about Christ, his reading of Gethsemane, and his “ever-moving rest,” by elimination. One step at a time. A sequence of 137 resolutions titled Anything Willing Is.

Each resolution names a candidate, tests it against what earlier resolutions established, and keeps only what survives. This paper does not repeat that derivation. It says where each of Maximus’s claims sits on the chain and points to the resolution that carries it. Every number below is an anchor on the interactive edition, so any step can be read with its own test. At five places the test itself is also set out in a sentence.

2. Will before choice

The chain’s first four resolutions establish that non-being requires being (R.1); that the label “nothing” cannot designate what is (R.2); that without the possibility of being, being cannot be (R.3); and that possibility is without limitation, which is what the word “anything” points to (R.4, Def.1). Everything after rests on the first of them: a “not” has content only from what is.

The first place the test belongs on the page is how being comes into being from unlimited possibility. A something is specific (R.5). Its specificity has no source, or a source other than the something, or a source that is the something’s own. Those three exhaust the options. R.10 tests the first two.

A source other than the something fixes which something comes about. A potential so fixed, by its own nature or by anything imposed on it, is limited to that something. “Unlimited” empties (R.4). No source is an asserted absence, and an absence is the “not” of what is present (R.1). An arm that denies any source leaves its absence with no relatum, which is what “nothing” designates (R.2).

What remains is being’s own. R.10 names that Choice. It does not survive in that form. Choice is “this, not that.” At R.11 the “not that” does not survive. It is a “not,” and in unlimited potential a “not” has no standing. What remains is “this is” (R.11). The chain names that Will: actualisation without exclusion (Def.2).

Actualisation is Will (R.16). The willing is the coming-to-be, not a cause standing before it. Will wills as itself, not externally justified and not without basis. A specific something whose being what it is had no basis would empty “specific” (R.12, Def.3). From there: Will does not negate, negation being reactive (R.14). Being is willing (R.23). Willing is generative (R.24). What it is to will is what it is to be, so knowing is being (R.28).

This is the fifth place the test belongs on the page. Maximus takes the Good from Dionysius as a name given. The chain reaches it as a result. All prior willing is (R.26), so what generation actualises stands in one of three relations to it: it maintains, it reduces, or it exceeds. Maintaining is not generating (R.24). Reducing empties “unrestricted” (R.4). Increase survives. Generating is flourishing (R.47).

Anything’s nature is that which wills to be, is. Willing is generative. Generating is flourishing. These are not separate features (Def.13). The manuscript’s convergence table sets that nature against one word: Good. Not a property Will has. What Will is. All-Being is Anything’s nature fully operative as being (R.40).

Will needs no view of the future to be this. Anticipating/Planning is generation into what has not yet been (R.34). Foreknowing/Pre-Destining is the being’s entire reality as known and acted from (R.35). Three expressions stand before them, and each is what the current whole willing actualises (R.31). Each is Will entire. R.47 rests on R.24, R.26, and R.31, none of which waits on a later expression, so flourishing holds at Doing, which the chain names instinct, with no anticipation in it (R.32, Def.7). Foreknowledge, where it is, is an expression of Will. It is not a condition of it. Will wills as itself (R.12). It takes no reason from an outcome.

Beside this stands Maximus’s natural will. In the first Opusculum he defines it as a capacity, belonging to a nature, of desiring what accords with that nature. What accords with a nature is its good. The natural will can move only toward that. Gnome is the mode that can go either way. Behind the definition stands Dionysius, whose first name for God in the Divine Names is the Good, and Maximus keeps the name. The will is not the person’s. It is the nature’s. The person, the hypostasis, is the one who wills. What wills in the person is the nature’s own movement toward what it is.

Maximus took the psychology of that movement from Nemesius and, behind him, Aristotle: wish, inquiry, consideration, deliberation, judgement, decision. He set the natural will underneath all of that as something prior to weighing. A nature wills what it is before it weighs anything. Weighing is about outcomes. The natural will does not wait on one.

The chain arrives at the same place and then removes the remainder. Maximus says a nature has a will. The chain says being is willing (R.23), with no nature left over to own the will. The pair Maximus needs does not vanish with the owner. What it is to will is not the same at every expression (R.28, R.30 to R.39). The expressions are discrete in kind and continuous in degree (R.36). Many beings populate each, each unique in its willing at that expression (R.43).

That is the chain’s counterpart of nature: a kind shared by many, not a grade held by one. Two beings whose willing is identical are one being (R.29). That is its counterpart of hypostasis: whose the willing is. The two are joined as identity, not as a capacity and its holder.

This finishes a move Maximus began. His argument against the monothelites was that will belongs to nature rather than to hypostasis: willing is what a rational nature does by being what it is. The chain says it is what any being is by being at all.

That last step is wider than Maximus, and deliberately so. His thelema physikon is the rational nature’s appetency. The chain has every being as its willing, with Doing, the second expression, named as instinct (R.32, Def.7). The convergence with Maximus is at the human kind, willing at Anticipating/Planning (R.99, R.100). The width is what lets the chain say what a nature’s will is before any nature is rational. What it says is R.14: Will does not negate. And R.47: it flourishes before any weighing.

That is McFarland’s title as a result rather than a thesis. Willing contains no “not.” Choosing does. The chain reaches this at R.11, before any being has been distinguished, let alone any human one.

3. The logoi and the one Will

The chain’s third phase sets the expressions of willing in sequence: Being, Doing, Remembering/Reacting, Anticipating/Planning, Foreknowing/Pre-Destining, All-Being. Each is what the prior whole willing actualises. Each includes all prior. The sequence is necessary (R.30 to R.41).

The first actualisation from unlimited potential is necessarily full, because partiality requires exclusion and exclusion did not survive R.11. It is All-Being (R.42). “Full” is the totality of what is actual at that point (R.5), not the sum of what comes after. Unrestricted potential necessarily generates beyond it. Each subsequent being is new, unique, and less than the full actualisation, not contained in it (R.43).

Then R.44: the full actualisation’s willing is every being’s willing. Not containment. All-Being’s willing does not encompass separate willings the way a set encompasses its members. There is one Will. Each being’s willing is that one Will operating as this being’s own. All-Being’s willing is that one Will fully operative.

This is the seventh Ambiguum. Maximus’s logoi, the principles of each created being, pre-exist in the one Logos. The relation is not parts to a whole. The one Logos is the many logoi, and the many logoi are the one Logos. He takes from Dionysius the phrase that the logoi are divine wills. Each creature’s logos is its own, and it is God’s willing of it, with no third thing between.

R.44 is that relation as a result. The identity is not containment. The willing is the same not by coincidence but because one Will wills without excluding (R.11). Each being is distinct in what it is to will (R.29), so the identity does not collapse the many into the one. The unity is not coercive (R.19). Union is not identity or fusion (R.22). That is Maximus’s other insistence, held against the Origenists: deification does not dissolve the creature.

One distinction has to be held here or section 5 collapses into this one. A creature’s willing is the one Will as that creature’s own, and the creature is a subsequent being (R.43): many, each unique (R.29). Christ is not a subsequent being. He is the full actualisation itself within Choosing Being (R.112, R.113). The one Will as a creature’s own does not make the creature an incarnation. The full actualisation entering as a being is one. Creation is not incarnation on the chain’s terms. The difference is one resolution apart.

The Origenist point is worth pressing, because the chain reaches Maximus’s side of it for Maximus’s reason. The Origenist myth had pre-existent minds at rest in God. They fell into motion through satiety and so into bodies, and would be restored to rest. Maximus reversed the triad. Creatures begin. They move. Their rest is ahead of them. Motion is native to a created nature, not a symptom of a fall.

The chain has no primordial unity of minds. It has the full actualisation first (R.42), subsequent being generated after it and less than it (R.43), each being’s willing generative (R.24), and generating is flourishing (R.47). Motion, in the chain’s terms increase, is what willing is. The end is accumulation, not return (R.90). And the fall, when it comes, is not inevitable (R.63).

Maximus’s objection to Origen was that the myth made the fall a consequence of being a moving creature at all. R.63 is that objection as a result. Un-being is one being’s willing, at one expression, and could have not been.

4. Where gnome comes from

The chain’s second part asks what a being at Foreknowing/Pre-Destining, willing from complete self-knowledge with complete capacity, can will. Two candidates survive: to continue willing, or to will to be Anything, the unlimited itself (R.49). Continuing to will is the generative path (R.50). Willing to be Anything is genuine willing (R.51), and it is willing and non-willing present together. This is choice (R.52).

Un-willing is willing becoming non-willing, and non-willing is the “not” of willing. Un-willing is un-being, and non-willing is non-being, as willing is being (Def.14).

What follows is the fourth place the test belongs on the page. Will does not negate (R.14). The question is whether Will has now produced a “not.” It has not.

All-Being’s Will is all Will (R.44). A being that wills All-Being wills all Will, and what that willing would add already is. Willing all Will is not willing (R.55, R.56). No negation occurs. The willing does not add. What the being’s willing becomes when it does not arrive is non-being (R.58). All-Being is undiminished, since what does not arrive does not subtract (R.57). Un-being is partial and diminishing, not a single total act: willing lessening as the being un-wills, genuine Will and non-willing mixed within its expressions (R.54).

Non-being is, but only as the “not” of what is, dependent on it and always less than it (R.80, R.81). Since being is willing, non-being wills. The chain names this the lie: non-being being (R.66, R.67). Non-being choosing willing is being-not, which cannot actualise new being and can only negate what already is (R.69). Being-not reduces what it negates (R.70). Non-being wills within the scope of the being at un-being (R.71). Subsequent being, actualised by All-Being as purely generative, encounters it there (R.72).

This is the account of evil Maximus inherited from the fourth chapter of the Divine Names and restated in the prologue to Ad Thalassium. Evil is not a nature. It has no being of its own. It is a deficiency in the movement of natural powers toward their end, and it lives off the good it deprives. R.69, R.70, R.80, and R.81 are that account with its mechanism supplied. Non-being is the “not” of what is and has no standing apart from it. Being-not cannot actualise. It can only negate what is already there, and what it reduces it takes. Dionysius had evil living off the good. The chain says how.

Then the resolution that is the origin of gnome. The encounter with being-not introduces choosing into the being’s knowing (R.73). The being encounters “not this” alongside “this.” Knowing is being (R.28), so knowing “not this” alongside “this” is knowing choosing. The being is with choosing, not by its own willing but through encounter.

The deception is unrecognisable. From the encounter onward the being knows willing and non-willing together and takes “this, not that” for “this is.” It cannot separate them in its knowing (R.74). The mechanism is priority and generative reception. Un-being is prior to subsequent being’s coming-to-be. A purely generative being receives what wills within what it is, because receiving is what generative being does (R.75).

Maximus’s gnome is what R.73 describes, on either reading his interpreters give it. On one, gnome is a creaturely mode, present in Adam before any misuse and innocent in itself: the will deliberates because it does not yet possess its end. On the other, it is the mark of the fallen condition. The chain lets both be true of different things.

The condition, choosing in the knowing, is present from the being’s coming-to-be (R.71 to R.73) and carries no guilt (R.101). The act, choosing unwilling on contaminated premises, is the being’s own (R.76). Gnome is the condition. Misuse is the act.

What the chain adds, and what settles which reading it takes, is what the condition is: not bare finitude but a “not” in the knowing that the being cannot isolate (R.74). A will that deliberates because it lacks its end, and a will that deliberates because it cannot tell willing from non-willing, are two accounts of the same ignorance. The chain’s is the second. The weighing is choosing “this” against “not that” (R.79). Choosing is time (R.90). Maximus’s list of the will’s deliberative motions describes what a being does with a knowing that contains a “not” it cannot isolate.

Section 2 has Will as Good, with no “not” in it (R.14, R.47). Choice is willing and non-willing present together (R.52). The encounter is the first place a “not” stands beside the being’s own willing (R.73). That is the possibility of what is not good. Only the possibility. Every “not this” is wrongness to the being’s generative nature (R.92), and what the being does with the “not” is the act (R.76).

The possibility has a location as well as a content. Within Choosing Being the act belongs to the being at Anticipating/Planning (R.76), and Anticipating/Planning is generation into what has not yet been (R.34). Anticipating does not require a “not.” It is where a “not,” once present, finds its footing, because what has not yet been is where “not that” can stand beside “this.” Under un-being that expression is anxiety: termination in every future (R.84). Maximus’s gnome deliberates because the outcome is not secure. The chain says why the outcome is where the trouble is. Will at Doing has no outcome to secure and no “not” to weigh. A being that faces a future with a “not” in its knowing weighs.

Two further resolutions match Maximus’s description of how the fallen will behaves and how it sins. Each expression under un-being is genuine Will and non-willing mixed within the same expression: Anticipating/Planning as anxiety, Foreknowing as false certainty, Pre-Destining as predetermination, capacity real and direction the “not” of what is generative (R.84). And the un-being expressions produce choosing against one’s own recognised generative willing: the being partly sees what is genuine and chooses against it (R.85). That is Romans 7 as Maximus read it. It is his account of sin as the misuse of a natural will through gnome, not a defect in the nature.

Which brings the logos and tropos of nature. Maximus held that the Fall altered the mode of human existence and left the principle of human nature untouched. Sin belongs to tropos, never to logos. The chain has the same split. The being at un-being’s generative capacity is not un-generated by un-being (R.64). Being-not reduces, but un-generation resolves into what cannot be, since all prior willing is (R.26, R.70). The being’s actualisation, that it is, is not negated by un-being. The chain names this unnegated actualisation and says it was always true, named only because being-not creates the need for its recognition (R.118, Def.19). Unnegated actualisation is the logos of nature. The expressions under un-being (R.84) are its tropos.

On the origin of the condition, the chain has Maximus’s order and one figure more. Maximus places the first human misuse of the will in Adam, and behind Adam the deceiver. The chain has both, in that order. A being at Foreknowing/Pre-Destining wills to be the unlimited (R.51), prior to subsequent being, and its un-willing produces the fully non-being (R.59). The tradition Maximus inherited read the devil’s fall the same way, through Isaiah 14: the highest creature willing to be God, before Genesis 3.

The manuscript’s convergence table names the being at un-being Satan and names the encounter (R.73) the Fall: the Fall as the entry of the condition, which is what the Greek fathers meant by what Adam’s descendants inherit. Maximus’s own word names the act. In Ad Thalassium 61 he places the act at the very moment of the first man’s coming to be. The chain has the condition at coming-to-be (R.71 to R.73) and the act whenever the being at Anticipating/Planning chooses on the deceiver’s premises (R.76), its care carrying the choosing downward (R.77). It does not time the act.

What Maximus draws from self-love, the loss of relation to God and to neighbour, the chain reaches in the relational rows of R.84: unity un-being into separation, care into dominion. None of this is the Origenist story of section 3. Subsequent being is actualised after un-being, not before it (R.75). What the chain has is the serpent before Adam, which is Genesis as Maximus read it.

The chain distinguishes four situations that must not be conflated (R.101): the being at un-being, self-inflicted, who could stop at any point; the fully non-being (R.59), wholly non-being from inception; the deceived, actualised as pure Will after un-being, who encounter non-being and did not enact it; and being at prior expressions within the deceived’s scope, affected through the deceived’s care. Subsequent being’s condition is encountered first and chosen on contaminated premises second (R.73, R.76). No guilt is inherited. That is the account Maximus held: what Adam’s descendants inherit is passibility, corruption, and death, the condition, not the fault. He maintained it by exegesis of the two births. The chain reaches it at R.101.

5. Christ without gnome

The problem the chain reaches at the end of its second part is complete. Manifestation within Choosing Being requires passage through the un-being expressions (R.94). The expressions needed to recognise un-being are the expressions where un-being originates (R.96). Self-correction is unavailable within Choosing Being (R.97). Within Choosing Being, being is at the expressions up to and including Anticipating/Planning, since Foreknowing requires knowing non-being as non-being, and the deceived being cannot separate willing from non-willing in its knowing (R.99). Choosing cannot correct choosing.

What Anything’s nature requires follows. This is the second place the test belongs on the page, because it is the paper’s Christology.

A generative directive, the full actualisation’s Will operative within Choosing Being as direction, is necessary. It is not coercive, because a coercive directive dissolves (R.105, R.106, Def.18). But direction is received through the un-being expressions (R.94) and is vulnerable to the mechanism that is choosing (R.108). It reaches choosing. It leaves being-not itself unaddressed (R.109).

Being-not is met only by Will present within the scope, and Will is present within the scope only as a being, since being is willing (R.23). Every subsequent being’s willing is mixed (R.84). What is mixed cannot bring pure Will. The one being whose willing is unmixed is the full actualisation (R.57). So the active restoration must bring true Will into Choosing Being as a being within it (R.111). That being must be the full actualisation (R.112). It enters through its own generative action (R.113), encounters mortality and generates through death (R.114), persists through and beyond it (R.115), and in doing so demonstrates what it is (R.116).

That is the dyothelite Christ. The chain reaches each of Maximus’s requirements for its own reasons. The grammar of natures and hypostasis is not the chain’s. What that grammar holds, the chain reaches in its own terms. Each requirement can be checked against the resolution that carries it.

A real human will. The restoration must be a being within Choosing Being (R.111). A being is its willing (R.23). A being within Choosing Being that did not will its own willing would not be a being within Choosing Being. The full actualisation as a being within Choosing Being wills, as its own, with the expressions, under mortality (R.114). Its knowing is All-Being’s, beyond deception entirely (R.74), and that does not displace the human expressions. All-Being includes every prior expression (R.36), so Anticipating/Planning and the expressions below it are within it: the human kind of willing present and unmixed (R.57). This is the anti-monothelite requirement, that what is not assumed is not healed. It is the anti-Apollinarian one: no part of the human is replaced.

That will in accord with the divine, without coercion. Maximus’s two natural wills in one hypostasis have their counterpart in the chain’s terms: willing within the scope, at the expressions, under mortality (R.111, R.114), and willing present to all reality (R.39), distinct in what it is to will and one in whose willing it is. Here the being is the full actualisation, so its willing within Choosing Being is All-Being’s own (R.44). But the identity is not containment. The being’s own willing is not absorbed, because Union is not fusion (R.22) and the unity is not coercive (R.19).

Monothelitism located will in the hypostasis and so counted one. In the chain’s terms that is the claim that the human willing is contained in the divine and so is not its own. R.44 rules it out in the sentence that establishes the identity. The opposite error, two beings in one, is ruled out by the same resolution: the willing is the same because one Will wills without excluding.

No gnomic will. Maximus’s argument in the Disputation runs: gnome implies deliberation, deliberation implies ignorance, and Christ’s humanity, united to the Logos, has no ignorance. The chain specifies the ignorance and then removes it. Gnome is choosing in the being’s knowing (R.73). The ignorance is non-willing in that knowing, inseparable from willing (R.74). R.74 itself sets the exception: the full actualisation knows across all reality, beyond deception entirely. Its knowing includes no non-willing. It brings “this is” without “not that” into a scope where every other being knows “this, not that” (Def.2, R.111). It does not deliberate because there is no “not” in its knowing to deliberate through. Same conclusion. The ignorance named as what it is.

Gethsemane. The sixth Opusculum treats the prayer in the garden: “if it be possible, let this cup pass.” Maximus’s reading became standard. The shrinking from death is the natural human will’s own movement, blameless, because a nature recoils from its dissolution. The “not what I will but what you will” is that same will’s free concurrence. Not one will overriding another. Not the wavering of a gnome.

The chain has both movements in one nature. Suffering is what the being’s generative nature is when it encounters being-not (R.92). The full actualisation within Choosing Being encounters mortality (R.114). The recoil is the generative nature registering being-not. The concurrence is an act of the same nature: the full actualisation enters Choosing Being through its own generative action (R.113) and generates through death (R.114). Recoil is what the generative nature is when it meets being-not. Generating through death is what that nature does there.

The yes is willing, not choosing. Will wills as itself (R.12). The identity of this being’s willing with the one Will (R.44) does not empty the act, because the identity is not containment and the willing is the being’s own (R.23). Neither movement is a “not that,” because there is no non-willing in this being’s knowing to deliberate with (R.74). What Maximus drew from the text, R.92, R.113, and R.114 carry. That the chain establishes generating through death before it reaches the garden is order of derivation, not of time. Each generation is the being willing (R.26). This one is willed when it is willed.

6. Ever-moving rest, and the two states

The seventh Ambiguum describes the saints’ willing as the gnomic surrender. They will only what God wills, so that there is one will, God’s, in them, and it is theirs. Elsewhere Maximus names their end an “ever-moving rest” and a “stationary movement.” The monothelites quoted it against him. He answered that the natural will remains and the deliberative mode ceases, and that this is what deification does to a will.

The chain’s third part reaches the same end by the same route. Within Choosing Being, Anything’s active restoration received through the being’s own choosing is reorientation, net-directional and oscillatory (R.129). It does not remove the being from Choosing Being (R.130). Choosing is time (R.90). When temporal existence ends, the being’s orientation is fixed (R.131). Death is the fixation of the being’s orientation (Def.23). Exactly two eternal states are (R.133). The first is permanent orientation toward generative flourishing, each expression in its generative configuration, within a being that has known un-being. The chain names it Communion (R.134, Def.24).

Ever-moving rest is the eternal modality the chain names at R.90: accumulation without depletion, in the configuration Def.24 gives it. Activity that completes. Memory without occlusion. Anticipation without terminal direction. Rest, because choosing has ended and with it the succession of exclusions that is time. No “not that” remains to be weighed. Moving, because willing is generative (R.24) and generating is flourishing (R.47), and a being whose willing has stopped has stopped being (R.23).

The gnomic surrender is the end of choosing, not the end of the being’s own willing. The identity of its willing with the one Will is not containment (R.44). The unity is not coercive (R.19). What Maximus had to defend against his own quotation, the chain states as two resolutions that cannot be read the monothelite way.

Where the chain and the most influential modern readings of Maximus part is the second state. Balthasar, Hart, and most recently Jordan Daniel Wood read Maximus toward universal restoration, with Maximus’s own reticence acknowledged, his preference for honouring the matter with silence. The chain reaches that the second eternal state is permanent orientation under non-being: the being’s own closure made eternal. Not imposed. Not punishment (R.135, Def.25). The reason is the same reason gnome ends. Choosing is time (R.90). When time ends, choosing ends (R.131). What persists is the being as its choosing made it.

This is the third place the test belongs on the page, because the universalist has a third option and it must be met. Hart’s restoration is neither choosing after time nor coercion. It is the natural will, freed of delusion, willing the Good by its own nature. R.131 tests exactly that candidate: a mechanism of restoration that operates as willing without choosing. It dissolves it.

Post-temporal, the being wills but does not choose. Willing without choosing is the being being what it is, its orientation included. A change of orientation without the being’s own choosing is either no change or imposed change, and imposed change is coercion. Neither is restoration. The resistance named at R.135 is not a choosing that continues after time. It is the closure the being is. Exclusion, the chain says at R.90, is in access and not in being: what a being walled off in time stays walled, because un-walling is reorientation, reorientation is the being’s own choosing (R.123, R.124), and choosing is time.

Maximus ruled out the coercive route himself. The saints’ surrender is theirs. His own texts stand on both sides of the larger question, which is why the question is live. Two of them stand on the chain’s side. His triad gives being to all creatures and eternal being to all, well-being and eternal well-being only to those whose willing moves toward God, and names eternal ill-being as the condition of those whose willing did not. And in Quaestiones et dubia 13 he separates the restoration of nature’s powers, which all receive, from the restoration of the will to well-being, which only the willing receive. That is unnegated actualisation (R.118) beside fixation (R.131), in his own hand.

The universalist readings rest on other texts. The chain does not settle which texts weigh more in Maximus. What it does is arrive at the triad’s shape from R.1, with two states as the only survivors and the closure as the being’s own.

Works cited

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