International Symposium on Saint Maximus the Confessor
October 21, 2012.
The First Two Days
The St. Maximus the Confessor Symposium, Knowing the Purpose of Everything Through the Power of the Resurrection, co-hosted in Belgrade by the Belgrade Theological Faculty and the Orthodox Christian Studies Program of Fordham University, has begun with opening remarks by Bishop Maxim of Alhambra and the Western American Diocese, Patristics Professor at the Faculty and a Maximus scholar in his own right. Bishop Maxim introduced the new dean of the Faculty, Professor Predrag Puzović, who expressed his satisfaction at beginning his term as dean with such a grand event. He observed that St. Maximus is the “most universal spirit of his time and probably greatest thinker in the history of the Church. He has become the focal point of reference in modern Orthodox and Catholic dialogue.” The first church dedicated to St. Maximus, he noted, is in Serbia.
Bishop Maxim, chief organizer of the event, included in his welcome address, greetings to panelists and guests from His Holiness Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch and His Holiness Irinej, Serbian Orthodox Patriarch.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, in his address, noted that “The Saints represent God’s gift to the world, precious beacons within the darkness of this transient world, and an example to be followed leading us to our final goal – the Kingdom of God.” Among these saints, who we commemorate this weekend, is the Confessor Maximus. Born in the sixth century and reposed in the seventh century, he, like all saints, belongs to the timelessness of the Kingdom of God, wherein we have him as a Heavenly intercessor before the Throne of Christ. The Ecumenical Patriarch highlight St. Maximus’s major contributions to theology in his address: his emphasis on love as the foremost of the virtues, his staunch defense of the two wills of Christ during the monothelite controversy, his distinction between the natural and the gnomic will, and his insistence that there is no natural evil, but the negligence of thoughts, from which stems mistaken actions and, important for a consideration of the contemporary ecological problem, the mistaken use of things that results from mistaken thoughts.
His Holiness Patriarch Irinej greeted the presenters and guests with an import note that by commemorating the 1350th anniversary of St. Maximus’s repose with this solemn symposium, we invoke his blessing. And trulyhis blessing has been invoked. Three monks from the Holy Monastery of St. Paul’s on Mt. Athos arrived on the opening day of the Symposium with the incorrupt hand of the Confessor, a generous donation to the Symposium from the Igumen Partheny. The Metropolitan of Pergamon, John Zizioulas, one of the speakers over the four-day event, served for the unveiling of the relic in the Faculty chapel. The grace was evident as the Maximus’s life in Christ, permeated with the Divine energies of God, manifest through his relics to fill the chapel with vivifying Heavenly grace. Hundreds of pilgrims bowed down in veneration before the Paschal mystery evident in St. Maximus.
Certainly, it is the power of the Resurrection manifest in his relics and holy prayers that make St. Maximus important not only for his theology but his witness to holiness. Over 40 artists captured the image of this holiness, which is the Divine image manifest in man, in a special art exhibit put together by Adrijana Krstić and Dragana Mašić to honor the subject of the Symposium. The art exhibit was also unveiled on the first night of the Symposium. Adorning the hallway that runs between the chapel and lecture hall, the artistry is a worthy tribute that connects St. Maximus’s spiritual and intellectual gifts to humanity.
Indeed the spiritual and the intellectual are tied together by the thread of St. Maximus’s witness to Christ, celebrated in this capital of the Balkans perched on a promontory above the rivers Sava and Danube. The Danube threads across Central Europe, leaving behind Proustian landscapes of cultural artifacts as it enters the Balkan Peninsula, where self-preservationcoexists with transcendence. St. Maximus is asimilar thread to link West and East. Here, in Belgrade, one encounters a parallel intellectual perspective threading remnants of German idealism with the lasting potency of the Byzantine legacy, which is most clearly articulated in the Logos-centered reality of St. Maximus the Confessor.
The talks of the first evening were available to all and featured the important issue of the context in which St. Maximus is received. The first to speak was Maximos, a monk from Simonopetra Monastery on Mt. Athos who is presently a theology professor at Holy Cross School of Theology in Boston. Fr. Maximos spoke on “The Relevance of His Thought Today,” in particular focusing on two of what he identified as three historical appropriations of the thought and writings of the Confessor: the Maximus translations of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (ca. 800-879) and John Eriugena (ca. 815-877), whose work was closely intertwined with the cultural politics of Rome and the Carolingian court of Charles the Bald, and Maximus’s popularity in the 11th century Byzantine court. Both of these appropriations illustrate different sociologies of translation that reveal how contemporary preoccupations inform our reception of Maximus. At issue are the passions of the day that, until rooted out, result in the fragmentation that is indemic to our society. This fragmentation is rooted in a spirtiual pathology for which Maximus offers a cure, if only we avail ourselves of his entire teaching and not what we think is relevant.
The 2012 winner of the Ratzinger Prize, “The Nobel Prize for Theology,” Fr. Brian Daley, followed with a consideration of “Maximus the Confessor, Leontius of Byzantium, and the late Aristotelian Metaphysics of the Person.” Fr. Daley is a well known historical theologian specializing in the early Church. He continued his studies of the fifth through eighth centuries on this evening, where he delved into Maximus’s Christology, which culminates with Maximus’s realization that Christ must himself be free as both creator and creature in one acting, free subject. By being two, a number that had heretofore signified division in God, the infinite becomes finite with so great a love for the world that He is able to save it. This is a Christology that is soteriological and that ventures beyond the traditional boundaries of metaphysics. There was a question and answer period, which Bishop Maxim said provided a “robust beginning to the conference.”
As the host for the Symposium, the Belgrade Theological Faculty is also able to enrich the Symposium with its liturgical schedule. Friday began with Orthros and Divine Liturgy, served by Bishop David of Kruševac. The first session of the morning was chaired by Bishop Porfirije of the Faculty and featured Fr. Joshua Lollar from the University of Kansas, Professor Aristotle Papanikolaou of Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Program, and Adam Cooper from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute on Marriage and Family. All of the Symposium proceedings can be viewed online for 15 €, which defrays the cost of setting up remote live access to the Symposium.
Fr. Joshua began the day with a consideration of “Pathos and Technê in St. Maximus the Confessor,” which generated considerable interest in the question and answer period. His paper brought Maximus the Confessor’s notion of pathos, which is the beginning of philosophy for Maximus, into contact with the contemporary and urgent question of technology and human life in the twenty-first century. Using Ambigua 6–8 and Ambiguum 45 to illustrate these concepts in relation to the state of human passivity in relation to the development of human technology for coping with an environment that afflicts that passivity, Lollar takes Maximus’s understanding that pathos resides at the heart of human nature, andasks whether technological attempts to overcome human passibility constitute an altering of human nature itself.
Professor Papanikolaou followed with “Learning How to Love: St. Maximus on Virtue,” which unflinchingly brought contemporary issues of soldiers dealing with Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into dialogue with Maximus’s teaching on the virtues, in particular, love, the chief virtue. According to St. Maximus, the human is created to learn how to love, and is in constant battle against that which weakens the capacity to love. Virtues are necessary for the learning and acquisition of love: “All the virtues assist the mind in the pursuit of divine love” (1.11). Papanikolaou emphasizes St. Maximus’s complicated detailing of the relation of virtues and vices to the inner life of the human person and to human agency as a “progress in the love of God,” (2.14), which is measured ultimately by how one relates to others, especially those to whom one feels hatred or anger.
Concluding the morning panel was Adam Cooper, whose “St. Maximus on the Mystery of Marriage & the Body: A Reconsideration,” Bishop Porfirije correctly noted, demonstrates that “Christianity shows great emphasis on the body.” Cooper seeked to contextualize an analysis of a few texts within the tradition of Christian thought and within Cooper’s own formation and development, and within the Institute of John Paul II of Marriage (founded 1981), and the context of the confused and hyper-sexualized society of the West, especially using Centuries on Love 230 and 233.
During the question and answer period, Bishop Atansije (Jevtic), who himself speaks on Saturday, after complimenting Lollar, noted, “In Maximus’s thought, his estimation of pathos, “We are under the pathos, which is neither positive nor negative, the human being as created is a gift from God, it is not negative, it is rather, a capacity of participating in communion & love, which is a sort of pathos. God’s providence and Wisdom is called techniqes, it is in the realm of art.” Such is the caliber of this Symposium that the world’s foremost theologians are in the audience participating in an ongoing conversation with their peers on stage.
A second session chaired by Prof. Papanikolaou immediately followed.
First to speak was Fr. Demetrios Barthrelos on “St. Maximus’s Contributions to the Notion of Freedom.” Barthrelos recounted that central to this notion of freedom is Maximus’s treatment of the will, which includes both the rational and the subrational. Human will is primarily understood by Maximus as self-determination. It is a natural faculty, but its actualization in concrete acts of willing depends on the person. Barthrelos argued that Maximus described the will in its fallen state as dominated by ignorance and deliberation, but also as continuously oscillating between choices that may be God-pleasing or sinful. In its perfected state, as it appears in Christ, it is steadily and unhesitatingly oriented to the doing of the will of God. He concluded by arguing that this does not threaten the integrity and authenticity of human freedom, but is rather its fullest and highest form.
This talk was followed by that of the chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, Professor David Bradshaw. A specialist in the history of philosophy, Bradshaw delved into the history of the will by asking when the concept of the will originated. He said that most scholars point to Stoicism or Augustine, but that the will is already present in Plato. Maximus’s contribution to the will was formulated in his a response to monothelitism, which was a result of monoenergism, where it is clear that Maximus is interested in the form natural will takes in rational beings. His famous distinction between the natural and gnomic will is predicated on the gnomic (an act of choice) will not being a faculty (which the natural will is), but an act made possible by the natural will.
The panel concluded with Professor Torstein Tollefsen, philosophy professor at the University of Oslo, considering “Essence, Potentiality, and Activity in Maximus’s Conception of Hypostasis.” It is Maximus’s understanding of essence that provides the basis for Tollefsen’s claim about Maximus’s idea of self-understanding, which revolves around Maximus’s use of ousia, dynamis, and energia.
The Symposium continued in convivial fashion over lunch before returning to a session that delved deep into Maximus’s notion of the gnomic will. George Varvatsoulias presented on “Ruminative Thinking & Psychopathology Issues in the Writings of St. Maximus the Confessor: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective.” Ruminative thinking is a reasoning process where individuals dwell on the same thought or theme for long time;it is characterized by focusing too much on negative appraisals about oneself.In terms of evolutionary psychology,it explains our ancestors’ need to protect themselves from potential threats by adapting to and fulfilling their survival needs. Ruminative thinking literally means believing that what took place in the past, will again repeat itself. In St. Maximus’s writings, rumination can be found under the concept of μηρυκισμὸς, which is not a regular term. This term is rarely found in his writings for he uses connotations to describe it, such as περιποιήσασθαι, συντηρῆσθαι, ἐπιφερομένων, τυποῦσθαι, when he talks of the conditions of the soul in terms of the maladaptive habit of the intellect towards impassioned thoughts. Tollefsen employs two existing questionnaires, 1) The “Responses Styles Questionnaire” (1987) and 2) A self-devised questionnaire composed out of St. Maximus references to ruminative thinking in order to test the hypothesis that the more individuals ruminate the more effectively psychopathological issues can be dealt with.
Fr. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, of Holy Cross (Boston), gave a recently written paper that specifically addressed a controversy in Greece right now concerning the gnomic will: “The Elected Will in St. Maximus,” which is based on a dialectical relation between nature and self. However, Manoussakis avoided reductive over categorization by recalling that the person is always more than its nature. Only persons can be partakers of the communion with God that began with the world’s creation and will end in the great eschaton.
Fr. Philipp Gabriel Renezes, in “The Concept of ‘Habitus in Theological Anthropology of St. Maximus” insisted that there is no gnomic will in Christ even if there is an apparent change in Christ’s human will. Renezes reaches this conclusion by way of his study of hexis, a problematic and unsatisfying term that expresses one of the connections between human nature and the divine. Perhaps best considered what we might otherwise call “virtue,” helps us understand Maximus’s notion of divinization, which is the encounter of the human person with the transforming and liberating freedom of God.
After dinner, a final panel for Friday the 19th consisted of Paul Blowers’s “The Interpretive Dance: Concealment, Disclosure, and Deferral of Meaning in Maximus the Confessor’s Hermeneutical Theology” and Nino Sakvarelidze’s “How to Read and Understand Patristic Texts Today? Contextualization and Actualization of St. Maximus’ Textual and Spiritual Heritage.”
Blowers, a professor church history at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, argued for the transformative possibilities through divine revelation. It is a divine revelation manifest through the Logos, manifest through what Blowers calls the “interpretive dance” of Maximus hermeneutics. In the tradition of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and with aid from the Areopagite’s notion of the divine “ecstatic” movement, Blowers argues that Maximus understands exegesis in some sense as an erotic interpretive “dance” in which the interpreter is being ecstatically drawn out of his or her intellectual and spiritual constraints into the deifying presence of the elusive Christ, who alone satisfies all desires.
Sakvarelidze’s historical-critical essay deals with Maximus’s reception in Georgia and it is a keen study of terms in order to build to the hypothesis that she tests. The paper focuses on two central questions: the contextualization of St. Maximus’s traditional-synthetic and innovative-systematic thought within Old Georgian and the translation and transportation of St. Maximus’ texts and thinking into the Georgian geographical, linguistic and cultural context.
Speaking of contexts, as we mentioned, Maximus is the thread tying together the intellectual and the spiritual, the cultural and the noetic. How could this be better expressed then marking the mid-way point of the Symposium on St. Maximus with an All-night Vigil and Divine Liturgy for the Confessor in the presence of his relics. Bishop David served the Vigil and Bishop Maxim served the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy with Bishop David and seven other priests concelebrating. Beginning at 8 pm, the Liturgy did not conclude until a quarter past one in the morning, although to mark such messianic moments of aeonic time with a chronometer is to distortthe truth behind this synaxis of the sanctified Confessor and the struggling Faithful: this was Eternity in a continuous anamnetic reflection of the “Resurrectional present” and it was experienced by hundreds of the faithful who came together to celebrate the Eucharistic joy of our Lord and to taste what St. Maximus knows: the power of the Resurrection.
The Third Day
The third day of presentations began with Christos Yannaras, the renowned philosopher and scholar who has found harmony between Heidegger and Orthodox thought in offering strong critiques of Western European philosophy; the author of more than fifty books, Yannaras delved into the treasures of the hereafter in “Ontological Realism of the Things Hoped After Death: Conclusions from Brief References in St. Maximus’s Works.” Yannaras took the paper as an opportunity to clarify the question of authority when it comes to interpreting patristic texts. We might merely say “the Church,” but is the Church bestowed authority by Tradition and Scripture, or does the Church itself birth these elements? Yannaras answers that true authority is experienced ontologically in an ecclesial mode of existence. This mode, of course, continues after the failure of the physical form. But, if hypostasis continues and nature has run its course, what is being hypostasized? It is the grace of God, for which the sanctified Person has prepared to receive throughout his life, which fills the Person at death and becomes the substance of the hypostasis. The ecclesiastical experience was not something completed in a glorious past, but was rather actively transported/transformed into a dynamic that is actuated now. This study shed light on hermeneutical ambiguities about those things that wehope for after death.
Pascal Mueller-Jourdan, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Catholic University of the West in Angers, France, gave “A contextual reading of the Ambiguum 10 of Maximus the Confessor” in “Where' and 'When' as metaphysical prerequisites for Creation.” His intent was to reveal Maximus’s philosophical sources, precisely the kind of endeavor that Bishop Atanasije would take issue with later in the evening. However, Mueller-Jorudan’s well-executed paper did reveal theological consequences tied to Maximus’s ideas. For example, his consideration of concrete beings is that they do not possess their being in a simple, absolute way, but in a particular way. This raises the consequence of developing a theory of nature, which points Mueller-Jourdan to Ambiguum 10, where Maximus considers two expressions of the modality of existence of real beings. Moreover, Maximus suggested that the two categories of Space and Time are not minor categories, but crucial to informing reality.
The first panel then concluded with Alexei Nesteruk, a deacon in the church and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, who writes about science from an Orthodox perspective. His work looked at three issues relevant to contemporary science that Maximus’s work helps to illustrate: 1) the knowability of the universe from the perspective of Christological anthropology, 2) modern scientific attempts of explicating creatio ex nihilo as the activity of mediation between the sensible and intelligible realms in creation (as contributing in the restoration of the divine image and growth of faith in God), and 3) from the anthropic cosmological principle to the Christological cosmological principle. Ultimately, Nesteruk noted, Maximus’s vision was not an astronomical vision. The universe was in his heart. We need to see God and we need to understand the unity of the universe through this particular vision.
The next panel included two Serbian hierarchs and the highly respected Fr. Andrew Louth. First to present was Bishop Ignatije, dogmatics and systematic theology professor at the Belgrade Faculty and bishop of Pozarevac and Branicevo. His talk, “The Roots of the Church According to St. Maximus the Confessor: The Eschatological Community and Her Historical Establishment,” examines two approaches to Maximus, the Biblical and the Originistic. He notes that the Church always derives her existence based on future events, for example the coming of the Messiah or the coming of the eschaton. St. Maximus holds firmly to a biblical perspective akin to St. Ignatius who says that eating of the body of the Eucharist serves as a "medicine of immortality." Bishop Ignatije noted that Maximus takes Ignatius a step further in arguing that the Church is an icon of the age to come, and that we cannot live alone on communion but that the Truth itself must become manifest, an event which is yet to come. In this way, Maximus rejects both Originism and Platonism and formulates a new tradition. The ensuing implications of this notion in the modern day, Bishop Ignatije argued, strongly encourage that Christians fully understand that Holy Communion is critical for salvation. Without the manifestation of this aspect, even ascetic practice cannot lead one to salvation. And, importantly asceticism is not about rejecting creation as evil but rejecting egotism.
“Despite an apparent paucity in the works of the Confessor on the subject, Fr. Andrew Louth presented on the institutional ecclesiology of St. Maximus. In his works, the Church, primarily liturgical in inspiration, reveals a hierarchy that is concerned with primacy. Louth argues that this notion of primacy is secondary to martyrdom as the cornerstone of his ecclesiology.
Bishop Maxim, professor of Patristics and Hagiology at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, University of Belgrade, as well as at the St. Sava School of Theology in Libertyville, Illinois, and Bishop of the Western American Diocese, as well as organizer for this Symposium, then followed with his paper, “Death, Resurrection, and the Church in Saint Maximus’ thought,” where he examined Maximus’s erotic-personal ontology of life leading to sacrifice and beyond, not stopping at the cross, but penetrating to the centrality of the Resurrection in the economy of salvation. Echoing the theme of the Symposium, Bishop Maxim notes that it is the Paschal experience that makes our existence comprehensible. He argues that, according to Maximus, the Resurrection alone permits knowledge of the purpose underlying all; central to this knowledge is the Eucharist as both Paschal experience and also the place where death (which is separation from God, and sin is the sting of death) is conquered and overcome.
What followed was a spirited discussion. In response to a question from Prof. Papanikolaou about the place of ethics, since it all seems to be about ontology, Vladika Maxim responded that the dichotomies that exist are real. The Church reality in the 2nd half of last century consisted of some movements in Orthodox countries that over-emphasized human effort. On the semantic level, Ontological ethics is a better term, thanks to Met. John (of Pergamon, who was in the audience). In St. Maximus’s thought there are different virtues. If you do not experience the Hypostatic reality of Christ in love, then we are condemned to continue in our struggles of what is the essence of Christianity. Louth added that how do we become what we are meant to be is the key. In the Western world this is lost and we instead ask, “How do I do what I am meant to do? Bp. Ignatije noted that God must become man and we must unite with Him in order for us to live. It is not enough for the Incarnation only to occur.
Met. John Zizioulas remarked that Louth described the role of the hierarch like Dionysius (which is also how Maximus takes him), which shows the importance of the bishop to the Liturgy. What Maximus called the Truth had to be confirmed by the Synod of the Council…by the Institution, he often was referring to Ecumenical Councils. His own work had to be confirmed by the Sixth Council. So, Councils are an indispensible part of what we call Truth. So, we should not refer to Truth as disembodied from the Institution, this is not what Maximus would have in mind. It is not Eucharistic theology that creates the mess in which the Orthodox findthemselves. Rather, primacy is a natural consequence of Eucharistic theology. To this, Louth responded that he affirms the institution, but none are infallible.
Bishop Atanasije addressed Bishop Ignatije, concerning a moment in his talk when he discussed monastics and ecclesiastical tradition as potentially polarizing. Bishop Atanasije notes that we cannot say that Maximus has not ethics. Then we could say he has no dogmatics. He has both! It is clear that he has ethics! It is only bad if one chooses to think so. If there is ethics, there is ethics. It is another question about where it has gone. We should save words and use them. Some complain that theologians speak against ethics. All things are very well balanced in Maximus. To this, Bishop Ignatije noted thathe did not say every ethics is not good. However, our measures are not ethical by nature, but the true measure is Christ. If we are to be open here, it goes beyond ethics. It cannot be characterized by ethics, which implies a law. Maximus is not a slave to Law. When we talk about ethics it should be distinguished between that which is taught at universities and that of theological schools.
A lunch followed, after which Fr. Calinic Berger presented on “Towards a Theological Gnoseology: The Synthesis of Fr. Dumitru Staniloae” and Paul Gavrilyuk of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota spoke about “Georges Florovsky’s Reading of Maximus: Anti-Bulgakov or pro-Bulgakov?” This panel presented different appropriations of Maximus, by Staniloae and Florovsky respectively. Berger noted the special place of Staniloae among Maximus interpreters, particularly in his devotion to the Church and commitment to not separate dogma from life. His use of Maximus is with knowledge, but also balanced by an embrace of the Philokalic tradition that also animated Maximus, as well as contemporary ascetics. Gavrilyuk then concluded, noting that it is difficult to know how well Florovsky knew Maximus in the original, receiving Maximus as he did by way of Sergei Epifanovich’s St. Maximus the Confessor and Byzantine Theology. What he did know in the original was Bulgakov, whose sophiology implied paganism, pantheism, and other problems to Florovsky. Grounding the paper in a comparison of Maximus’s theory of the logoi and Bulgakov’s sophiology.
For the final two talks, the Symposium moved to the University Hall of Belgrade University in downtown. There, His Eminence John, Metropolitan of Pergamon began his address by graciously noting that for years, he has been saying that Serbia is a center—it may be the center—for Orthodox theology for our time. By this, he means creative theology that takes theology and applies it to actual life and reality. Without any hesitation, Met. John expresses his admiration for the theological work that has taken place in this country and in this Church.
In his talk, “Person and Nature in St. Maximus’s Ontology,” Met. John noted that St. Maximus is the subject of extensive discussion in our time. He is an example of the wide, all-embracing area of theology. Yet, there are different ways to approach him, the present paper engages with him in the context of Nature and Person. Met. John defined terms and clarified the Cappadocian teaching on nature and hypostasis. He described the gnomic will as the will particular. It is involved in sin and sinfulness, but is in not sinful. It plays a decisive role in deification. It can lead us to good as well as to bad.
Met. John, seemingly responding to Jean-Claude Larchet, affirms that there is no necessity in nature. He noted that all theologians should be doing the work of helping us know how Maximus would reply if he was asked a modern question. Today, postmodernist tendencies threaten anything associated with nature. Modern existentialist thought puts so much emphasis on the Person’s freedom. The only experience available to modern man who has rejected Christ is nature in its fallen state. In Christ, freedom is not freedom from nature, but freedom for nature.
Bishop Atansije, speaking on “The Mystery of Christ in St. Maximus’s Theology,” was not at all mysterious about the principal influences on St. Maximus: it is the Bible, especially the works of St. John and St. Paul. The “Mystery of Christ” is not a common mystery. It is an event that is a Person, Christ Himself, which is the greatest gift of God to all creation, especially to humanity. The Gospel is the Eternal Living Word of God. His Grace noted that Sartre once said that he did not believe in God because He would have to create Himself. That is what God did with Christ. That is the Truth. That is the Reality we call Christ. There is no God apart from Christ and Father of Christ.
A couple years ago when there was an attempt to union with Monophysites, there was an effort to recuperate Severus, but for Maximus, he was the one who led them into schism. Man is called by God to perpetuate the Gospel and to incarnate the Gospel. Maximus is a living brother of Christ. He is the same Christ, many and One at the same time, and that is the Mystery of the Church. For Maximus, the Gospel is his poem about the Beloved, Christ. Bishop Atanasije strongly implied that so should it be for all who would wet their feet in the deep waters of theology. For the Power of the Resurrection, through which we can know everything, is known through the Evangel.
The Symposium was to conclude on Sunday with the Hierarchical Liturgy and consecration of the new church of St. Maximus in Kostolac, about 80 kilometers from Belgrade. Thereafter, the participants were to have lunch and then visit the ruins of the Roman town and fortress of Viminacium, as well as the still-active Medieval monastery of Ravanica.
