Imitation, Knowledge, and the Task of Christology in Maximus the Confessor

Maximus the Confessor's combustive historicalera, committed doctrinal reflection, and loud and influential voice took him ona turbulent career of traveling and writing around the Mediterranean. Maximuswas a spiritual teacher, an ascetic and a contemplative, but he was also apolemicist, a crafter of dogma, an embattled Christologian, a premeditatingrhetorician. In this study, Luke Steven binds togetherthese two disparate sides of the man and his writings by showing thatthroughout his oeuvre the Confessor positions imitation as the key toknowledge. This lasting epistemology characterizes his earlier ascetic andspiritual works, and in his later works it prominently defines his dogmaticChristological method - that is, the means by which he communicates andpersuades and brings people to understand and encounter Jesus Christ, the onewith two natures, divine and human. This multifaceted study offers a deepassessment of Maximus's forebears, new insight on the animating assumptions ofhis thought, and an unprecedented focus on the rhetoric and method of hischristological writings.