Abstract
Through a close reading of the two definitions of evil in the Introduction to Responses to Thalassios, this article points out a circular, cognitive-affective-somatic, genetic mechanism that St. Maximos the Confessor considers responsible for the initiation and transmission of the fallness as a human condition and the specific manifestation of it in the form of passions. It elucidates the first definition as mainly phenomenological, by identifying the circular mechanism and its behavioural expressions, and the second definition as more aetiological, by explaining why this mechanism emerges and reemerges with the fallen humanity despite its catastrophic results.Contribution: This article highlights a double genetic mechanism (survival cum passions) that St. Maximos the Confessor grasped within the fallen human condition as a curse solvable only in Christ, a notion largely carved out by previous Maximian scholarship, but fully explained and valuated here.
Highlights
This article is part of a series dedicated to the conception of passions in the work of St
Maximos the Confessor, which, in turn, I use as a term of reference in a comparative investigation of the Eastern Patristic conception of passions and contemporary scientific models of addictive behaviours (Moldovan 2018:281–294)
In both Responses, we can identify a phylogenetic mechanism of generational transmission of the fallness, and an ontogenetic mechanism, that is, its personal reactivation, the two supporting each other
Summary
This first circuit opens another: (5) from the filling of this experience arises the inflammation of an erotic self-love (τῆς ἐκ ταύτης γεννωμένης φιλαυτίας ἐξῆπτε τὸν ἔρωτα [238–239]) whose insistent concern (πεφροντισμένως περιεποιεῖτο [239–240]) is (6) the invention (ἐπινοέω) of ways of achieving pleasure (ἡδονή), as the fulfillment of self-love 6. briefly mentioned in the first definition (259–261)
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