Freedom and Heteronomy:Maximus the Confessor and the Question of Moral Creativity Adam G. Cooper Of the many circles within which Maximus the Confessor is invoked as an authority, one that merits particular attention in recent studies lies in the field of moral theology. While criticisms emerging from the disciplines of historical and systematic theology have sometimes held up Maximus’s staunch defence of the doctrine of two wills in Christ as an embarrassing but typically Byzantine example of theological hair-splitting, not a few scholars have lauded the way the Confessor’s expositions on the topic, particularly in his reflections on Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, may contribute towards a clearer understanding of the nature of human volition and its moral actualization. One example of this positive appropriation may be seen in an article by New Zealand theologian Ivor Davidson subtitled “The Ontological Dynamics of Incarnational Intention.”1 Davidson takes issue with criticisms that allege that, by ascribing two wills to Christ, Maximus and the traditional proponents of dyothelete Christology end up with an implausible account of Jesus’s conscious subjectivity. Besides asking too much of a Christological method whose interests and anxieties were more metaphysical and theological than they were physiological or psychological, the error in such allegations, argues Davidson, lies [End Page 1133] in regarding our own fallen experience of volition as humanly normal and, therefore, as the adequate criterion of what Christ’s experience of volition ought to be like. Drawing on Maximus’s evolving concept of “gnomic” will (γνώμη) and the rationale behind his eventual denial of its presence in Christ, Davidson exposes the superficial and illusory character of freedom as it is commonly conceived in many contemporary moral theories. If Maximus’s idea of freedom includes “the kind of self-determination appropriate to our real status as God’s creatures,” then, according to Davidson, “the diverse factors that complicate and impede such authentic direction—the kinds of factors, we might say, that have been highlighted in later modernity’s demise of confidence in the stability of a choosing self—are testimony to the reality that humans are not in practice half so free as might be supposed.”2 Another example of Maximus’s dyothelete Christology being enlisted in the service of moral theology is found in a still more recent (2007) essay by American Ian A. McFarland entitled “Willing is Not Choosing: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology.”3 McFarland similarly argues that Maximus’s assignment of will to the category of nature rather than to hypostasis “challenges the idea that willing is the source or ground of individual identity (hypostasis).” And, he continues, “if identity is not reducible to the will, then the will’s lack of freedom with respect to sin either now or in glory may not constitute the kind of threat to human integrity that modern Westerners are inclined to fear.”4 The mode of willing that characterizes the gnomic will, as McFarland interprets Maximus, is incapable of securing human fulfilment on its own because it is “in itself empty, directionless and (therefore) mutable.”5 True human freedom is realised not in an unlimited range of possible choices, nor even in the ability to make such choices, but in “a direct and undeviating orientation to God.”6 A third example of this recent appropriation of Maximus’s dyothelete Christology in the field of moral theology appears in the “action theory” of Italian theologian Livio Melina.7 According to Melina, [End Page 1134] behind Thomas Aquinas’s recognition that Christ’s humanity was not simply the passive instrument utilized by the divine Logos, but was rather the principle of actions that were fully human, free, and salvifically meritorious, lies the wealth of the Eastern Fathers’ Christological reflections, and not least the distinction made by Maximus between thelêsis, understood as the natural capacity to will, and boulêsis, understood as the subjective actuation of that capacity in this or that particular way.8 For Melina, this means that, “even if the will’s natural dimension is the indispensable foundation of the freedom of action, it is not yet enough to explain it: spiritual nature founds but...