In spite of their frequent obscurity, due partly to their technical difficulty and partly to their involved style, his works were highly prized, especially in the Greek monasteries, but also by such keen western philosophers as Scotus Erigena, and by pious and learned women like the Empress Irene and her daughter Anna Comnena. Fabricius enumerates fifty-three different writings, of which five are either lost or still unpublished, while forty-four are printed by the French Dominican Combefis and four elsewhere. Combefis undertook a complete edition, but published only two volumes (Paris, 1675); the third was left unfinished at his death.
The exegetical writings of Maximus are not so much continuous expositions as theological and mystical excursuses on selected passages, following the anagogical or allegorical method of the Alexandrian school. The most important work in this class is the Quostiones ad Thalassium in locos scripturce difciles, addressed to a Roman abbot who has left a collection of moral and ascetic sen- tences. It begins with a discussion of the problem of evil, and goes on to propound sixty-five questions which Maximus answers, usually taking the text only as a point of departure for rich dogmatic, ethical, or mystical trains of thought. Of a similar nature, though briefer and less original, are the Quo'stionea et dubia, seventy-nine questions and answers on texts of Scripture and other subjects; Ad Theo pemptum scholaBticum, on three passages of the New Testament; Ezpositio in psalmum LIX., an allegorical-mystical exposition; Orationis dominicas brevis expositio, rich in mystical ideas. There are also fragments of other exegetical works (on the Psalms, Isaiah, Canticles, Luke, James) in the Greek catenae. The same kind of treatment is applied by Maximus to patristic texts in his Scholia and Ambiguu on Gregory Nazianzen and Dionysius the Areopagite; he attempts less to explain another man's thoughts than to develop mystical or theo logical ideas of his own suggested by the text. There are three collections of this sort on the two authors named; the third, Ambigua in, Gregorium Nazianzenum, was translated into Latin by Erigena about 864, at the instance of Charles the Bald. The unpublished manuscript (at Vienna) Quastiones sacro miscellanea is
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