THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLDVIEW OF ST. MAXIMUS THE CONFESSOR
March 22, 2018 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
The National Hellenic Museum
Among the many Greek Christian thinkers that were philosophically minded during Late Antiquity and Byzantium, the 7th-century saint Maximus the Confessor (580-662 AD) occupies a unique place. This is not only due to the breadth of his thought, but also due to his capacity to synthesize various traditions of thought in an all-encompassing worldview. This integrative approach touches reality from the most general angles: ontology/metaphysics, cosmology, theological anthropology, ecclesiology, even politics, in order to shape one unified view of the world, a task central to most philosophical systems of antiquity.
Maximus’ specificity lies in the original combination of previous traditions of thought under the idea of Christian ontology and cosmology, having its direct result what was perhaps the first Christian “theory of everything,” whose impact on Eastern and Western thought is currently the object of intense scholarly engagement. This lecture will focus on Maximus’ logoi doctrine and on the philosophical implications of his seemingly obscure teaching on deification, touching on subjects such as motion and time, and tracing a line from classical philosophy to Byzantium and up to Modern Greek philosophical insights.
Dr. Sotiris Mitralexis is Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies (Spring Term 2018), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the City University of Istanbul and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Winchester. During Lent term of 2017, he was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the Freie Universitat Berlin and a degree in Classics from the University of Athens. He has taught Philosophy at Boğazici University (Istanbul), and in Athens and Berlin. His books include the monograph Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor’s Theory of Time (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade/Wipf & Stock, 2017) and the edited volume Maximus the Confessor as a European Philosopher (Cascade, 2017).
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