The Age of Confessors: Maximus the Confessor and the Problem of Gender Ideology
By Fr. Olek Stirrat
At first glance one may be baffled at whether there is any relationship between a 7th century ascetic monk and a 21stcentury woke, non-identifiable gender they/them. Yet, St. Maximus the Confessor has much to offer the gender ideologue of today, in particular his understanding of the will being rooted in nature rather than in the person, or rather “psychological man.”1 We will begin with the anthropological crisis expressed in the gender movement today before looking to St. Maximus the Confessor for a response.
The Anthropological Crisis
The Cambridge historian Richard Rex sees the history of the Church through the prism of three great crises, the first being theological, the second, ecclesiological and the final one, which we are living through, anthropological. He states that the first crisis
was an agonized and church-rending argument over the question, “What is God?” The second great crisis was that of the Reformation (of which Jansenism, an elite fad, was a kind of backwash or eddy within the Church); it was an agonized and church-rending argument over the question, “What is the Church?” Our crisis, at least as great as those, is all about a question that would once have been expressed as “What is man?” The fact that this wording is now itself seen as problematic is a symptom of the very condition it seeks to diagnose. What is it, in other words, to be human?2
The present anthropological crisis, centers around the questions: What does it mean to be human and is one’s identity determined by choice? This trajectory is traced historically by Carl R. Trueman in his work The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Trueman comments that our understanding of the human person today “emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late eighteenth century, that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.”3 The uniqueness of the current anthropological climate is that in contrast to the past where the human person was understood and shaped from without, the human person today is determined from within by the power of one’s self will.
This is particularly manifest in the gender movement, which reduces identity to a compound of one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s inner felt sense of self.4 Within this context there is a split between one’s body and one’s mind, an outer dimension and an inner dimension where the mind or what is termed the psychological self5 takes precedence. This understanding of the gender as a conglomeration of social construction and inner feeling is reflected in the documents of The United Nations Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues (OSAGI) and the American Psychological Association, which describe gender as the aggregation of “social attributes and opportunities associated with being male and female [which] are socially constructed and… are context/time-specific and are changeable,”6 as well as the fruit of a choice, namely “one’s self- identification as male or female.”7
It follows that the current anthropological crisis is founded upon a voluntaristic definition of the human person rather than an understanding of nature and freedom shaping the human person. Consequently, the contemporary belief holds that the will determines my identity and, ultimately, my nature. To understand what we have lost and what we need to return to, St. Maximus the Confessor is a trusted guide.
Contrary Conceptions of the Will
Maximus the Confessor (580–662) stands at the crossroads both historically and theologically between the early Church period and the scholastic period. Historically he arrives after the fall of the Roman Empire, but prior to the West-East split in 1054. Theologically he synthesizes the symphony of the faith within the context of a Cosmic Liturgy, but not as a rigorous system (which was favored by the Scholastic theologians). This context is important since, as it was for Maximus, the concept of the will is a vital anthropological dimension for us today. Like the postmodern world, “the early church also placed a premium on the importance of human free will as a means of opposing both pagan fatalism and the perceived determinism of various Christian Gnostic groups.”8
The contrast between Maximus’ understanding of freewill and the gender ideologue’s may be drawn out the groundbreaking work The Sources of Christian Ethics, wherein Servais Pinckaers contrasts a modern conception of will understood as a freedom from constraint with a more traditional understanding of the will as the freedom for excellence. The freedom for excellence that Maximus the Confessor envisages is the process of deification, while the freedom from constraint exemplified by a gender ideologue is seen as the emancipation from one’s sex assigned at birth. There is thus a focus and prioritization of potentiality over actuality, of who one could be over who one is. The problem here is that potentiality is by definition not determined, it is fluid, leading to potential anxiety over one’s sense of self. The voluntaristic god of the middle-ages has morphed into the voluntaristic self.
Further, these two approaches to the understanding of the will differ in where each believes the will is located. For Maximus it is rooted in nature, for the gender ideologue in the person. For Maximus the will, understood as a complex unity of both rational and instinctual appetites, arises out of nature but seeks actualization through a personal subject,9 whereas for gender ideology the autonomous will overcomes the negative and oppressive limits of nature, ,from which one must be liberated. Part of the problem with the gender paradigm is that it is predicated on the assumption that one’s identity may be wrong. This is the case, for if potentiality implies lack of definition, who I was yesterday was not determined and therefore may have been incorrect. Breaking open categories is what drives the ideologue. Both social constructs and how we feel about ourselves change. Thus, if these are the building blocks from which we build a conception of ourselves, our identity is inherently unstable.
Autonomy and Independence
Within this context, autonomy becomes ultimate reality, as opposed to harmony and communion with external reality. The problem with this in more Patristic terminology is that it sees the human person not so much as a being that is moved, but as the unmoved mover. It replaces God with the human being and in this sense is idolatrous. But, of course, God is at rest since He is fully satiated, whereas humans still experience passions and desires which drive them teleologically toward something from without. As Maximus says, “Nothing that comes into being is perfect and complete.”10 The fact that we come into being, that we are contingent, means that we are teleologically oriented. At the very least we are oriented towards being, and in Maximus’ view we are oriented through well-being to eternal well-being.
Maximus describes the natural dynamic of the human as one who is moved (feels pathos), which leads to the perception of external reality and a love for the good which is perceived. This love then leads to ecstasy over what is loved.11 So here Maximus joins the capacity for wonder and awe to the ecstatic drive to be wholly embraced by the object of desire in the same way that “air is illuminated by light and iron is wholly inflamed by fire.”12 This dynamic of being moved is lost, however, if one believes that one’s will grounds one’s identity. For if my will defines my identity, then nothing from without can have an impact upon me. Every movement of external molding from without of the psychological man is seen as an imposition upon one’s freedom. Therefore, this kind of life is passionless since there is no interaction between the self and the world that has significant consequences. There is no genuine love in such an existence. It ends up being a lonely life for there is no capacity to engage through pathos, understood as the capacity for desire proper to our nature that draws one from without and is therefore subject to movement.13 Maximus’ cosmological approach appears to be more sound since it sees the human person within the context of a web of interrelated relationships centered on the enfleshed logos.
Maximus the Confessor and Charity
Maximus’ cosmological context, encompassing others, our desires, our passions, and the world, grounds his understanding of ecstatic charity. He comments
I have no intention of denying free will. Rather I am speaking of a firm and steadfast disposition, a willing surrender, so that from the one from whom we have received being we long to receive being moved as well… since [the will] lays hold of God’s power or rather becomes God by divinization and delights more in the displacement of those things perceived to be naturally its own.14
The capacity to willingly surrender one’s own self-determination in the hands of God is predicated on the belief that the will is rooted in nature and not person. Since the will is grounded in something other than itself, it therefore has the capacity to rejoice in the displacement of those things perceived to be naturally its own. In psychological terms we describe it as the displacement of the ego. This results in the capacity of gift-giving. This mirrors GK Chesterton’s comment in his essay, Why I am not a socialist, which stated that socialism is focused on sharing whereas charity is preferable, since it is predicated upon self-determination. Chesterton believed that
There is a real pleasure in sharing. We have all felt it in the case of nuts off a tree, and such things. But it is not the only pleasure nor the only altruistic pleasure, nor (I think) the highest or most human of altruistic pleasures. I greatly prefer the pleasure of giving and receiving. Giving is not the same as sharing; giving is even the opposite of sharing. Sharing is based on the idea that there is no property, or at least no personal property. But giving a thing to another man is as much based on personal property as keeping it to yourself. If after some universal interchange of generosities everyone was wearing someone else's hat, that state of things would still be based upon private property.15
Gender ideology on the other hand, is an expression of a socialist agenda where charity is undermined because no one has the capacity of gift giving, for no one owns anything. The capacity to love is lost when one grounds identity ultimately in one’s own will. For if one cannot give of themselves, they are wrapped up in themselves, and are unable to stretch out a hand towards another.
Gender as Performance
This begs the question: How then within the context of gender ideology do we project ourselves into reality? How does one engage with the world within this context? Our inability to give and hence to love the other is gleaned from an understanding of gender as performative. Judith Butler comments, “The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”16 Here gender is seen as something which is constructed, but it begs the question of the building blocks of the construction. From whence does one construct one’s gender? It seems as if, through the performative basis of gender, Butler believes that it is constructed ex nihilo. The divine has been predicated of us humans, for “performative suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning.”17 As with our assessment of the human person being autonomous from an ideological perspective, here again we see the return of idolatry. Only God is both the unmoved mover, and He who can create ex nihilo. Both these dimensions then display that gender ideology is parasitic, in the sense that it is a Judeo-Christian heresy. This parasitic dimension is exemplified by the use of the word performance and how it relates to the etymology of person.
Performance mirrors the Greek word for person hypostasis, which was drawn from the context of the Greek theatre and drama meaning the mask that actors wore. The notion of performance is deeply aligned to that of the person. However, the uniqueness of Butler’s belief is that there is nothing beneath the performance, there is no face behind the mask. The performance is the reality. As Butler comments, “If gender attributes, however, are not expressive but performative, then these attributes effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal.”18
Within a Christian context, there is an affirmation of the “role” that is the prosopon, the face. However, we move from the notion of a role or mask to that of a person or face. For the Christian, there is a depth beneath the surface of the performance. The idols in the Old Testament may be said to describe the understanding of the human person through the prism of gender ideology:
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. (Psalm 115:4–8)
We have made idols of ourselves. Butler’s thought with regard to the lack of depth and social construction of gender is encapsulated here:
According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality.19
Thus the way the psalmist describes idols as being the work of human hands which do not have a capacity to interact with the world because of their inability to engage with the world through their five senses, is almost identical to the way Butler describes humanity, as being fabrications through performance, which only engage with the surface beneath which there is no ontological reality. We are all idols unto ourselves.
Recapitulation
The Church is confronting an anthropological crisis today made manifest by the gender movement. What the Church needs today are confessors like St. Maximus who can witness against the confusion caused by the inherent assumption that one’s will is not grounded in one’s nature. While our tongues and hands may not literally be cut out or off as they were for Maximus, symbolically our speech and capacity to write may be hindered by being cancelled. However, let us not shy away from proclaiming the truth and draw inspiration from St. Maximus, that great and courageous confessor, for through our confession and “cancellation” the Gospel of the resurrected Lord is proclaimed. This is the age, not so much of martyrs but of Confessors. What we need now are people who will lay down their lives for their friends at the risk of being cancelled. Today’s gender ideologue is willful; the Christian response must be confessorial.
Fr. Olek Stirrat, born in Poland, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Adelaide. He was ordained in 2022 and is currently ministering in South Australia.
See Rieff, Philip. The triumph of the therapeutic: uses of faith after Freud (Wilmington: Isi Books, 2007).
Rex, Richard. “A Church in Doubt.” First Things. April 1, 2018.
Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self : Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway 2020), 46.
See Trueman, p. 45. “Psychological man” is a type characterized not so much by finding identity in outward directed activities as was true for the previous types but rather in the inward quest for personal psychological happiness.
“Concepts and Definitions,” UN Women, August 2001.
American Psychological Association, APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2nd ed. (2015), s.v. “gender identity.” See also the definition provided by The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: “Gender identity is a category of social identity and refers to an individual’s identification as male, female, or, occasionally, some category other than male or female” (American Psychiatric Association, 5th ed. [2013]), 451.
McFarland, Ian A. “‘Willing Is Not Choosing’: Some Anthropological Implications of Dyothelite Christology.” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9 (1): 3–23. January 10, 2007, p. 6.
Von Balthasar comments that “Maximus’ principle that in all action the basic activity (actus primus) belongs to the nature, the express realization of the activity (actus secundus) to the person.” Cosmic Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 228.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid., 52.
“Why I Am Not a Socialist.” The Jolly Journalist. Accessed August 24, 2012.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1990), xv.
Ibid., 177.
Ibid., 180.
Ibid., 173.