The Cosmos is fractured in five distinct ways.
We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.
Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.
To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.
We heal the Cosmos, Being itself, by letting God's grace overcome these divisions within our own being.
So says St Maximus at least....
St. Gregory of Nyssa, it should be noted, also made a similar distinction in hisOn the Soul and Resurrection , chapter 10;:
“When we have put off that dead and ugly garment which was made for us from irrational skins (when I hear ‘skins’ I interpret it as the form of the irrational nature that we have put on from our association with passion), we throw off every part of our irrational skin along with the removal of the garment.
These are the things which we have received from the irrational skin:sexual intercourse, conception, childbearing, dirt, lactation, nourishment, evacuation, gradual growth to maturity, the prime of life, old age, disease and death.”
The place St Maximus speaks of this is in Ambiguum (Difficulty) 41.
The other place is in the first part of his short work on the Eucharistic liturgy, his Mystagogia.
Basically his theory of divisions sets up a set of echoing correspondences in the Church.
Sanctuary/nave is reflected in invisible/visible, heaven/earth, soul/body, mind/reason, New Testament/Old Testament, meaning/text. So the movement between sanctuary and nave in the liturgy interprets and is interpreted by movement between the other divisions.
So the liturgical movement celebrates the healing of the five divisions.
Andrew Louth goes into more detail :
“Difficulty 41 is built up around this notion of the divisions of being. According to the Saints, Maximus begins (an expression that always means that he in introducing a traditional notion, and often something that can be precisely paralleled in earlier Fathers, as here), there are five divisions of being.
The first divides uncreated nature from that which is created. The second divides created being into that perceived by the mind and that perceived by the senses. The sensible realm is further divided into heaven and earth; earth into paradise and the inhabited world (what the Greeks called the oikoumene).
Within the inhabited world human beings dwell and these are divided by sex into male and female. But the human being is not just the last stage in this structure, it is, as he says, ‘the laboratory in which everything is concentrated and in itself naturally mediates between the extremities of each division’, for human beings are found on both sides of each division: they belong in paradise but inhabit the inhabited world; they are earthly and yet destined for heaven; they have both mind and senses; and though created, they are destined to share in the uncreated nature by deification.
All the divisions of the cosmos are reflected in the human being, so the human being is a microcosm, a ‘little cosmos’ (a term Maximus does not use explicitly here, though he does elsewhere).
As microcosm, the human person is able to mediate between the extremes of the cosmos, he is a ‘natural bond’ (physikos syndesmos), and constitutes the ‘great mystery of the divine purpose’ (1305B). Maximus then develops this work of mediation.
The first step is to transcend sexual division through ‘the most dispassionate relationship to divine virtue’. As Maximus makes clear here and later on, the division of the sexes is not original or primordial. Maximus shares with Gregory of Nyssa a belief in the double creation of humankind: an original creation that transcends sexuality, and a second creation, embracing sexual division, that has been introduced, not because of the Fall, but with a view to the Fall, that will exploit this division and turn it into an opposition, even a warfare. Maximus does not believe in what the poet Amy Clampitt has called ‘the archetypal cleft of sex’.
Second, by a ‘way of life proper and fitting to the Saints’, the human person unites paradise and the oikoumene to make one earth. Then, by imitating by virtue the life of the angels, the human person unites heaven and earth. Then, by being able to perceive the logoi of the created order, the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible falls away.
And finally, by uniting created nature with uncreated nature through love, the coinherence or interpenetration of God and the creation becomes apparent.
These stages recapitulate the stages of the spiritual life as Maximus understands it. In other words, through accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with God.”
For further study see pages 53-54 of On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor. Trans. Paul M. Blowers and Robert Louis Wilken.
Lars Thunberg has two superb books on this.
Torstein Theodor Tollefsen is the other guy to consult, The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor
