Attention to virtue ethics in Eastern Christianity complicates the dominant narrative within the field by revealing new ways of conceptualizing classical problems in virtue theory, new insights into the dynamics of virtues’ development, as well as new contexts for applied virtue ethics. Human flourishing is understood as the progressive realization of theosis—a godly mode of being cultivated through liturgy and askesis, marked by the embodiment of the full range of virtues, and crowned by a radical love.

THE BASIC THESIS OF THIS ESSAY IS THAT CONFESSION—DEFINED AS ACTS of truth-telling about that which one most fears to speak—affects the landscape of one's emotions and desires. How such acts of confession affect emotions and desires depends on where and to whom such a confession is spoken. The kind of effect confession will have on emotions and desires is determined, in part, by the identity of the listener. Thus, the listener is not neutral in such acts of confession but (...) assumes, de facto, a symbolic or iconic mediating role. I explore this relationship between confession and desire through an analysis of the Sacrament of Confession and in conversation with Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. I suggest an alternative understanding of the Sacrament of Confession that defines the Sacrament not in juridical terms but as an event whose purpose is to increase one's desire for God. Although I affirm the constitutive role of language and interpretation on desires and emotions, I argue that Taylor and Nussbaum give insufficient attention to how desire affects interpretation and to how the particular iconic role of the listener affects how confession affects emotions and desires. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaximus the Confessor has been the subject of numerous subsets of the historical, philosophical, and theological disciplines, but the prominent role virtue – and above all else love – plays in his corpus remains vastly underexplored or misunderstood in secondary scholarship. The ascetic thinker’s understanding of virtue is fascinating in its own right since it implies and decodes the enormity of his theological vision by serving as the locus in and through which the created and the uncreated encounter each other. (...) But the distinctive edge of his aretology is all the more peculiar by the way in which he forged it from the remaining shards of the late antique philosophical schools and honed it against the theological touchstones of anchorites, monastics, and Biblical commentators. The result was a multilayered theology of virtue that reimagined the place of love in the Christian life and remained a constitutive aspect of Greek monastic practice and lay piety until the fall of Constantinople and beyond. This chapter situates Maximus within the intellectual horizons wherein he expressed his theology of virtue, analyzes the relationship of love to knowledge and personhood, and examines how the virtues, and especially love, function as the mediating principle between divine condescension and human deification. (shrink)