Developing an Apophatic Christocentrism: Lessons from Maximus the Confessor

A thoroughly apophatic commitment to divine unknowability appears incompatible with the claim that god is known in Christ. The theological writings of Maximus the Confessor, however, provide a way of combining these two theological imperatives so that the more authentically apophatic one is, the more christocentric one will be (and vice versa). This relationship is expressed most clearly in Maximus's exposition of the transfiguration, in which Christ is both the source of illumination that constitutes human knowledge of god and, in his ineffable brightness, the only proper basis for human recognition of the inherent unknowability of the divine essence.