Contemporary scholarship recognizes in Maximus the Confessor a theologian of towering intellectual importance. In this book Adam G. Cooper puts to him a question which from the origins of Christian thought has constituted an interpretative crux for catholic Christianity: what is the place of the material order and, specifically, of the human body, in God's creative, redemptive, and perfective economies? While the study builds upon the insights of other efforts in Maximian scholarship, it primarily presents an engagement with the full vista of Maximus's own writings, providing a unique contribution towards an intelligent apprehension of this erudite but often impenetrable theological mind.

Christianity is deeply interested in the body. In its central mysteries -- creation, incarnation, and resurrection -- the body and human flesh are radically implicated. Bodies are persons, and persons are spiritual beings, bearers of the divine image and destined for bodily union with God. From the Bible to the Second Vatican Council, from Irenaeus and Tertullian to Aquinas and Luther, the classic sources of the Christian tradition engender a spiritual philosophy that challenges the ever-present gnostic impulse either to marginalize, or else to worship, the body. Adam G. Cooper brings these rich sources into conversation with numerous contemporary voices in philosophy and theology, offering an illuminating and critical perspective on such pressing social and ethical questions as pornography, feminism, philosophy of mind, sterility, and death.