Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor

Maximian logoi or the “principles” of created being are often virtually identified with Platonic ideas or forms. This assumption obscures what is distinctive about Maximus's concept of the logoi. I first note two metaphysical peculiarities of his doctrine, and then propose that these only make sense if we follow Maximus's own directive to read the logoi through Christology proper – that is, as describing creation as the Word's cosmic Incarnation. This suggests, in creative tension with a good deal of twentieth‐century philosophical theology, that the God‐world relation is not fully exhausted by the analogia entis: Maximus divines a still deeper hypostatic (not natural) identity between Word and world that actually generates natural difference – for perhaps the first and only time in the history of Christian thought. Here I assay a first step toward retrieving that relation.     

The content and structure of laypeople's concept of pleasure

Five studies were conducted to map the content and structure of laypeople's conceptions of pleasure. Instances of the pleasure concept collected in Study 1 consisted predominantly of objects, events or persons described as sources of pleasure. Content analysis suggested that the pleasure category, like emotional response categories, might be formed at an implicit level where various pleasure antecedents are grouped based on common phenomenological qualities of the affective experience. Studies 2 and 3a showed that the pleasure category possesses a graded structure and fuzzy boundaries. Results further revealed that, either when explicitly presented with labels (Study 3b) or left to their own implicit categories during a sorting task (Study 4), laypeople represented pleasure as a hierarchical concept in which differentiated pleasure types (i.e., intellectual, emotional, social and physical) were subsumed under a higher level unitary form of pleasure. In this structure, unitary and differentiated pleasures shared a set of common affective qualities but were also distinguishable by unique and distinctive affective characteristics (Study 5). Ties to prior theories of pleasure and implications for decision making and behavioural research are discussed.