Distributed Agency in St. Maximus the Confessor as Social Model of Disability

Eastern Orthodox theological anthropology is frequently represented as neo-Platonic, dualistic, and against positive representations of the material body despite several major scholars countering such claims. What Nicholas Wolterstorff calls the taxonomy of worth in classical Greek thought is a persistent theme in Greek Patristic writing, which represents created order in a gradation of value with rational human beings at the top of an Aristotelian hierarchy. Rationality sets human beings apart and comes packaged with several requisite attributes like free agency, individual autonomy, and an independent will. The taxonomy of worth is often assumed of figures like St Maximus the Confessor and the father of apophaticism, Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite. Because both figures discuss rationality, divine communion, and various capacities all as hierarchical, it is common to frame these discussions as Aristotelian and rationality centered. Such a taxonomy would render persons who do not display individual or independent agency—including those who rely on caregivers, medical or ambulatory devices, or who otherwise depend on supportive structures in everyday life—as less than fully human. This taxonomy is a feature of Aristotelian virtue ethics, meaning that even disability theologians like Shane Clifton and Hans Reinders contend with a hierarchical representation of human capacities and their corresponding value in producing the good life. Because rationality is viewed as an individual performative capacity, and because it requires other autonomous traits like independent agency, the taxonomy of value has a significant impact on Christian ethics and its representation of disability as an extended state of dependency which threatens eudaimonia. However, I argue that St. Maximus does not replicate the Aristotelian taxonomy of worth which attributes greater value to rationality and independent agency; Maximus instead inverts this model, creating a model for agency which emphasizes the mediation of others in the facilitation of the individual subject, distributing agency to trusted others. By describing human beings as mediators of the “direct and unmediated light,” the goal of human action for Maximus is highly interdependent and participatory. Instead of a model for human agency that sets greater independency as the goal of rational beings, Maximus inverts the model for activity and passivity conventionally ascribed to the Aristotelian tradition and instead shapes the goals of human flourishment around collaboration and greater passivity. In Maximus’s description of human nature, the more just a social environment becomes the less friction there is between the individual and their environment and the less effort and action the human being must exert to thrive. The goal of the human being is not to become more active, but instead more passive, relying on the contributions of others in an interdependent social system which provides the moral infrastructure for wellbeing. I argue that this distribution between the person and the environment forms a type of distributed agency that is typified by the social model of disability. The social model of disability emphasizes that disablement is a socially produced harm, created by blockading the access of some bodies while normalizing others. The medical model, also called the individual model by Mike Oliver, frames disability as a deficit of the body, an individual problem, a deviation from a norm. The social model upends this individual model by unpacking the ways in which discriminatory structures, both material structures and ideological beliefs, form barriers to access. I resource critical disability studies’ more expansive sense of social modeling where all aspects of individual autonomy are framed as relational rather than independent, facilitated by both material structures and the social economies which create those material structures. In this expanded sense of the social model, independent movement and social autonomy do not function as neoliberal goals, as if the flourishing life is radically individualized and non-collaborative. Instead, relational autonomy functions to describe the ways in which trusted others function to support the unique flourishment of the individual who, though demarcated and individuated, is never an isolated actor. I unpack how Maximus views human agency through environmental friction, making the goal of the moral community the facilitation of a diverse range of bodies such that the community would reduce the friction between the person and her social environment over time. By making traits participatory, Maximus views moral goods like rationality as equally distributed, non-individualized, and non-performative. He builds upon Pseudo-Denys’ description of variable human beingness to specify that the ways in which individuals participate in divine goodness varies in detail but not in value—the way a person with a profound intellectual disability participates in the direct unmediated divine light is of the same degree and same quality as the person with public displays of high intellect. The connection between the human being and the divine is of the same value but expressed through a wide range of sensory modes of embodiment. Thus the goal of a just society or moral community is to facilitate the flourishment of diverse and variable bodies, all the while affirming that variable need does not relate to variable human worth. This description of variable embodiment parallels Tobin Siebers’ concept of complex embodiment, making the social model of disability much broader in scope. Because the body changes over the life cycle, social supports must also respond to those changes by anticipating a non-fixed body. This is precisely the type of fluctuation in material need which Denys and Maximus use as their definition of human nature, challenging performative rationality and replacing it with social responsiveness as a sign of moral community. By distributing the traits of the community, intelligence, rationality and agency are all communally produced. This means that human nature is not defined through one quality, as if rationality or free agency prove one’s worth as a human being. Instead, human nature is defined through its ability to support and be supported in a mediated display of Logos to logoi, of divine action and human interdependency. In this way, Maximus provides a social model of disability for Christian virtue ethics which emphasizes mediation and social reliance at the heart of what it means to be human.