Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Salvation through Temptation: Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas on Christ's Victory over the Devil > Status Update

For Thomas (himself an educator), the teacher defeats the devil in the same way that one who spreads the truth is opposed to a sower of lies.

Alexander av Hales: Djävulen som tändved: The role of the devil here is remote and material at best; the devil adds nothing that is not already present in the one tempted. Before the devil tempts in this way, the one tempted is already “prone [pronos]” to the sin that the devil assists in committing.

Using Nemesius’s definition of human rationality, however, this Christological affirmation would mean, problematically, that Christ was not a rational human being.

Maximus’s denial of ignorance in Christ also has a corollary for
Christ’s moral psychology, albeit only implicitly. Maximus defines de-
liberation and choice as concerning matters of action that are indeter-
minate—things that are possible and of which the end is unknown.37
The affirmation of Christ’s perfect knowledge, then, is one of the roots
of Maximus’s claim that Christ did not deliberate or choose.

He (maximus) speaks in the Questions and Doubts, of three kinds of “involuntary (ἀδιάθετος)” sin: sin through “tyrannical constraint,” through deception, and through ignorance.

associationen som demonisk när den kommer med begär.

Corruptibility is a susceptibility to change and an inclination to-
ward earthly realities. Corruption is associated with the physical mode
of human conception after Adam’s sin. Thenceforth, human beings
come into being in the same way as the irrational animals, in a mode
that is perhaps not altogether becoming for the rational creatures that
human beings are.

This vulnerable ignorance follows from the universal ac-
cessibility of these truths by the human subject, who must actively
avoid knowing them in order to remain ignorant. Because of this fact,
any misjudgment or ignorance about universal truths leads to a will-
ful moral evil.

Nemesius sees two ways in which actions become unwillful: either
through force or through ignorance of particular facts.19 Given his
apparently Platonic conception of universal truths, he explains that
ignorance about universal and general truths is itself willful, an act
that might be called “vulnerable” or “vincible” ignorance in modern
categories.20

with the Stoic category of “what is up to us” (τὰ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν). For the Stoics, as for these early Greek-speaking Christians, this category delimits the extent of praiseworthy action, virtue, and vice since anything that is not up to us is beyond the purview of human moral agency