Desiring the Beautiful: The Erotic‐Aesthetic Dimension of Deification in Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, FilipIvanovic, The Catholic University of America Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3189‐1), xiv + 250 pp., hb $75

The scholarly turn to themes of participation in God and deification continues in Ivanovic's Desiring the Beautiful. In this book, Ivanovic examines the role of deification in the works of two influential early Christian theologians, Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor, an area of interest already covered in depth elsewhere. Yet Ivanovic uniquely explores the relation between deification and ‘two other aspects of their systems, namely erotology and aesthetics’ (p. 3). Accordingly, Ivanovic assiduously traces the links between love, beauty, and deification. The book is divided evenly between Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus, having three parallel chapters in each half considering love, beauty, and theōsis. It ends with a synthetic conclusion drawing together its disparate elements to offer ‘a more general picture of the erotic-aesthetic dimension of deification’ (p. 209). Rather than a pedestrian recapitulation, then, of previous scholarly retrievals of the idea of deification, Ivanovic's work evocatively opens up the erotic dimension of how participating in God involves a form of divine seduction nestled in the hollows of creation drawing it to reunion with its Creator. Ivanonic skillfully crafts the sense in which, for Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus, the basic and dynamic shape of creation is love. In terms of the Dionysian hierarchies, the purpose of which is ‘assimilation to God as far as possible,’ they are ‘instituted in love, by love, and for love’ (p. 45). As such, love describes the noncontrastive and relational quality of the divine nature and that which God creates. Indeed, love describes the arc stretching from freely willed creation through to deification, with the incarnation as the bridge uniting these two aspects. For Pseudo-Dionysius, eros is thus identified with agape: it has a desirous and a philanthropic character shaping creation and its relation to the Creator. While Maximus will prefer the latter term agape, he also likewise ‘employs other expressions […] which designate desire or longing […] and θιλανθρωπία, which denotes God's love for humanity’ (p. 115). Through the notion of love, Maximus develops various heuristic triads that, in effect, describe the creation, preservation and redemption of creation, its exit from, determination, and salvific reversion to its creative divine source. In a manner reminiscent of Augustine of Hippo, Maximus's emphasis on love not only asserts both the intrinsic loveliness of creation but also accounts for a theological anthropology in which self-love misdirects and disorients humankind, forming ‘the mother of all vices and passions’ (p. 126), that is to say, the frustration of the desirous movement towards the proper final good of union with God. As such, love permeates manifold dimensions of Maximus's work and presents ‘itself as one of the central motifs of his entire thought’ (p. 143). Ivanovic details how beauty plays a central role in the structure of names attributed to God and to creation as a diminished effect of its beautiful cause. For Pseudo-Dionysius, beauty describes that which is desirable; it is also that which dynamically constitutes creatureliness and inculcates dynamic desire to return to its donating source. As such, love in each being ‘yearns for beauty, and so beauty is the principle of erotic movement’ (p. 55), a movement that circumscribes creation by and salvific return to God as goodness itself, the superabundance attractiveness of being. Ivanovic details how the Dionysian emphasis on beauty generates an aesthetic sense of order and also a manner in which visible things may act as signs of invisible divine realities. The beauty that yokes together creation and Creator creates a sense of how the beauty of material things, especially in liturgical symbols, unveils truths otherwise inaccessible because they are transcendent, drawing creatures into a theurgic participation of God as source and summit. While Maximus does not have a sustained treatment of beauty as such, Ivanovic adroitly gathers together his disparate thought to describe how, in a similar way as for Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘the beauty and magnitude of creatures points to the beauty and magnitude of their creator’ (p. 146), ‘divine beauty attracts the soul and incites her desire’ (p. 154), and that ‘through spiritual development’ human beings ‘will attain likeness to God, who will become present in those saved as the archetype of the beauty which they, as mirrors, reflect’ (p. 160). Ivanovic draws together how these erotic-aesthetic dimensions concatenate with deification in the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus. The former theologian ‘underlines the cooperative character of deification, not just as the relationship between human beings and God but also as a community of hierarchically ordered beings’ (p. 112). Ivanovic establishes how likewise for Maximus, ‘creation and deification are complementary, in that they are both granted by God's grace alone’ (p. 179). This dynamic blurs any strict boundary between nature and grace, especially as both converge in Christ as eternal and incarnate Logos, rendering deification not as ‘a moment or unilateral act’ but as a ‘process of co-operation between God and man’ (p. 207). For both Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus, the Church is the milieu in which deification occurs, with the sacraments as the means. Ivanovic offers a crisp, erudite, and eloquent synoptic overview of large and interrelated themes in two great Neoplatonic Christian thinkers of late antiquity. While the work is intended for scholars of patristic thought, it would serve readers well who are looking for a broad introduction to the theologies of Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus or the interaction between Greek philosophy and early Christian thought. The vision presented of how ‘love, desire, and ecstasy are intrinsically interwoven since they point to the motion that seeks the beloved as rest’ (p. 212) is a compelling one. While one will not find any theological criticism of the Dionysian emphasis on hierarchical mediation, or of how either Pseudo-Dionysius or Maximus have a nonreflexive high ecclesiology, Ivanovic's work nevertheless contributes a remarkable scholarly achievement mining the riches of Eastern patristic theology for contemporary consideration.