principle in the world of created reality supplies the very key to making sense of that reality. For now we can affirm that for Maximus what can be known and said of God has itself been given by God who presents himself for apprehension in the symbolic structures of his pluriform incarnate economies. At the same time, Maximus, like his orthodox predecessors, is under no illusions about the fundamental ontological dissimilarity of this universe to God, and the inadequacy of rational discourse when