Brief remarks regarding the problem of divine npovoia in Maximus the Confessor

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to discuss the question: How can God actually know the future with the emphasis on Maximus the Confessor. Foreknowledge is generally regarded as one of the typical attributes of God's divine nature. That is because once someone even speaks of God, he must allow God to know the future, otherwise, God would appear to hesitate in his decisions, to waver as he would not be able to be certain about the outcome of his choices, even to have been surprised by the prevalence of evil in the world He created. All these are obviously not worthy of God. Roughly, according to Maximus' response, the key to the solution of the problem lies in the proposition that God is eternal, namely, that God is not subject to time. His response also provides us with a clear and defensible explanation of divine knowledge of future occurrences, and eventually succeeds in reconciling divine foreknowledge and human free choice that seemed to be through and through inconsistent.