ABSTRACT
Aristotle Papanikolaou explores theological resources for war veterans suffering from moral injury from within his Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. He turns to Maximus the Confessor (b. 538–d. 662) who was preoccupied with the ontological gap between the transcendent God and not-God (creation). For Maximus, the “bridge” connecting God and creation is love, the highest virtue, which is also theosis, or the experience of God. Papanikolaou notes that, in cases of moral injury, the problem is self-hatred. He asks: Is self-forgiveness possible without transcendence? No, he concludes. One cannot will forgiveness; one becomes forgiveness (not a forgetting, but a learning to move through violence) by learning to love. Papanikolaou explores how it is possible to commune with the transcendent God to make self-forgiveness possible. Like Maximus, Papanikolaou proposes that, as we acquire virtue, especially love, the highest virtue, we commune with God in an embodied “presencing” of the divine.
