Contemporary scholarship recognizes in Maximus the Confessor a theologian of towering intellectual importance. In this book Adam G. Cooper puts to him a question which from the origins of Christian thought has constituted an interpretative crux for catholic Christianity: what is the place of the material order and, specifically, of the human body, in God's creative, redemptive, and perfective economies? While the study builds upon the insights of other efforts in Maximian scholarship, it primarily presents an engagement with the full vista of Maximus's own writings, providing a unique contribution towards an intelligent apprehension of this erudite but often impenetrable theological mind.