Introduction. 

The purpose of this essay is to take Ambiguum 41by St. Maximos the Confessor and to read it creatively through Hans Jonas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 

A Theological Exposition of Ambiguum 41 by St. Maximos the Confessor. 

In the Ambiguum 41, the St. Maximos articulates that the human being is not merely one creature among others but occupies a unique ontological position. The human being,  “who is above all—like a most capacious workshop containing all things” is “a kind of natural bond mediating between the universal extremes through his parts, and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance” (ODCF-V2, p105).  

This mediating role is not a mere function but arises from the very composition of the human being. Drawing on Neoplatonic and patristic categories, Maximos presents the human as a microcosm, a living image of the macrocosm, in whom all realms converge – spiritual, corporeal, rational, and emotional. In this way, the human person becomes the site where the divisions within creation can be reconciled, not abstractly, but through free participation in the divine life. 

Five fundamental divisions are outlined in the cosmos: between created and uncreated; intelligible and sensible; heaven and earth; paradise and world; male and female. Each of these divisions is not inherently evil; rather, they are the result of the ordered multiplicity of Creation. Yet humanity is called to overcome these divisions, not by erasing them, but by uniting them through contemplation, love, and the exercise of freedom. 

In overcoming these cleavages in being, the human being fulfils a cosmic priesthood – not as one who dominates Creation, but as one who offers it back to God in love. As a mediator by nature, the vocation of the human being is to recapitulate all Creation in itself, and then unite it with God. This structure of mediation is not arbitrary; it reflects the very logic or providential intentionality (logos) of Creation, embedded in all things by the divine Logos. Humanity, uniquely gifted with reason and volition, can recognize these logoi and responding to them openly and freely. 

The goal of this mediating task is deification (theosis) – the transformation of the human person and of all Creation through participation in God. Just as Christ unites divine and human natures in His person, so too the human being, in Christ, becomes capable of uniting and sanctifying the world. This is not metaphor, but ontological vocation: the human is the axis along which the created and uncreated meet, and through whom the cosmos is lifted into communion. 

The anthropology of St. Maximos is predicated upon his Christology. It is in the Incarnation that the true nature and vocation of the human are revealed and fulfilled. Christ is not only the perfect image of God, but the perfect human – the one who mediates all things because He is the Logos in whom all logoi cohere.

In this synergy, human freedom is not abolished but exalted. St. Maximos speaks of the gnomic will – the deliberative, fallen will of humanity – and the natural will, which desires the good in accordance with nature. The task of theosis as deification is the alignment of human freedom with divine purpose, not through coercion, but through the loving consent. For this, Mary as the Theotokos is the model to follow with her humility and obedience. 

This theological vision places the human being at the centre of Creation’s journey toward God. Humanity’s mediating role is not anthropocentric triumphalism, but a humble, Eucharistic vocation – to gather the world in its multiplicity, perceive its divine logoi, and return it to God in praise and union. 

Hans Jonas and the Imperative of Responsibility. 

Writing in the essay: Philosophy at the End of Century: A Survey of Its Past and Future, Hans Jonas was of the opinion that his philosophical master, Martin Heidegger, had forgotten that human beings are living creatures whose mode of existence is corporeal. Furthermore, in the Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas added in phrase evocative of St. Maximos, that human beings are “the supreme outcome of nature’s positive labor” (IR, p82). 

Hans Jonas’ philosophical project begins with a provocation: the phenomenon of life, particularly organic life, has been systematically overlooked in modern ontological thought. He insists that the organism as a living body is not a peripheral or accidental feature of reality, but the central clue to understanding being itself. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas argued that life is the bearer of an ontological structure grounded in freedom, inwardness, and teleology. Human beings, far from being isolated minds in mechanical bodies, emerge as the culminating expression of an organic striving already latent in the structure of life itself. 

At the heart of Jonas’ philosophy is the idea that freedom is not a human invention, but a defining feature of life itself. Life, even in its simplest biological form, exhibits a mode of being that is not reducible to inert matter. The organism is not merely moved by external forces; it maintains itself, resists entropy, and asserts a patterned identity over time. Jonas terms this metabolism, the ongoing exchange with the environment that sustains life. Yet metabolism is more than biochemical process – it is, in Jonas’ view, an existential enactment of freedom, a can that is at the same time a must, because the organism exists precisely in its continual activity. 

In this metabolic striving, Jonas sees the roots of ethical concern. To be alive is already to care about one’s existence. Thus, life brings with it not only structure and function, but a kind of original valuing. The simplest cell, in preserving its boundary, affirms its own being. This ontological movement of wanting to be grounds Jonas’ later ethical reflections in The Imperative of Responsibility, where he argued that life itself demands care, not as an imposed duty, but as a continuation of its very structure. 

Freedom, for Jonas, is inseparable from inwardness. This to say that, the capacity of the organism to have a world, to sense, respond, and selectively engage its environment. He explicitly rejects Cartesian dualism, which posits mind and body as separate substances, and likewise critiques materialist monism for reducing mind to an epiphenomenon. Instead, Jonas argues that the organism is a psychophysical unity, in which inwardness is inscribed from the very beginning of life. Even primitive life forms display what he calls teleological sensitivity. That is, a responsiveness not explainable by mere mechanism, but oriented toward ends and survival. 

This inwardness deepens as life evolves. In animals, it becomes consciousness and instinct; in humans, it becomes self-reflection, foresight, moral judgment. Yet for Jonas, this development is not a leap or rupture, but the unfolding of what was always implicit in the nature of living being. As the complexity of organism increases, so too does its capacity for world-relation, until in the human, this relation becomes explicitly thematic. We not only respond to the world—we understand it, question it, and feel responsible for it. 

From this ontological base, Jonas locates the unique place of the human: not as a metaphysical exception, but as the supreme realization of the organic structure of life. The positive labours of humanity do not come by domination or control, but by being the most exposed, the most concerned, the most capable of carrying the burden of freedom. The human being, by possessing both a body subject to death and a mind aware of that death, represents the deepest manifestation of life’s tension between necessity and freedom, between mortality and transcendence. 

In this way, Jonas rehabilitates the meaning of the human from two dangers: the mechanistic flattening of materialist science, and the disembodied abstraction of idealist philosophy. Instead, the human is a being whose bodily life is not a limitation but a revelation – a being who exists in the tension between immanence and transcendence, whose freedom is exercised in the very finitude of metabolic and ethical concern. 

Thus, for Jonas, to be human is to be a mediator between life and thought, body and meaning, necessity and freedom. Without using theological terms, he gestures toward a kind of cosmic responsibility placed upon humanity. The human being is not simply the accidental apex of evolution but the creature in whom the destiny of life itself becomes self-aware. 

Reading St. Maximos the Confessor through Hans Jonas. 

Jonas and St. Maximos concur, though from different perspectives, that the human being is not an accidental configuration of matter or a fallen spirit, but a creature whose freedom is ontologically significant. Jonas grounds this in the biological reality of the organism: even the simplest life form enacts freedom in its self-maintenance, and this freedom deepens in the human to include ethical responsibility, foresight, and concern. St. Maximos, by contrast, sees human freedom as the gift that allows for theosis – the willing participation in divine life that consummates Creation’s purpose. 

Where Jonas argues that the organism displays freedom as metabolic striving, St. Maximos states that the human being displays freedom as synergistic love. Both resist deterministic views: Jonas, by rejecting materialist epiphenomenalism; St. Maximos, by refusing any theology that would erase human will or reduce salvation to divine fiat. In both cases, freedom is relational and teleological, ordered not toward autonomy for its own sake, but toward a higher form of communion – be it with the world (Jonas) or with God (St. Maximos). 

Jonas places great weight on inwardness. That is, the organism’s capacity for world-relation and sensitivity. Life, for him, is not merely animated matter but a being-for-itself that experiences the world from within. This capacity deepens in human beings into thought, emotion, and responsibility, grounding the ethical call to care for life. St. Maximos complements this with his theology of the logoi: providential intentions (though often read as rational principles) embedded in all things by the divine Logos. The human being, as bearer of reason (logos) and intentional will (gnome), is capable of perceiving these logoi inwardly, not merely as abstract concepts but as divine meanings that call forth response and praise. 

In this way, Jonas’ concept of inwardness and St. Maximos’ doctrine of the logoi both affirm that the world is not mute. Rather, it is vocal and invites participation. The human, through contemplation and care, is the one who hears, who responds, and who interprets. St. Maximos spiritualizes this capacity – seeing it as participation in the Word who is Christ. Meanwhile Jonas, remaining within phenomenology, suggests that such responsiveness is built into the structure of life itself. 

A junture between Jonas and St. Maximos comes in the parallel between metabolism and synergy. For Jonas, metabolism is the continual act of self-sustenance through exchange. That is, a dynamic engagement with the world that defines what it means to live. Life is not static being but existence-in-tension, a holding-together through continual transformation. For St. Maximos, synergy (synergeia) names the dynamic cooperation between divine grace and human freedom. Deification as theosis is not an imposition from without, nor sheer assertion of brute volition, but the continuous conversion and working away through humility and obedience of the human being in free engagement with the divine. 

Both thinkers, then, propose that true life (whether physical or spiritual) is not automatic. It is a relational dynamic, a process that requires both reception and activity, vulnerability and participation. The metabolic struggle of the cell and the spiritual struggle of the ascetic are, in this case, homologous: both are existential enactments of a deeper logic, whether inscribed in nature or revealed in Christ. 

Jonas perceives death not as an external negation of life, but as that which reveals life’s full existential pathos. In death, the tension of being reaches its climax: the organism that strove to be collapses, and in this collapse the mystery of life stands starkly revealed. St. Maximos, likewise, sees death as both the result of sin and the stage upon which resurrection and deification are enacted. For both, death is not simply an end, but a moment in which being is tested, revealed, and possibly transformed. 

Where Jonas sees the finality of death as the great ontological rupture, St. Maximos sees it as the battleground where Christ tramples corruption, opening the path to restored life in communion with God. Yet both thinkers agree that death is where any meaningful account of being must arrive, and that any vision of life that bypasses this confrontation is ultimately incomplete. 

Reading St. Maximos through Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 

As I have articulated above, the anthropology of St. Maximos is both cosmic and Christological. The human person is not merely a rational soul inhabiting a body, but the very axis of Creation – the one creature in whom the five fundamental divisions of existence (created/uncreated, intelligible/sensible, heaven/earth, paradise/world, male/female) are held together. This mediating vocation is not abstract or symbolic. It is ontological: the human is synthesizing nature, created to unify all levels of being in the act of offering creation back to God. St. Maximos describes this as a movement from being, through well-being, to eternal being. The human stands within this arc as both its microcosmic image and its fulcrum. Mediation, for St. Maximos, is the human mode of participation in the divine economy. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for his part, destabilizes the Cartesian subject and offers instead the image of the human as intercorporeal flesh—a being between, a point where the visible and invisible interlace. In his later work, especially The Visible and the Invisible, he speaks of the chiasm or reversibility of perception, where to see is always to be seen, to touch is to be touched. The human is not an isolated observer of the world but a fold in the flesh of the world, a singular juncture of relation through which meaning arises. Like St. Maximos, Merleau-Ponty rejects a static ontology in favour of a dynamic field structured by relation, mediation, and response. While he does not articulate this within a theological frame, his vision of the human as expressive, perceptive, and implicated in the world prepares a philosophical groundwork that is unexpectedly resonant with patristic theanthropology. 

Crucially, both thinkers challenge the notion of the human as autonomous. St. Maximos frames the human as hypostatic unity. That is, a personal mode of being whose purpose is to mediate the cosmic logoi through love and ascetic transformation. Merleau-Ponty, from a more secualr perspective, situates the subject not as master but as participant, born into the perceptual world already entangled with others and with the latent depths of Being. The mediating structure of the human in both cases is not a matter of moral function alone, but of ontological identity. 

St. Maximos the Confessor begins from the conviction that Creation is neither arbitrary nor autonomous. It is structured according to divine logoi (rational principles or providential intentions) that exist eternally in the divine Logos. These logoi do not merely order the world like Platonic forms; they are dynamic, ontological energies by which created beings participate in God’s creative will. In short, these logoi are the affirmation of God in His Creation. Each being, by its nature and purpose, bears within it a unique logos – an embedded orientation toward the Logos through which it was made and toward which it is called to return. The cosmos is thus not a flat plane of things, but a hierarchically structured order of meaningful beings, each with a place in a dynamic movement toward deification as theosis. 

For St. Maximos, hierarchy is not a vertical chain of domination, but a gradation of expressive participation. The structure of reality is poetic: layered, harmonic, and liturgical. The higher contains the lower, as the soul contains the body, not to suppress it but to reveal its fullness. Human nature, situated at the centre of this structure, does not dominate the rest but it binds it, because it alone shares in all levels of being. 

This vision is echoed, in secular terms, by Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of flesh. For him, reality is not divided into subject and object, mind and world, but is composed of an elemental medium of visibility and touch, which he calls la chair du monde. Flesh is not physical substance, but the depth through which being expresses itself. As he writes in The Visible and the Invisible, “flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing…a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style to being wherever there is a fragment of being” (TVAI, p139). Flesh is the medium of meaning, the field in which expression and perception are reciprocal. 

This leads Merleau-Ponty to develop the idea of reversibility or chiasm: every perception is a crossing. To touch is to be touched, to see is to be seen. Reality is not a collection of parts but a layered field – a depth. This precisely parallels St. Maximos’ conception of hierarchy as interpenetration rather than external ordering. Both thinkers understand being as structured by relational gradients of visibility, intelligibility, and participation. 

What Merleau-Ponty brings, then, is a phenomenological vocabulary that renders St. Maximos’ vision intelligible to modern sensibility. Rather than appealing to transcendent planes, Merleau-Ponty shows how depth of being can be disclosed within perception itself. Just as St. Maximos teaches that the hierarchy of the world is not an ascent away from the body but a transfiguration of it, so too does Merleau-Ponty claim that the flesh is the condition of possibility for depth, transcendence, and meaning. 

This convergence suggests a re-reading of hierarchy not as domination but as depth-structure: an order of expressive potentialities, where the more spiritual is not more real but more expressive of reality. In St. Maximos, the hierarchy is Christocentric and eschatological; in Merleau-Ponty, it is embodied and ontological. But in both, it is a fabric of mutual presence and response, what his All-Holines, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew called the “seamless garment of God’s vast creation” (EM, p143).

In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s thought gives a new phenomenological contour to the ancient cosmology of St. Maximos. The hierarchy of being is not an imposition but an unfolding. Flesh is not inert matter but the place where the logoi find an echo. The human being, far from being above the world, is immersed in its texture, capable of articulating its depth. 

At the centre of St. Maximos the Confessor’s cosmology stands the human being as mediator. Created last among all rational and irrational beings, the human is not an afterthought but the linchpin of the cosmos. That is, the creature in whom Creation gathers, reflects upon itself, and is offered to God. Human nature is not merely dual (soul and body), but synthesizing: it integrates the full range of created reality and, in so doing, prepares it for transfiguration. 

This role is grounded in the microcosmic nature of the human being. In Ambiguum 41, St. Maximos outlines five ontological divisions that fracture creation: (1) uncreated vs. created, (2) intelligible vs. sensible, (3) heaven vs. earth, (4) paradise vs. the world, and (5) male vs. female. These are not moral or symbolic binaries, but actual schisms in the structure of being. The human being uniquely partakes in both poles of each division. This means that in humanity alone is it possible for the reunification of Creation to begin – for these ontological tensions to be harmonized.  

Merleau-Ponty arrives at a strikingly similar image, though from a different place of origin. For him, the human is neither a pure consciousness nor a brute biological object but a fold in the flesh of the world – a zone of reciprocity where meaning arises. The human body is intercorporeal: it perceives and is perceived, touches and is touched, speaks and is spoken to. In this way, the body is not a shell but a site of mediation, a suture where self and world intersect. The perceiving subject is always already implicated in the world’s expression; it is both of the world and about it. 

What St. Maximos calls the hypostasis as the personal mode of being that unites soul and body in the image of Christ; Merleau-Ponty might call the institution of expressive depth. For both, the human subject is not the sum of its parts but a juncture of convergence, a singularity through which Creation becomes conscious of itself and is offered back to its source. St. Maximos articulates this liturgically and ascetically: the human is to mediate all Creation back to God in love, culminating in deification as theosis. Merleau-Ponty articulates this phenomenologically: the human being is the site where the flesh of the world becomes articulate, visible, and ethical. 

St Maximos provides a metaphysical and eschatological framework that locates the human within the divine economy. He insists that the human calling is not merely to exist, but to unify. That is, to draw all things toward God through the transformation of self and cosmos in Christ. Merleau-Ponty, in turn, provides a phenomenological method for exploring how this unification might be lived and perceived from within: not as a metaphysical abstraction, but as the lived tension between visibility and invisibility, body and word, gesture and meaning. 

When Merleau-Ponty writes that the subject is not an actor in the world but the place where something takes place, he unknowingly echoes St. Maximos’ vision of the human as liturgy in flesh – the meeting place of heaven and earth, time and eternity. This taking place is not private or solipsistic; it is cosmic. The human being does not simply mediate between things, it becomes the place where mediation occurs. 

Thus, in both systems, the human is ontologically central not because it is superior, but because it is capacious. This is to say, capable of holding contradictions in tension, capable of reversing the Fall by turning perception into prayer. For St. Maximos, this culminates in the figure of Christ, the God-man in whom all logoi are united and through whom all things are reconciled. For Merleau-Ponty, it remains an open task, an ethical responsiveness to the unseen within the seen. 

In each case, the human is the hinge of the cosmos. Its task is not to escape embodiment, but to redeem it. Not to dominate nature, but to render it articulate. Not to transcend the world, but to gather it into communion. 

If the human being is the mediator of Creation, then the fall of the human is no private failing – it is a cosmic rupture. For St. Maximos the Confessor, sin is not simply moral disobedience but an ontological misalignment. It is the turning of the human person away from the divine Logos, away from the harmonious motion of beings toward their intended logos, and toward the illusion of autonomy. This fall is described in terms of movement: humanity, created to move from being to well-being and ultimately to eternal being, instead collapses inward, choosing a life according to appearances, passions, and dissipation. 

This deviation is not confined to human nature alone. Because the human is the mediating link within the hierarchy of being, its fall causes a ripple of disintegration throughout the cosmos. St. Maximos insists that when humanity disordered its own relation to the Logos, it caused a division in Creation so great that is rent apart from its Creator. The natural harmony of the logoi (the divine principles embedded in each creature) becomes obscured darkly. Creation begins to groan, in St. Paul’s verbiage, under the weight of a human will no longer attuned to divine movement. The body and the world, which were once transparent to the presence of God, now become opaque, resistant, alienated. 

This condition is echoed in Merleau-Ponty’s diagnosis of modern perception. Though he does not speak of sin in theological terms, he identifies a similar ontological pathology: the flattening of being, the hardening of perception into abstraction, the dissociation of thought from lived reality. In his critique of Cartesian dualism, Merleau-Ponty exposes how modernity reduced the body to machine and the world to object – what he calls the objectification of the visible. This reification results in a loss of depth, a forgetting of the chiasmic, reciprocal nature of perception. 

Such forgetting is not innocent. It leads to a form of violence, both against the world and against oneself. In this world, the other becomes mere object, nature becomes resource, and flesh becomes obstacle. What Merleau-Ponty describes as the sedimentation of perception (a process in which habitual patterns become hardened and unconscious) reflects the ascetical account of spiritual blindness in St. Maximos: the more the human wills according to the passions, the less it sees the true structure of reality. The senses are dulled. Perception no longer discloses the logoi of beings but turns them into instruments of pleasure and/or domination. 

In both systems, then, fallenness is perceptual. It is a distortion of how reality is seen and encountered. The visible world, once theophanic and luminous, becomes flattened. The human person, once mediator, becomes a tyrant or exile. In St. Maximos, this is the alienation from paradise; in Merleau-Ponty, it is the alienation from the flesh of the world, a forgetting that the subject is always already within the field of intercorporeality. 

For both thinkers, the fallen condition contains within it a possibility of recovery – a metanoia, a change of perception that reopens the world. St. Maximos envisions this as ascesis: a re-training of the senses, a turning of the will toward God through prayer, fasting, and contemplation. The objective is not to reject the body or the world, but to transfigure perception – to learn to see again the logoi in all things, and to live in harmony with them. 

Similarly, Merleau-Ponty speaks of institution – the re-inauguration of meaning in perception, a return to the primordial openness of the body to the world. This is not naïve immediacy, but a disciplined attentiveness that reactivates the depth and reversibility of experience. It is, in his terms, an ontological faith: a trust in the world’s intelligibility, in the reciprocity between self and other, seen and unseen. 

Both accounts call for a conversion of vision. The human must unlearn the habits of control, detachment, and domination. It must relearn how to be-in-relation, how to perceive with depth, humility, and love. In St. Maximos, this path culminates in the imitation of Christ, the one in whom all the logoi are gathered, and through whom the fractures of creation are healed. In Merleau-Ponty, it moves toward a renewed ethics – one grounded not in command but in fidelity to the invisible within the visible. 

Thus, sin, in both accounts, is not merely a matter of transgression. It is a forgetting of relational being – a closing of the eyes to the chiasmic structure of the world and the mediating vocation of the self. Its healing requires more than doctrine or decision; it requires a re-habituation of perception, a renewal of the body’s participation in the world’s meaning. 

However, for both St. Maximos the Confessor and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the rupture of falleness between self and world, between being and meaning, can be sutured. But where St. Maximos speaks in the idiom of theology (of deification as theosis and Christ as the Logos incarnate) Merleau-Ponty speaks in the idiom of ontology – of expression, depth, and a faith in perception. What emerges in both accounts, is a vision of transfigured embodiment, of perception re-opened to the invisible, and of the human restored to its vocation as mediator and revealer. 

St. Maximos grounds this restoration in the Incarnation. Christ, the eternal Logos, assumes human nature to heal the divisions introduced by sin. In His flesh, the fractures between intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, male and female, created and uncreated are overcome. Christ is not merely an ethical example but the ontological mediator: the One in whom all logoi are united, the One through whom all things are recapitulated. The human being, now joined to Christ in baptism and the Eucharist, is no longer a broken microcosm but a cosmic priest – able, once again, to lead all Creation into union with God. 

This is what St. Maximos means by theosis: not the erasure of humanity, but its fulfilment. Not a flight from the world, but a luminous transfiguration of the world in and through the human body. This restoration is deeply ecological and ethical, as the sacred within Creation has always existed – it is only in the fall of humanity that human beings have moved from closeness with their Creator. To live according to the logoi is to love Creation rightly, to see in each being the presence of the Logos, and to enact the cosmic liturgy in which all things are drawn to God. 

Merleau-Ponty does not speak of theosis, but his ontology of the flesh gestures toward a similar vision. The flesh of the world is not inert matter but a medium of revelation, a field of expression in which beings speak themselves into visibility. The human, as the site where this expression becomes reflexive, is not an intruder in nature but its voice, its face, its conscience. In learning to see the world not as object but as event – as something that happens through and with us – the human begins to live a kind of secular liturgy: a life of fidelity to what exceeds comprehension, a life attentive to the invisible in the visible. 

This attentiveness is not passive. It requires discipline, humility, and what Merleau-Ponty calls ontological faith. One must learn to perceive again – not through mastery or calculation, but through aesthetic and ethical responsiveness. As perception is deepened, the world becomes luminous once more – not through transcendence of the flesh, but through its intensification. Given the visible is pregnant with the invisible, in this he approaches a theology of transfiguration. 

What Merleau-Ponty helps us see, then, is the phenomenology of theosis. He provides a language for describing how the human body, through renewed perception, participates in the depth of being. Meanwhile, St. Maximos provides the metaphysical and Christological ground for why such perception matters: because it is the very means by which Creation is healed and offered to God.  

Sources and References 

~ (ODCF-V2) On the Difficulties of the Church Fathers: Volume 2 by St. Maximos the Confessor (HUP, 2014). 

~ (PEC) Philosophy at the End of the Century: A Survey of Its Past and Future by Hans Jonas – see Social Research 61, number 4 (1994): 812–32. 

~ (IR) The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age (University of Chicago Press, 1984) by Hans Jonas. 

~ (PL) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology by Hans Jonas (NUP, 2001). 

~ (TVAI) The Visible and Invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1969). 

~(EM) Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today (Doubleday 2008) by His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.