St. Maximus the Confessor, Fr. Kimel and Jordan Daniel Wood on the activity of the soul after death

St. Maximus the Confessor, Fr. Kimel and Jordan Daniel Wood on the activity of the soul after death

 I wanted to share this post by Father Kimel about a letter (Epistle 7) by St. Maximus the confessor (translated by Jordan Daniel Wood): https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2026/01/25/st-maximus-the-confessor-on-the-immortality-of-the-soul/

In it, as I understand it, St. Maximus argues that the soul's activity doesn't cease its natural rational activity because, if it did, it would either mean that intellectual activity is a property of the body or that intellectual activity isn't an essential property of the soul.

Father Kimel asks: "Readers will not be surprised that I have raised this question. Maximus’s argument in Epistle 7 for the soul’s ontological integrity and continued intellectual activity after death might appear to support the possibility of post-mortem repentance and moral reorientation toward the Good. How could repentance be impossible if the soul remains alive, conscious, and actively engaged with intelligible reality? Yet many Maximus scholars demur. They argue that, for Maximus, death marks the end of moral becoming. With the cessation of embodied temporality, the soul’s fundamental orientation becomes fixed, either toward God or away from him, and is no longer subject to revision."

As an example of this 'common' interpretation, Fr. Kimel refers to this paper: "David Bradshaw, “Patristic Views on Why There Is No Repentance after Death,” in The Unity of Body and Soul in Patristic and Byzantine Thought (2021), 192-212." (https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/bradshaw-patristic_views_on_why_there_is_no_repentance-after-death.pdf )  

If the soul can turn towards the Good only during this life, it would imply that this ability, which seems essential for the soul to being 'rational', would only be possible if the soul is coupled with the changing body.

In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMxhHNyL5oM ,), Jordan Daniel Wood (who starts speaking at 7:40) discusses, among other things, the tension in the traditional Thomistic view that the orientation of the soul is fixed after death: when this happens? At the moment before death, i.e. the separation between the soul and the mortal body? Or at the moment the soul is separated? If the latter, it would imply that the 'decisive choice' is made in a situation when the human being is an incomplete substance, because the human being is body and soul. If the former, one would ask why should the 'decisive choice' happen only at that point in earthly life, what is so special about it? Jordan mentions this tension starting from 11:40 in the video.

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