As a Christian, Maximus was an heir to the traditions of the Hebrews, but he was also addressing the questions of Greek philosophers such as Thales and Aristotle, who had tried to explain the world through natural causes. Natural phenomena, Maximus agreed, were not divine in themselves, nor caused by gods, and could be investigated on their own terms. But why, he asked, are we able to understand ourselves and the natural world in the first place? Only because that world was made, said Maximus, by the God who created us in his image, capable of comprehending the universe or at least able to perceive its patterns – that is, able to read the book of nature.

Maximus the Confessor saw the natural world as charged with symbolic meaning.