Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

92 DIFFICULTY 10
veil describes for Maximus the experience of engagement with all that
hides God: in short, it describes the experience of ascetic struggle.
Maximus explores this in the first sections, as he discusses how the
soul operates and of what its relationship to the body consists
(sections 1–3).
But the ideas of contemplation and the cloud have already brought
to Maximus’ mind the Transfiguration of Christ, when the disciples
beheld the radiant glory of the divinity of their Lord, and a bright
cloud overshadowed Him (see Matt. 17:1–8 and parallels). In the
account of the Transfiguration (and in icons, too: the earliest known
icon of the Transfiguration is from about the time of Maximus’ birth;
it is still in the monastery of St Catherine at Sinai), Christ appears
transfigured together with the figures of the great prophets of the Old
Testament, Moses and Elijah. In this event the Old and the New
Testaments meet: the prophets bear witness to Christ’s glory, which is
beheld by the apostles. It is the Transfiguration, and all that it
implies, that is at the heart of Maximus’ tenth Difficulty. At the end of
section 3, in his account of how the soul, having passed beyond the
cloud, escapes to intellectual contemplation, Maximus recalls the
place of the cloud in the escape, under Moses’ leadership, of the people
of Israel from Egypt, and this leads to a long series of meditations (or
contemplations) on events from the Old Testament concerned with
passing over, or passing beyond—to contemplation of God. Here we
encounter quite directly the lateral movement of Maximus’ mind.
Thirteen short sections (sections 4–16) explore the preparation in the
Old Testament for the divine manifestation of the Transfiguration
(section 17).
In the Transfiguration itself we behold, not just Christ
transfigured, but also his garments which contain his human
presence. These garments can be interpreted either as Scripture or as
the works of creation: a dual interpretation Maximus sees indicated in
the two figures Moses (who received the written law, already
discussed in section 5) and Elijah (to whom God revealed himself
through the works of creation: 3 Kgd 19:9ff., already discussed in
section 12). This leads Maximus to demonstrate the unity of the
natural and the written law (section 18), and then, in section 19, to
discuss natural contemplation, the contemplation of God in created
nature (in this section, in particular, he picks up and corrects some
Origenist errors concerning the cosmos). All this is explored in a long
series of meditations, especially of Melchisedec (the priest-king of
Salem of Genesis 14:18–20, whose superiority to Abraham
demonstrates his transcendence of the written law, as Heb. 7 argues)
and Moses. Section 31 returns to the Transfiguration itself, with a
series of brief meditations, which include a striking Christological