Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

100 DIFFICULTY 10
C
unshakeable land under their feet. In this way he showed, I
think, that the nature that is beneath the senses can be
contemplated and easily described by right reason, and, to the
life that is adorned by the virtues, is accessible and easy to
cross and presents no danger to those who cross it thus from
the seething impulses of the divided waters on either side, and
their obscuring effect. If the break-up of mutual, rational
coherence by evils, opposed to the virtues by lack or B excess,
is what sublime reason discerns in the waters of the
intelligible sea, then the one who cleaves to them [sc. evils] in
his heart will in no way be allowed to be united with those who
are hastening earnestly after God.
5
Contemplation of Moses on the mountain 13
So again Moses followed God who called him, and, passing
beyond everything here below, entered into the cloud, where
God was, 14 that is, into the formless, invisible and bodiless
state, with a mind free from any relationship to anything
other than God. Having come into this state, in so far as
human nature is worthy of it, he receives, as a worthy prize for
that blessed ascent, knowledge encompassing the genesis of
time and nature, and, having made God Himself the type and
paradigm of the virtues, he modelled himself on Him, like a
picture preserving beautifully the copy of the archetype, and
came down the mountain. Because of his participation in
glory, his face shone with grace to all men, so that having
himself become a figure of the Godlike figure, he gave and
displayed without envy, and he did this by expounding to the
people what he had seen and heard, and handing on to those
with him in writing the mysteries of God as a kind of divinelygiven
inheritance.
6
Contemplation of the dough of the unleavened
loaves 15
So the people, when they were led out of Egypt by Moses, took
the dough needed for their food into the desert. For it is
necessary, I think, to guard the power of reason within us pure
and unharmed from entanglement with things perceived by
the senses. He taught them then to flee the realm of the
senses, and to journey hiddenly to the intelligible world, so