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Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

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D<br />

TEXTS 111<br />

back to what is good, and by setting straight what is not in our<br />

control by opposing what is, they cut off all evil, whether<br />

present, future or past. For I do not say that in these things<br />

providence is one thing and judgment another. But I know<br />

them as potentially one and the same, but having a differing<br />

and many-formed activity in relation to us. Mixture (or<br />

composition) of beings is a symbol of our inclination. For when<br />

it cleaves to the virtues, and mixes them in itself, it is<br />

constituted at the level of mind as the divinely-fitting cosmos.<br />

Position is the teacher of the character that is chosen by<br />

inclination, steadily holding an opinion concerning the good<br />

and training those who oppose what is against it, and accept<br />

only on rational basis any kind of change. And again if they<br />

combine movement with position, and mixture with difference,<br />

they distinguish the substance of all things indivisibly 47 into<br />

being and difference and movement, and if they grasp that the<br />

cause is to be beheld from the things that are caused<br />

differently by an inventive and technical use of reason, they<br />

conceive this reverently as being and being wise and being<br />

alive. 48 Thence they are taught the divinely-perfect and saving<br />

meaning concerning the Father and the Son and the Holy<br />

Spirit, according to which they are hiddenly illuminated that<br />

the meaning of the cause is not simply that of being but are<br />

reverently initiated about the mode of existence. 49 And again<br />

carefully considering the whole of creation from the point of<br />

view of position alone, they contracted the five modes of<br />

contemplation mentioned into three, recognizing that creation<br />

in accordance with its own meaning teaches from heaven,<br />

earth and what is in between ethical, natural and theological<br />

philosophy. 50 Again beholding the creation from the point of<br />

view of difference alone, that is to say from the distinction<br />

between what is contained and what contains, I mean of<br />

heaven and what is within it, they reduce these three forms to<br />

two, by which I mean wisdom and philosophy, one that, as it<br />

were, circumscribes and receives in a way divinely fitting the<br />

above-mentioned reverent forms and encloses within itself the<br />

hidden and natural meanings of the others, while the other<br />

holds together, as it were, character and inclination, activity<br />

and contemplation, and virtue and knowledge, drawing them<br />

up by an intimate relationship to wisdom as cause. And again<br />

considering creation from the point of view of mixture as the<br />

harmonious composition of everything, and thinking of the<br />

fashioning Word as ineffably binding all things to one another

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