Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

C
D
1144A
B
TEXTS 115
made and transformed wholly to the whole, he is manifested
in accordance with the verse: Resembling the Son of God he
remains a priest forever. For each one of the Saints who has
made a special beginning with the good in itself is declared to
be a figure of God the giver. According to what this means,
this great Melchisedec because of the divine virtue created in
him is worthy to be an image of Christ the God, and of his
ineffable mysteries, to whom all the saints are gathered
together as to an archetype and source of the good impression
that is in each one of them, especially this one, as bearing in
himself for all the others most of the patterns of Christ.
20b
For our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, who is absolutely single,
is in nature and truth without father and without mother and
without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end
of life. He is without mother because of the immaterial,
bodiless and completely unknowable manner of his pre-eternal
begetting from on high from the Father. He is without father
according to his temporal and bodily begetting here below from
his mother, which took place after a conception without
intercourse. He is without genealogy, since both of his
begettings have a form that is universally inaccessible and
incomprehensible to all. He is without beginning of days or end
of life, as being without beginning or end and utterly
boundless, since he is by nature God. He remains a priest for
ever, since he cannot cease to be by any kind of death, whether
of evil or of nature, because he is God and the provider of all
natural and virtuous life. Do not think that no-one can have a
share in this grace, since the word defines it only in relation to
the great Melchisedec. For God provides equally to all the
power that naturally leads to salvation, so that each one who
wishes can be transformed by divine grace. And nothing
prevents anyone from willing to become Melchisedec, and
Abraham, and Moses, and simply transferring all these Saints
to himself, not by changing names and places, but by imitating
their forms and way of life.
20c
Anyone therefore who puts to death the members that are on
the earth, and extinguishes his whole fleshly way of
thinking, 56 and shakes off his whole relationship to it, through