Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

116 DIFFICULTY 10
C
D
1145A
B
which the love that we owe to God alone is divided, and denies
all the marks of the flesh and the world, for the sake of divine
grace, so that he can say with the blessed Paul the Apostle,
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? and the rest (Rom.
8:36)—such a person has become without father and mother
and genealogy in accordance with the great Melchisedec, not
being in any way subject to the flesh and nature, because of
the union that has taken place with the Spirit.
20d
If then anyone denies himself in these things, in losing his own
soul on account of me, he finds it. 57 That is: he goes beyond the
present life with its wishes for the sake of the better [life], and
possesses the living and active and utterly single Word of God,
who through virtue and knowledge penetrates to the division
between soul and spirit (Heb. 4:12). Such a one has no
experience of what is present to it, and has become without
beginning and end; he no longer bears within himself temporal
life and its motions, which has beginning and end and is
disturbed by many passions, but he possesses the sole divine
and eternal life of the indwelling Word, a life unbounded by
death.
20e
If then he knows how, with great attention, to be vigilant over
his own gift, and cultivates the goods that are beyond nature
and time through ascetic struggle and contemplation, he has
become a lasting and eternal priest. Intellectually he enjoys
divine communion forever, and by his unchanging inclination
towards the good he imitates that which is naturally
unchanging, and is not prevented, in a Jewish manner by the
death of sin, from lasting forever. He gloriously speaks of God
as the fashioner of all, and gratefully gives thanks to Him as
the foreseeing and just Judge of all, as He offers, at the level of
mind, a sacrifice of praise and confession within the divine
altar, from which those who worship in the tabernacle have no
authority to eat (Heb. 13:10). 58 For it is not, as it were, of the
hidden loaves of divine knowledge and the mixing-bowl of
living wisdom59 that they partake who stick to the letter alone
and regard as sufficient for salvation the sacrifices of
irrational passions. For these are those who declare, through
their ceasing from sinning, the death of Jesus, but do not