Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

118 DIFFICULTY 10
B
C
D
22
Twofold contemplation of Moses
22a
And Moses again is shown to be another. In the time of the
domination of the passions, that is to say of the devil, who is
the Pharaoh of the intelligible world, tyrannically prevailing
over the better in favour of the worse, and causing the fleshly
to rise against the spiritual, so that every pious train of
thought is destroyed, he who has been born according to God
in his inclination and placed in the box of true struggle64 is
established outside fleshly ways of behaving and inside divine
thoughts according to the soul. He accepted to be subject to the
senses, that is the daughter of the intelligible Pharaoh, until
the law of the reception of natural contemplations. 65 With
noble zeal he put to death the Egyptian-like way of thinking
that belongs to the flesh (Rom. 8:6), and buried it in the sand. 66
By the sand, I mean that habit that is unfruitful in evils: if the
tares of evil are sown by the enemy, 67 nothing comes up
naturally because of its inherent poverty of the spirit, but it
gives birth to and protects dispassion. By a divine command it
is made desolate for the winds of wickedness, becomes a forest
for the constantly changing waves of temptation and places a
limit to a sea of bitter and truly salty evil, as it is written,
Replaced sand as a boundary for the sea, saying to it. This far
shall you go, and not transgress, and in you shall your waves
be thrown together (cf. Jer. 5:22). The trains of thought that
still consent to the earth and seek enjoyment from it, where
the passionate part [of the soul] naturally struggles against
reason and the capacity to discriminate, and dominates and
expels it—these he, being a wise shepherd, leads, like sheep,
through the desert which is a condition deprived of passions
and material things and pleasures, to the mountain of the
knowledge of God, which can be beheld on the heights of the
mind. 68 O what labours he expended and time he spent on
behalf of those contemplations that attach one to the spiritual
level by breaking the relationship of the mind to the things of
sense (by this I mean the forty-year crossing [of the
wilderness]), and became worthy of beholding and hearing
with his mind the ineffable, supernatural and divine fire that
is present, as in the bush, 69 in the being of everything that
exists, I mean God the Word, who in the last times shone forth
from the Bush of the Holy Virgin and spoke to us in the