Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

132 DIFFICULTY 10
C
D
1172A
B
senses, and what is perceived through the senses is contained
by the senses through sensation, as being understood. And
again the universal is corrupted by change into the particular,
and the particular, turned into the universal by reduction, also
suffers corruption. And there comes about the corruption of
everything that owes its coming to be to others. For the union
of universals with one another, which causes the coming to be
of particulars, is the corruption of one another by change, and
the reduction of particulars to universals by the dissolution of
their being bound together, leading to corruption, is the
continuance and coming to be of the universals. And learning
that this is the constitution of the world of the senses—the
change and corruption of the bodies through which and in
which it consists, one into another—we come to understand
that it follows from the natural property of the bodies in which
it consists—their instability and changeability and their
chameleon-like alteration of universal qualities—that it is not
possible for the world to have a necessary consummation. Nor
can it be rightly thought that what does not possess eternity
should appear to any rational understanding as eternal,
separate from change and alteration, and not rather scattered
and changing in a myriad of ways.
33
Contemplation of the future world, and of the
gulf, of Lazarus, and the bosom of Abraham 92
Those who have nobly passed from her, beyond things visible,
conjecture concerning the limit of the universe, which is wholly
in the future, in which there will no longer be among beings
anything bearing or anything borne, nor any kind of motion at
all in the ineffable stability which defines the range and
motion of what is borne and moved. Those who desire with the
mind to reach this, while still encumbered with corruptible
flesh, need consciously to cross over the gulf between God and
human beings and willingly to be freed from any relationship
to flesh and the world. For truly the great and fearful gulf
between God and human beings is the desire and inclination
to the body and this world. It was deprivation of these things
that Lazarus joyfully embraced (clearly manifest in sickness
and want, the one in relation to the world, the other in relation
to the body, which worked in him estrangement), and made
him worthy to receive rest in the bosom of Abraham. But the
rich man who was attached to all these was abandoned without