Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

156 TEXTS
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no longer tied to earth by any bodily weight. Nor is it
obstructed in its ascent to the heavens thanks to the perfect
invisibility to these things of the mind that is genuinely
hastening towards God, and wisely stretches out towards him
step by step, as on an ordinary path, naturally overcoming any
obstacles that stand in its way. And then the human person
unites what is perceived by the mind and what is perceived by
the senses with each other by achieving equality with the
angels in its manner of knowing, and thus makes the whole
creation one single creation, no longer divided by what it can
know and what it cannot know, through its equality to the
angels lacking nothing in their knowledge and understanding
of the logoi in the things that exist, according to which the
infinite pouring out of the gift of true wisdom inviolably and
without intermediary furnishes, so far as is permitted, to those
who are worthy a concept of God beyond understanding or
explanation. And finally, beyond all these, the human person
unites the created nature with the uncreated through love (O
the wonder of God’s love for us human beings!), showing them
to be one and the same through the possession of grace, the
whole [creation] wholly interpenetrated 10 by God, and become
completely whatever God is, save at the level of being, and
receiving to itself the whole of God himself, and acquiring as a
kind of prize for its ascent to God the most unique God
himself, as the end of the movement of everything that moves
towards it, and the firm and unmoved rest of everything that
is carried towards it, being the undetermined and infinite
limit and definition of every definition and law and ordinance,
of reason and mind and nature.
Since then the human person is not moved naturally, as it
was fashioned to do, around the unmoved, that is its own
beginning (I mean God), but contrary to nature is voluntarily
moved in ignorance around those things that are beneath it, to
which it has been divinely subjected, and since it has abused
the natural power of uniting what is divided, that was given to
it at its generation, so as to separate what is united, therefore
‘natures have been instituted afresh’, and in a paradoxical
way beyond nature that which is completely unmoved by
nature is moved immovably around that which by nature is
moved, and God becomes a human being, in order to save lost
humanity. Through himself he has, in accordance with nature,
united the fragments of the universal nature of the all,
manifesting the universal logoi that have come forth for the
particulars, by which the union of the divided naturally comes