Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

158 TEXTS
1312A
D
B
C
(Heb. 9:24), as a human being. As Word, he cannot be
separated in any way at all from the Father; as man, he has
fulfilled, in word and truth, with unchangeable obedience,
everything that, as God, he has predetermined is to take
place, and has accomplished the whole will of God the Father
on our behalf. For we had ruined by misuse the power that had
been naturally given us from the beginning for this purpose.
First he united us in himself by removing the difference
between male and female, and instead of men and women, in
whom above all this manner of division is beheld, he showed
us as properly and truly to be simply human beings,
thoroughly transfigured in accordance with him, and bearing
his intact and completely unadulterated image, touched by no
trace at all of corruption. With us and through us he
encompasses the whole creation through its intermediaries
and the extremities through their own parts. He binds about
himself each with the other, tightly and indissolubly, paradise
and the inhabited world, heaven and earth, things sensible
and things intelligible, since he possesses like us sense and
soul and mind, by which, as parts, he assimilates himself by
each of the extremities to what is universally akin to each in
the previously mentioned manner. Thus he divinely
recapitulates the universe in himself, showing that the whole
creation exists as one, like another human being, completed
by the gathering together of its parts one with another in
itself, and inclined towards itself by the whole of its existence,
in accordance with the one, simple, undifferentiated and
indifferent idea of production from nothing, in accordance with
which the whole of creation admits of one and the same
undiscriminated logos, as having not been before it is.
For in their true logos all beings have at least something in
common one with another. Amongst the beings after God,
which have their being from God through generation, there are
no exceptions, neither the greatly honoured and transcendent
beings which have a universal relationship to the One
absolutely beyond any relation, nor is the least honoured
among beings destitute and bereft since it has by nature a
generic relationship to the most honoured beings. 12 For all
those things that are distinguished one from another by their
particular differences are united by their universal and
common identities, and forced together to the one and the
same by a certain natural generic logos, so that the various
kinds are united one with another according to their essence,
and possess the one and the same and the undivided. For