Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

DIFFICULTY 71
INTRODUCTION
This is the last of the early collection of Difficulties, and differs from
the rest in being uniquely on a passage from one of Gregory
Nazianzen’s poems, rather than on a passage from his sermons.
Gregory’s couplet on the ‘high Word’ playing ‘in every kind of form’
recalls the similar imagery, used to rather different purpose, by
Gerard Manley Hopkins:
For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and
lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces. 1
This Difficulty provides a striking example of Maximus’ tendency
(already seen in Amb. 10.17, 31b–e) to interpret the Dionysian
categories of apophatic and cataphatic theology in terms of the
Incarnation. This is developed in the first meditation he offers on the
couplet from Gregory’s poem. Maximus goes on to offer several other
interpretations. First, another Christological interpretation that sees
the ‘play of the Word’ like the weaving about of a wrestler, so that the
paradox of ‘divine play’ is interpreted by another paradox, that of ‘still
flowing’, understood as a holding to the middle, in an active, agile way:
this interpretation should be compared with the way in which
Maximus talks of the Word in the Incarnation fulfilling the
mediatorial, microcosmic role of humanity in Amb. 41, above. This
play is also compared to the way in which parents come down to the
level of their children, with the intention of educating them through
play. The last two interpretations offered compare play to the shifting
character of the world in which we live: such play is again pedagogic,
and leads us to higher, unchanging reality.