Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

C
D
1412A
B
DIFFICULTY 71 163
weakness and play are privations, of wisdom, power and
prudence, respectively, but when they are attributed to God
they clearly mean excess of wisdom, power and prudence. What
with us counts as privation, with God is certainly rightly taken
to mean possession; while what with us counts as possession,
with God is most fittingly taken to mean privation by excess.
For the transcendent attributes of the divine, spoken of by us
in a contrary sense as privations, fall a long way short of their
true meaning. If this in its normal sense is true (for the divine
never agrees with the human), then the mystery of the divine
Incarnation is called the foolishness and weakness of God
according to the holy Apostle Paul, and God’s play according
to the wonderful and great teacher Gregory, since it oversteps
in a way that transcends being every order and harmony of all
nature and power and energy. This the most divine David
beheld from afar and in this he was initiated at the level of
mind through the divine Spirit, so that he expressed
beforehand the apostolic interpretation of the transcendent
possession of God through privation, calling out (I think with
reference to the Jews), In the multitude of your power your
enemies will lie about you (Psa. 65:3). For every human being
is certainly an enemy of God and clearly established as a liar
who ignorantly and irreverently includes God in the law of
nature and has not begun to believe that he who is serenely
beyond nature in reality came among those who are subject to
nature and is able to fill with power the whole of nature. Thus
from one point of view reason dares in a conjectural way 5 to
behold the foolishness, the weakness and the play of God, by a
digression in which it seeks a provisional interpretation of the
difficulty before us, and reason takes the abyss calling to abyss
in the noise of the divine cataracts to be the mind that reaches
after knowledge and calls upon wisdom, and thus discerns a
tiny reflection of the mysteries of the divine and ineffable
descent among us. For the abyss and the place of the abyss are
called by the same name, and thus the pure mind is
established as the place of divine wisdom. Thus the mind is
called abyss because of its capacity, and again wisdom is given
the same name because of its nature.
Another contemplation of the same
With the help of divine grace, looking in another way at the
difficulty before us—by way of conjecture6 rather than
categorical assertion (for the one is modest, the other reckless)