Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

164 TEXTS
C
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1413A
—we dare to take the Word before us and say that the play of
God spoken of by the great teacher is a kind of keeping to the
middle, staying equidistant from the extremes, by weaving
about and quickly changing one’s position, or, to put it better,
by a flowing that remains still. And this is the paradox: to
behold stillness eternally flowing and being carried away, a
flowing, eternally-moving, divinely contrived to contribute
providentially to the improvement of the whole divine
economy, capable of making wise those who are taught by it to
hope always for change, and to believe that the end of this
mystery for them is that by an inclination towards God they
might be securely deified by grace. By the middle I mean the
totality of things visible which now surround the human being
or in which the human is; by the extremes I mean the reality of
everything not manifest and which is going unfailingly to
surround humanity, things that have properly and truly been
made and come into being in accordance with the ineffable and
preeminent purpose and reason of the divine goodness. 7 Just
as the wise Preacher with the great and clear eye of the soul
caught a glimpse of the coming into being of visible and
flowing things and, as in a vision, of their being made and
coming into being, and said, What is this that has been? It is the
same as that which is going to be. And what is this that has
been made? It is the same as that which is going to be made
(Eccles. 1:9). Clearly he has in mind the first and the last
things, as those which are themselves and truly are, and also
the middle things, that pass away and are never in the same
place. For when the teacher has come to an end of speaking
grandiosely of a certain kind of living things and of stones, and
of simply speaking boundlessly of the many things that can
been seen in beings, 8 he adds ‘The high Word plays in every
kind of form, mixing, as he wills, with his world here and
there.’ Is it not therefore the same as what he says in his
sermon on Holy Pentecost about divinity and created nature?
‘As long as each nature remains on its own, the one in its
majesty, the other in its lowliness, his goodness remains
unmixed and his love for human kind unshared, and there is a
great gulf in the middle that cannot be crossed, which not only
separates the rich man from Lazarus and the longed-for bosom
of Abraham, 9 but also every nature that has come to be and is
in a state of flux from that nature which has not come to be
and is immutable.’ 10 Somewhat similar to this is what the
great divine preacher Denys the Areopagite says: ‘We must
dare to add this as being no less true: that the source of all