Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

DIFFICULTY 5
INTRODUCTION
The fifth Difficulty of the later set is the only one in either set to
discuss a passage from anyone else other than St Gregory of
Nazianzus, ‘the Theologian’. It differs from the others, too, in that it is
not simply a discussion of the text cited, but of the whole (brief) letter
of which the words cited are the beginning. The Difficulty has been
analysed above at some length in chapter 4 of the Introduction. 1 There
is little to add here, except to remind readers that it comes from the
mid-630s, after Sophronius had raised his protest against the
monenergism of the Alexandrian Pact of Union of 633, but long before
Maximus had declared himself as a defender of Christological
Orthodoxy against Monothelitism. Much of the point of the Difficulty
is textual: to justify the Orthodox reading of ‘a certain theandric
energy’ in the fourth letter of Denys the Areopagite against the
longstanding Monophysite reading of ‘one theandric energy’, to which
Cyrus, Patriarch of Alexandria, and other Monenergists and
Monothelites made (and were to make) appeal.
1045D
TEXT
In the letter from Saint Denys the Areopagite to Gaius the
monk:
How, you ask, is Jesus, who is beyond everything, ranked
together with all human beings at the level of being? For here he
is not called a man as the cause of humankind but as one who is
himself in his whole being truly a man. 2