Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

170 TEXTS
1048A
B
C
D
Since, according to the simple interpretation of Holy
Scripture, God as the cause of all is designated by the names
of everything that he has produced, and again after the
Incarnation is only in this mode 3 called man, the great Denys
corrects the monk Gaius with these words, teaching that the
God of all, as Incarnate, is not simply said to be man, but is
himself truly a man in the whole of his being. The sole, true
proof of this is its natural constitutive power, and one would
not err from the truth in calling this a natural energy properly
and primarily characteristic of it, being a form-enduing
movement that contains every property that is naturally
added to it, apart from which there is only non-being, since,
according to this great teacher, only that which in no way is is
without movement or existence. 4 Most clearly therefore he
teaches that God Incarnate is to be denied nothing at all of
what is ours, apart from sin (which does not belong to nature),
and that he is expressly called not simply a man, but himself
truly a man in all his being. He [Denys] contends in what
follows 5 that to be called onewho exists humanly is properly
his, saying, ‘We do not confine our definition of Jesus to the
human plane’, since we do not decree that he is a mere man,
severing the union that transcends thought. For we use the
name human being of the One who is God by nature and who
truly shared our being in an essential way, not simply because
he is the cause of humankind. For he is not man only, because
he is also God himself, ‘nor beyond being only’, because he is
also himself a man, if there exists neither mere man nor bare
God, ‘but one who is in different ways truly man and the lover
of man’. For out of his infinite longing for humankind he has
himself become by nature that for which he longed, neither
suffering anything in his own nature in his inexpressible
selfemptying, nor changing anything of what is human
through his ineffable assumption, 6 nor in any way diminishing
nature, which the Word properly supports as constituting it.
‘Beyond what is human’, because divinely [conceived] without
a man, ‘in accordance with the human’, because humanly
[conceived] after the law of child-birth. ‘The one beyond being
assumed being from the being of humankind’, for he did not
appear to us simply in the mere form of flesh, in accordance
with the silly tales of the Manichees, 7 nor did he come down
from heaven to share being with the flesh, after the
Apollinarian myths, 8 but he himself became truly a man in the
whole of his being, by the assumption of flesh endowed with an