Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

172 TEXTS
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specified in everything he performs as man. Since he has truly
become man, he breathes, speaks, walks, moves his hands,
uses his senses naturally in the perception of things sensible,
is hungry, thirsty, eats, sleeps, is tired, weeps, is distressed,
and possesses every other independent capacity and, in every
other respect in the mode of a soul that with its own energy
moves the body that forms one nature that has truly become
and is called his own, or to speak properly, without change he
has become whatever nature was needed to fulfil in reality the
economy for our sake. Therefore he did not abrogate the
constitutive energy of the assumed nature, nor does the
teacher support such a notion when he says, ‘he assumed
being in a mode beyond being, and performed human activities
in a way beyond the human’, but he shows in both the newness
of the modes [tropoi] preserved in the constancy of the natural
logoi, without which no being is what it is. And if we say that
the transcendent negation 12 entails the affirmation of the
assumed nature but the destruction of this [sc. the human]
constitutive energy, by what reason do we show that the same
thing equally affirmed of both [natures], in respect of
existence, entails destruction in respect of this [sc., the human
nature]? And again if the assumed nature is not self-moved,
since it is moved by the Godhead that has been truly united to
it hypostatically, and we do not take away its constitutive
movement, neither may we confess the same nature to be
manifest as an independent hypostasis, that is by itself, but as
receiving being in the very God the Word that has in truth
assumed its being. 13 And since with both [natures] we have
the same reason for refusal, we confess together with the
nature the movement, without which there is no nature,
knowing that the logos of existence is one thing, and the mode
in which it exists another, convinced that one is a matter of
nature, the other a matter of the economy. The coming together
of these [natures] makes the great mystery of the nature
[physiologia] of Jesus who is beyond nature, and shows that in
this the difference and the union of the energies are preserved,
the one beheld without division in the natural logos of what
has been united, and the other acknowledged without
confusion in the monadic mode of what has come to pass. 14 For
why, where or how could nature come to be bereft of its
constitutive power? For this great teacher says that ‘what
completely lacks power neither is, nor is something, nor is
there any kind of affirmation concerning it’. 15 It follows then
that it is necessary reverently to confess the natures of Christ,