Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

1057A
C
D
B
DIFFICULTY 5 175
simply beyond being; nor did he do ‘human things humanly’,
because they did not take place in a solely fleshly way, as
if separated from the Godhead, for he was not only a man; ‘but
as God made man he exercised a certain new “theandric” 19
energy amongst us’. For by the assumption of flesh endowed
with an intellectual soul, he truly became man, he who was in
a different way the lover of humankind, and as man he
possessed the divine energy united to the fleshly in an
ineffable union, and fulfilled the economy for our sake
theandrically, accomplishing both divinely things, or to speak
more plainly, exercising the divine and human energy in the
same [person].
Therefore when the wise man makes affirmation of the
union by negation of the division between the divine and
human [properties], he does not ignore the natural difference
between what has been united. For the union, in refusing
division, does not harm the difference. If the mode of union
preserves the logos of the difference, to draw out the meaning
of the words of the saint, then since Christ has a double
appellation corresponding to his nature, it is clear that he has
a double energy, if the essential logos of what has been united
in the union has not been diminished in any way in essence or
in quality. But it is not as if, by the negation of the extremities
brought together in the union, there is made an affirmation of
something intermediate. For Christ is not some intermediate
being, affirmed by the negation of the extremities. For there is
a ‘certain new’ thing, characteristic of the new mystery, the
logos of which is the ineffable mode of the coming together.
For who knows how God assumes flesh and yet remains God,
how, remaining true God, he is true man, showing himself
truly both in his natural existence, and each through the other,
and yet changing neither? Faith alone can grasp these things,
honouring in silence the Word, to whose nature no logos from
the realm of being corresponds. ‘Theandric’, then, not simply,
nor as some composite thing, consisting simply neither of the
naked Godhead by nature, nor of mere humanity, nor being a
composite nature, a kind of borderland between two extremes,
but most naturally existing as God made man, that is as
perfectly Incarnate. Nor again is this ‘new’ to be thought of as
‘single’, 20 nor as a ‘single capacity’; for this ‘newness’ is not a
matter of quality or quantity, since the definition of every
nature is constituted by the logos of its essential energy, which
is not double, like the griffin 21 celebrated in myths. Given this,
how could such a being, with one energy, and that a natural