Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

186 OPUSCULE 7
84A
C
D
B
the reverent confession of the Fathers. ‘And when he says,
Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass,’ as the great
Athanasius says in his treatise on the Incarnation and the
Trinity, 18 ‘nevertheless not my will be done, but yours. For the
spirit is eager, but the flesh is weak,’ 19 we understand ‘that two
wills are manifest here: the human, which belongs to the flesh,
and the divine. For the human will, because of the weakness
of the flesh, seeks to avoid the passion; the divine will is
eager.’
And this the great theologian, Gregory, clearly teaches in his
second sermon on the Son, when he says, ‘For the willing of
that one 20 is not opposed [to God], 21 but completely deified.’ 22
Thus he possesses a human will, according to this divine
teacher, only it was not opposed to God. 23 But this will is not
at all deliberative, 24 but properly natural, eternally formed
and moved by its essential Godhead to the fulfilment of the
economy. And it is wholly and thoroughly deified by its
agreement and concord with the Father’s will, and can
properly be said to have truly become divine in virtue of the
union, but not by nature. For nothing at all changes its nature
by being deified. When therefore he says ‘completely deified’,
the teacher presents the union of Christ’s human will with the
divine will of the Father, and he completely excludes any
contrariety from the mystery of Christ, as if there were two
beings willing opposing actions. And when he says ‘For the
willing of that one’, he points to the innate movement of
Christ’s human will and its essential and natural difference
from the divine will of the Father, and completely excludes
confusion together with any phantom.
Understanding the meaning of the economy, this divine
Father and together with him the holy teachers of the Catholic
Church, fought against this confusion and the equally
irreverent division, and loudly proclaimed the dogma of the
difference and the union in respect of both of them [the wills],
preserving the difference perfectly and in its effects in respect
of the natural logos, and again saving the union, in the
manner of the economy, firmly and hypostatically, so as to
confirm the matters (and everything that naturally goes with
them) that essentially exist in the one and sole Christ God in
accordance with the inseparable union. For just as they all
maintained the dogma that in one and the same there is one
nature and another nature, the divine and the human, and
therefore a double nature, so they loudly preached to all that
there is also one will and another will, the divine and the