Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

85A
C
D
B
TEXTS 187
human, and therefore two wills, and one energy and another
energy, the divine and the human, and again a double energy,
that is two of them. So also they clearly pronounced the
signification of the natures in number. For it appears that the
same as man, who is also God by nature, wills in accordance
with the economy that the cup pass, and in this he typifies
what is human, as the wise Cyril taught us, so that he might
take away all shrinking from death from our nature, and steel
and arouse it to a brave assault against it, I mean against
death. And again it appears that as God, being also a human
being in essence, he wills to fulfil the economy of the Father
and work the salvation of us all. It made clear then that as
man, being by nature God, he acts humanly, willingly accepting
the experience of suffering for our sake. And it is again made
clear that as God, who is human by nature, he acts divinely
and naturally exhibits the evidence of his divinity. From which
the same one is recognized as being at the same time God and
man by the natures, out of which and in which he exists,
possessing naturally the same number of wills and the same
number of energies, for the confirmation of the perfect
existence of those [natures with their natural properties] that
he properly is.
And if anyone, wanting to refute what has just been said,
takes for a pretext the theandric energy of Denys, the revealer
of God, or the [energy] that the most wise Cyril shows in the
middle of the treatise to share kinship with both, let him know
that he will draw no strength from these against the reverent
confession.
For by the word ‘theandric’ the teacher obviously refers
periphrastically to the double energy of the double nature. For
he is clearly putting together in this word the adjectives
‘divine’ and ‘human’, but not simply, for which reason he does
not designate this energy with a number. 25 When he wants to
designate monadically the union of the natural energies, he
says ‘this energy’, which does not harm the natural difference
between them, just as it is not by identity of essence that they
form an inseparable union. But they say, ‘if he has one energy,
the same is also theandric’. But what if the Word Incarnate
possessed one natural nature, and no-one objects? How is the
one natural energy to be divided into two? And by what reason
does the one energy in itself define and sustain the different
essences, since it makes each nature essentially
indistinguishable from others of the same kind and again
makes it essentially different from others of another kind? And