Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

22 INTRODUCTION
Councils, Saints, Sacraments. Scripture is absolutely primary.
Maximus interprets it by analogy with the Incarnation: in it the Word
of God draws near to human beings and Selects things which are
familiar to them, combining together various stories, symbols,
parables and dark sayings; and in this way He becomes flesh’ (CT II.
60). Scripture is therefore the Word of God talking to human beings: it
is our access to eternal truth. To understand it one needs to engage
with the Word who speaks, enter into a relationship through which we
are transformed and come to find the Word less strange, though not
less awesome. The Church—all those incorporated into Christ through
baptism—is where understanding of the Word takes place. The
Fathers and the Saints are two categories (not separate, but distinct)
of those who are being drawn into this process of understanding. To
them Maximus attributes an authority scarcely less than that of the
Scriptures. On several occasions (notably in the Ascetic Life and the
Mystagogia) Maximus presents his teaching as something that he has
learnt from an ‘old man’ (gerôn, the normal Greek term for a spiritual
father): it is a way of clothing the teaching he has received in the
mantle of a lived tradition, lived out in the ascetic struggle of the holy
man or woman, or saint. In his scholia on passages from St Gregory of
Nazianzus, whom he calls ‘the Theologian’, he seems to attribute to
him virtual infallibility: Gregory is the ‘great and wonderful teacher’
and Maximus never, in dealing with the difficult passages in his
sermons, entertains the idea that the Theologian might have made a
mistake (even in Amb. 21, where Gregory refers to John the
Evangelist as the ‘Forerunner’, the title of John the Baptist). 5
Tradition, witnessed to in Scripture and expounded by the Fathers, is
there to be interpreted, not called in question. The councils of the
Church—both local and Ecumenical— were also occasions on which
the meaning of Tradition was authoritatively recognized, and
acclaimed by the bishops gathered together in the Spirit. 6 Maximus
does not all that often refer explicitly to the five Ecumenical Councils
that by his time had already taken place. But he does something even
more important: he makes the decisions of these councils a guide to
the fundamental nature of reality and develops what we shall call a
‘Chalcedonian logic’ which he uses as a powerful tool of theological
elucidation. As well as at councils, the bishops exercise their authority
as Fathers of the Church in their sermons, in which they expound the
meaning of the Scriptures, almost invariably in a liturgical context.
The authority of the Saints is manifest in their success (or better:
progress) in the ascetic struggle. Here lies the importance of
monasticism for Maximus, not that sanctity is confined to a monastic
élite, but sanctity is the goal of the ascetic struggle that monks have
set themselves to pursue without distraction, just as sanctity is the