Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

28 INTRODUCTION
an ineffable union’ (1045A). Maximus’ defence of two wills in the
Incarnate Christ is not intended to suggest that there are two subjects
in Christ, but to safeguard the full humanity in which the Second
Person of the Godhead lives out a human life.
A TRADITION OF COSMIC THEOLOGY: DENYS
THE AREOPAGITE
A final strand in Maximus’ theological heritage is more controversial.
This is the influence on him of the works ascribed to Denys (or
Dionysius) the Areopagite. These writings came to the notice of
Christian thinkers barely fifty years before Maximus’ birth. They are
first quoted (or misquoted) by the Cyrilline theologians who rejected
Chalcedon (the ‘Acephaloi’ or Severan Monophysites) at the colloquy
called by Justinian in his attempts to achieve a settlement of the
Christological controversy in 532. They cited in their support a
passage from one of the writings ascribed to the Areopagite where he
refers to Christ’s ‘one theandric energy’—arguing that if it is
legitimate to speak of one energy in Christ, it is legitimate to speak of
a single nature. The Orthodox dismissed the authority of the
‘Areopagite’, retorting that none of the Fathers—not Cyril, not
Athanasius—had ever heard of him. But the compelling vision of the
Areopagite was such that very soon his works were accepted by
Monophysite and Orthodox alike as authentic: that is, as genuine
works of that Denys, an Athenian who had been one of the judges of
the Apostle Paul when he defended his preaching of Christianity
before the court of the Areopagus in about AD 52 (see Acts 17.22–34),
and who, it was believed, had become one of the early bishops of
Athens. In fact, it is now universally recognized that these works—the
Celestial Hierarchy, theEcclesiastical Hierarchy, the Divine Names,
the Mystical Theology, and some letters—were written at the end of
the fifth, or beginning of the sixth, century, probably by a Syrian
monk, who had conceived an enthusiasm for the brand of
Neoplatonism we associate with the fifth-century ‘Platonic successor’
(diadochus) at the Academy in Athens called Proclus (probably
through having read some of their works, rather than having actually
been a pupil at the Academy). 27 These works were edited in the
middle of the sixth century by John, Bishop of Scythopolis in Palestine
(modern Bet Shean), an orthodox Cyrilline Chalcedonian, and all the
manuscripts of Denys that we have, except for the early Syriac
translation by Sergius of Reshaina, go back to John’s edition. 28 John
was a man of enormous erudition: he provided a preface to the Corpus
Areopagiticum and learned scholia to the individual works. Part of his
purpose in this was to show that Denys really belonged to the