Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

68 INTRODUCTION
clear and limpid to [the disciples], and were grasped by the mind
without any riddling puzzle or symbolic shadow, revealing the
meaning that lay hidden within them’ (1128B). Or the radiant
garments can be understood as a symbol of ‘creation itself…which can
be understood, through the wise variety of the various forms that it
contains, on the analogy of a garment, to be the worthy power of the
generative Word who wears it’ (1128BC). But in both cases—whether
through the interpretation of Scripture, or through discerning the
logoi of the created order—what one encounters, or rather the one
whom one encounters, is the Transfigured, and therefore Incarnate,
Word of God. There is not then, as Origen sometimes seems to
suggest, a movement away from the Incarnation to some higher
eternal reality (‘Wisdom hidden in a mystery’ in contrast to the Word
‘made flesh’, as Origen once put it), 14 but rather an ever deepening
engagement with the Incarnate Word. Maximus puts this concisely
later on when he says:
The knowledge of all that has come to be through [the Lord] is
naturally and properly made known together with Him. For just
as with the rising of the sensible sun all bodies are made known,
so it is with God, the intelligible sun of righteousness, rising in
the mind: although He is known to be separate from the created
order, he wishes the true logoi of everything, whether intelligible
or sensible, to be made known together with Himself. And this is
shown on the mount of the Transfiguration of the Lord when
both the brightness of his garments and the light of His face
made Him known, and drew to God the knowledge of those who
were after Him and around Him.
(Amb. 10. 27:1156AB)
The sections that follow the meditation on the Transfiguration (section
17) consist of a long series of considerations of the way in which, in
the Incarnate One, all the forms of God’s revelation are summed up
and become comprehensible. Section 18 discusses the
complementarity of the written law (of the Scriptures) and the
natural law (discerned in the order of the cosmos). The natural law is
like a book, and the written law like another cosmos. The next section
once again engages directly with the Origenist monks. Evagrius had
spoken of five principal modes of contemplation: of the adorable and
holy Trinity, of incorporeal beings, of corporeal beings, of judgment
and of providence: 15 from realizing one’s place in God’s providential
order (judgment and providence), one rose from contemplation of
bodies to the incorporeal and thence to contemplation of God.
Maximus speaks instead of five modes of natural contemplation: the