Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

COSMIC THEOLOGY 69
first three concern God as Creator, Provider and Judge, and the final
two ‘educate us to virtue and assimilation to God’ (1133B). On the one
hand Maximus incorporates ascetic struggle, and on the other
restricts contemplation to what God has revealed of Himself:
engagement with God in Himself is a matter of God’s ‘drawing up to His
ineffable self every thought of intellectual beings in ecstasy’ (1140A),
as he puts it in the following section, a meditation on the figure of
Melchisedec. Further on he makes clear that there can be no natural
contemplation independent of the Incarnation by bracketing together
‘His most wise providence, which binds all things together, and His
economy for our sake, which is passing marvellous and transcendently
ineffable’ (Amb. 10. 21:1145D). This understanding of natural
contemplation as embracing both a true understanding of the created
cosmic order through beholding its logoi and a grasp of the economy of
salvation, especially in the Incarnation, is already found in Gregory of
Nyssa, who may have influenced Maximus here. 16
THE DIVISION OF BEING
Another concern of Maximus’ cosmic theology revolves round the
notion of the divisions of being. In his treatment of this he draws
together a metaphysical analysis of being that places the human
person at a kind of central crossing-place in his understanding of
reality, and then relates to that the renewal of nature through the
Incarnation, and the celebration and recapitulation of that renewal in
the Eucharistic liturgy. Maximus does this by drawing together
threads from the earlier theologians, especially St Gregory of Nyssa,
and the author of those writings ascribed to Denys the Areopagite (in
the latter case he acknowledges his indebtedness). From Gregory he
borrows the way the earlier theologian had understood the whole of
reality as consisting of successive divisions. It is a theme Gregory
often returned to, and in different works treated sometimes in slightly
different ways. But his basic pattern looks like this. All beings can be
divided into uncreated beings (consisting only of the blessed Trinity)
and created beings. Created beings can be further subdivided into
intelligible beings and sensible beings. Each of these classes can be
further subdivided: intelligible beings into celestial beings (=angels)
and terrestrial beings (=human beings); and sensible beings into
living beings and lifeless beings. Living beings can be divided into
sentient and non-sentient beings; sentient beings into rational beings
(=human beings) and irrational beings (=animals). And note that
these successive divisions converge on the human being who embraces
all the divisions to be found in created reality. 17