Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

70 INTRODUCTION
Difficulty 41 is built up around this notion of the divisions of being.
According to the Saints, Maximus begins (an expression that always
means that he in introducing a traditional notion, and often
something that can be precisely paralleled in earlier Fathers, as here),
there are five divisions of being. The first divides uncreated nature
from that which is created. The second divides created being into that
perceived by the mind and that perceived by the senses. The sensible
realm is further divided into heaven and earth; earth into paradise
and the inhabited world (what the Greeks called the
oikoumenê). Within the inhabited world human beings dwell and
these are divided by sex into male and female. But the human being is
not just the last stage in this structure, it is, as he says, ‘the
laboratory in which everything is concentrated and in itself naturally
mediates between the extremities of each division’, for human beings
are found on both sides of each division: they belong in paradise but
inhabit the inhabited world; they are earthly and yet destined for
heaven; they have both mind and senses; and though created, they are
destined to share in the uncreated nature by deification. All the
divisions of the cosmos are reflected in the human being, so the
human being is a microcosm, a ‘little cosmos’ (a term Maximus does
not use explicitly here, though he does elsewhere). 18 As microcosm,
the human person is able to mediate between the extremes of the
cosmos, he is a ‘natural bond’ (physikos syndesmos), and constitutes
the ‘great mystery of the divine purpose’ (1305B). Maximus then
develops this work of mediation. The first step is to transcend sexual
division through ‘the most dispassionate relationship to divine virtue’.
As Maximus makes clear here and later on, the division of the sexes is
not original or primordial. Maximus shares with Gregory of Nyssa a
belief in the double creation of humankind: an original creation that
transcends sexuality, and a second creation, embracing sexual
division, that has been introduced, not because of the Fall, but with a
view to the Fall, that will exploit this division and turn it into an
opposition, even a warfare. Maximus does not believe in what the poet
Amy Clampitt has called ‘the archetypal cleft of sex’. 19 Second, by a
‘way of life proper and fitting to the Saints’, the human person unites
paradise and the oikoumenê to make one earth. Then, by imitating by
virtue the life of the angels, the human person unites heaven and
earth. Then, by being able to perceive the logoi of the created order,
the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible falls away.
And finally, by uniting created nature with uncreated nature through
love, the coinherence or interpenetration of God and the creation
becomes apparent. These stages recapitulate the stages of the spiritual
life as Maximus understands it. In other words, through
accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person