Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the
essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing
the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with
God. 20
But because the human person has not ‘moved around the
unmoved’ (1308C), but on the contrary has directed its power of
movement towards lower creatures that are even less capable
of stillness than itself, it has been sucked into the perpetual,
unsatisfying movement of the fallen universe. Instead of holding in
union what is divided, it has been the cause of separation of what is
united. The universe is now characterized by fragmentation,
disintegration—the corruption leading to death, of which we have seen
St Athanasius had spoken. The only solution is the Incarnation, which
introduces the unmoved into the midst of motion, and thus enables
human beings to reorientate themselves. It is the Incarnation that
now overcomes the five divisions: sexual division through the virginal
conception, the division between paradise and the oikoumenê in the
words from the cross to the repentant thief and in the resurrection
appearances, that between heaven and earth in the event of the
Ascension, that between the intelligible and the sensible by the
enduring reality of the Ascension—the presence of the sacred
humanity in heaven, and that between uncreated and created by his
sitting at the right hand of the Father, that we confess in the Creed.
‘Thus he divinely recapitulates the universe in himself, showing that
the whole creation exists as one, like another human being’ (1312A).
Through the Incarnation it is once again possible for human beings to
fulfil their natural role as bond of creation and microcosm. 21
THE COSMIC LITURGY 22
COSMIC THEOLOGY 71
This notion of the divisions of being occurs elsewhere in Maximus but
it is given particular significance in the first part of his short work on
the Eucharistic liturgy, his Mystagogia. This work falls into three
parts: first, a series of chapters on the symbolism of the Church
(meaning primarily, though not exclusively, the church building)
(chapters 1–7); second, a series of chapters interpreting the successive
ceremonies of the Byzantine liturgy of his day (chapters 8–21); 23 and
finally three chapters that show how the movement of the liturgy
provides an interpretation of the movement of the individual soul
towards God.
In the introduction, the whole work is presented as something
revealed to him by a ‘blessed old man’ as a complement to the
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Denys the Areopagite. In that work Denys
set his whole understanding of the liturgy (not just the Eucharistic