Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

72 INTRODUCTION
liturgy, but other Sacraments and sacramental rites— baptism, the
consecration of sacred oil, ordination, admission to the monastic
order, and the funeral service) against the background of his
understanding of the cosmic order as a hierarchical reality, meaning
by that (as we have seen), not so much a structure of rank and
subordination, as a graded structure of reality in which each order
mediates the divine glory and recalls other beings to unity with the
divine. For Denys the cosmos is a community reaching from heaven to
earth, in which each part fulfils its own role and so contributes to the
good of the whole and of each part. 24 Maximus begins by asserting that
he is taking a knowledge of the Dionysian understanding of the
liturgy for granted and is not going to repeat anything said there
(660D–661A). This is a little disingenuous as some of the
interpretations Maximus puts forward constitute a fundamental
revision of the Dionysian perspective. This is apparent in the very
first chapter of the second part. Here Maximus gives an interpretation
of the entry of the bishop into the church at the beginning of the
liturgy (what is now the ‘little entrance’): this represents ‘the first
coming into the world of the Son of God, our Saviour Christ, in the
flesh’ (688C). In contrast, Denys the Areopagite only ever speaks of
the bishop coming out of the sanctuary into the body of the church and
then returning to the sanctuary, and interprets this circuit of the way
in which God in his goodness moves out into the multiplicity of the
world and then returns, enfolding everything into unity. Denys sees a
primordial circular movement, Maximus envisages a movement
onwards towards a final rest. Denys is much closer to the pagan
Neoplatonic view of reality as fundamentally circular (a view with
which the Origenists concurred): Maximus, as we have seen, breaks
with this by placing rest, not at the beginning but at the end, as the
goal. This fundamental correction, both of Denys and Origen, must be
kept in mind.
The first part of the Mystagogia presents a series of ways in which
the church can be seen as symbolic. First, the Church (here primarily
as a world-wide community, than as a building) is interpreted as an
image of God, since both of them bring about union (Myst. 1:
664D-668C). The church building is then said to be an image of the
cosmos, for as the church is divided into sanctuary and nave, so the
cosmos is divided into the invisible and the visible. But this division is
not a separation: it is a division within a unity. Nave and sanctuary
are separated by being related; similarly the spiritual world is present
in the world of the senses in symbols, and the world of the senses in
the spiritual world in the logoi that constitute it (Myst. 2:668C–
669D). Again the church is an image of the visible world, the
distinction between sanctuary and nave being reflected in