Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

COSMIC THEOLOGY 73
the distinction between heaven and earth (Myst. 3:672A). Again the
church is an image of the human being, the soul being the sanctuary,
the body the nave, and the mind the altar within the sanctuary.
Conversely the human being is a mystical church, the body ‘radiant by
virtue through the ascetic force of the soul’, the soul a sanctuary in
which the logoi of the senses are conveyed to God by reason, and the
mind an altar on which ‘he summons the silence abounding in song in
the innermost recesses of the unseen and unknown utterance of
divinity by another silence, rich in speech and tone’ (Myst. 4:672A– C).
Maximus then devotes a chapter to an elaborate account of how the
church is an image of the soul considered in itself (Myst. 5:672D–
684A). Then follow two chapters that explore other examples of
division. First, the parallel between Holy Scripture and the human
person: body/soul corresponds to Old Testament/New Testament (the
New being the inner reality of the Old), and also to text/meaning (the
meaning being the inner reality of the text) (Myst. 6:684A– D).
Second, Maximus explores the parallels between what he calls three
human beings: the cosmos, the Holy Scripture, and the human being
‘who is ourselves’ (Myst. 7:684D–688A).
There are two striking things about the divisions of being as
presented here. First of all, as we have seen division is normally
presented by Maximus as something negative (‘indivisibly’ is one of
the ‘Chalcedonian’ adverbs). Here, not so, or not apparently. In chapter
2, he makes it clear that the division between sanctuary and nave,
between the invisible and the visible, is a matter of complementarity,
not opposition. But in another way these divisions are not oppositions,
for one term always stands higher than the other: the visible world
points to the invisible world and in a way adumbrates it, similarly the
nave and the sanctuary, or body and soul, or Old Testament and New
Testament, or the text of Scripture and its meaning. These divisions
are not separations, but representations of a tension, a tension which
draws onwards and upwards—towards the final consummation.
By holy communion of the spotless and life-giving mysteries
we are given fellowship and identity with him by participation in
likeness, by which man is deemed worthy from man to become
God. For we believe that in this present life we already have a
share in these gifts of the Holy Spirit through the love that is in
faith, and in the future age after we have kept the
commandments to the best of our ability we believe that we shall
have a share in them in very truth in their concrete reality
according to the steadfast hope of our faith and the solid and
unchangeable promise to which God has committed himself.
Then we shall pass from the grace which is in faith to the grace of