Greco-Christian stream·Dionysius the Areopagite·Letters·Letters — Letter IV — To the same Gaius Therapeutes
IV. To Gaius — Christ's human nature; the new God-manly operation
On the human nature of Christ. Christ acted not merely as God nor merely as man but with a new God-manly operation (καινῆν τινα τὴν θεανδρικὴν ἐνέργειαν) — the Dionysian phrase that Maximus Confessor will develop into the doctrine of the two energies of Christ.
Source context
- Theme
- epistolary spiritual counsel addressed to an individual disciple (Gaius Therapeutes)
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Pauline epistolary traditionPaul's letters to named individuals (e.g., Philemon, Timothy) establish the structural form of personalised spiritual instruction within an initiatory community, a pattern this letter replicates.
- Therapeutae (Philo of Alexandria)The addressee's epithet 'Therapeutes' invokes the Egyptian Jewish contemplative community described by Philo, for whom healing and sacred service were unified vocations — a cross-tradition congruence with the letter's apparent spiritual-medical counsel.
- Neoplatonic epistolary guidancePlotinus and Porphyry employed private letters to transmit graduated metaphysical instruction to individual students, structurally parallel to the personalised doctrinal address found here.
Letters — Letter IV — To the same Gaius Therapeutes
LETTER IV. 64 * To the same Gaius Therapeutes.*
How, you ask, is Jesus, Who is beyond all, ranked essentially with all men? For, not as Author of men is He here called man, but as being in absolute whole essence truly man. But we do not define the Lord Jesus, humanly, for He is not man only, (neither superessential nor man only), but truly man, He Who is pre-eminently a lover of man, the Super-essential, taking substance, above men and after men, from the substance of men. And it is nothing less, the ever Superessential, super-full of super-essentiality, disregards the excess 65 of this, and having come truly into substance, took substance above substance, and above man works things of man. And a virgin supernaturally conceiving, and unstable water, holding up weight of material and earthly feet, and not giving way, but, by a supernatural power standing together so as not to be divided, demonstrate this. Why should any one go through the rest, which are very many? Through which, he who looks with a divine vision, will know beyond mind, even the things affirmed respecting the love towards man, of (the Lord) Jesus,--things which possess a force of superlative negation. For, even, to speak summarily, He was not man, not as not being man, but as being from men was beyond men, and was above man, having truly been born man, and for the rest, not having done things Divine p. 144 as God, nor things human as man, but exercising for us a certain new God-incarnate energy of God having become man.
Footnotes
143:64 C. II. § 6.
143:65 τῇ ταύτης περιουσίᾳ.
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