From Saint Gregory’s poems, on the
words:
The sublime Word plays in all kinds of
forms, judging His world as He wishes, on this side and on that.
When the great David, by faith alone
[GK: κατα μονην
πιστιν], spiritually thrust his intellect through
the latches, as it were, of visible realities, and gazed upon intelligible
realities, he received from the [1408D] Divine Wisdom a certain cognitive mark
of the mysteries that are accessible to human beings—then, as it seems to me,
he said: Abyss, calls to abyss at the sound of Your cataracts. With
these words he may perhaps be indicating that every intellect in a state of
contemplation, on account of its invisible nature and the depth and multitude
of its thoughts, is like an abyss, for after it has passed through the whole
orderly arrangement of visible things and finds itself in the region of
intelligible realities, and when, again by faith [GK: κατα πιστιν], it
transcends even the majesty of these things by means of a forceful motion, so
that it comes to stand still in itself, [1409A] utterly fixed and immobile (on
account of its passage beyond all things), it is then that, as is fitting, it calls
to the Divine Wisdom—which to our knowledge is really and truly an
unfathomable abyss—and asks that it might be given, not of course the
divine cataracts themselves, but their sound, which means that it
asks to receive a certain cognitive mark of faith concerning the modes and
principles of divine providence governing the universe. Through this gift, the
intellect will be able to remember God from the land of Jordan and
Hermon, where the great and awesome mystery of the divine descent of God
the Word was accomplished through the flesh, a mystery in which the truth of
right faith in God was given to human beings, and which, insofar as it utterly
transcends the whole order and power of nature, was called the foolishness
and weakness of God by [1409B] the divine Paul, the great apostle, who is
both an initiate and initiates others in the divine and secretly known
wisdom—and I believe that he called it such on account of it surpassing wisdom
and power, whereas the great and godly-minded Gregory characterized this
mystery as a kind of game, on account of its surpassing prudence.(Maximus the
Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 71, in On Difficulties in the Church
Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 2:313, 315)