Part 3: Contemplation and Desire

As we have seen previously, Gregory of Nyssa taught that man must leave his current predicament and make his way towards God. However, this requires him to abandon complacency and self indulgence, to leave behind his old ways and to remain constantly vigilant -

“But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.” (Mt 24:43)

But how can one summon enough strength to practice the virtues and reach the purity that are required for walking the narrow path of reconciliation?

“There is a wide interval between those who have been purified, and those who still need purification. For those in whose life time here the purification by the laver has preceded, there is a restoration to a kindred state. Now, to the pure, freedom from passion is that kindred state, and that in this freedom from passion blessedness consists, admits of no dispute.” (In The Great Cathechism)

Therefore,

“if we must describe the masonry, then let incorruptibility and impassability mould the house which justice and freedom will adorn. Let humility and patience shine in another part of the house along with piety befitting God. Let love, the noble craftsman, fashion all these virtues in a marvellous way.” (Commentary on Ecclesiastes, J.325.)

In other words, the object of man’s desire, and love, is God’s Wisdom rather than his own:

“And so it is equally reasonable that he who is enamoured of wisdom should hold the Object of his passionate desire, Who is the True Wisdom; and that the soul which cleaves to the undying Bridegroom should have the fruition of her love for the true Wisdom, which is God.”

And what better way would there be, if one desires to become a temple for God’s Wisdom, than to follow Christ’s example of ‘detachment’ from sin and ‘immutability’ in virtue?

“Because Christ received the first fruits of our common nature through his soul and body, he made it holy and kept it in himself as unmixed and uncontaminated with any evil; by offering [the first fruits of our common nature] through incorruptibility to the Father of incorruptibility, he might draw all those of the same kin and race (Eph 1.5) and adopt the disinherited and God's enemies to share his divinity. Just as purity and detachment united the dough's first fruit with the true Father and God, we, the mass of dough, should cling to the Father of incorruptibility by imitating the mediator's detachment and immutability as far as possible.” (On Perfection, J.206)

The bishop of Nyssa considered that our desire to resemble Christ is born from the contemplation and the perception (theoria) of infinite Good. And God being infinite, that desire itself must be infinite:

“Since, then, those who know that is good by nature, desire participation in it [God as absolute virtue], and since this good has no limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless. […]

“Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. Therefore, the ardent lover of beauty, although receiving what is always visible as an image of what he desires, yet longs to be filled with the very stamp of the archetype. […]

“This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him. But one must always, by looking at what he can see, rekindle his desire to see more. Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied.” (Life of Moses, pp. 31, 114, 116; translation by Malherbe and Ferguson).

“We need an unceasing desire for higher things, which is not content to acquiesce in past achievements; we ought to count it a loss if we fail to progress further.” (On the Beatitudes, p.130)

In addition to sight, St Gregory uses another worldly metaphor to convey his thought of ‘theoria’, the perception of God: the scent of the divine – an imagery that was to become popular amongst kabbalists of the middle ages with regards to the immolation of the sacrificial lamb (holocaust). Whereas the fumes of the holocaust attract the divine to earth, it is the opposite movement that St Gregory has in mind, although both lead to the same goal:

“I will take up again what I said at the start of this homily: let no one who is passionate, fleshly and still smelling of the foul odour of the old man [2 Cor 2:16] drag down the significance of the divine thoughts and words to beastly, irrational thoughts. Rather, let each person go out of himself and out of the material world. Let him ascend into paradise through detachment, having become like God through purity. Then let him enter into the inner sanctuary of the mysteries revealed in this book [the Song of Songs]. […] The souls, therefore, draw to themselves a desire for their immortal bridegroom and follow the Lord God, as it is written [Hos 11.10]. The cause of their love is the scent of the perfume to which they eternally run; they stretch out to what is in front, forgetting what is behind. “We shall run after you toward the scent of your perfumes.” (Commentary of the Song of Songs, J.25, J.39).

Again, one sees that infinite desire can lead to eternally migrating away from the “foul odour of the old man” and towards the ‘scent of the perfumes’ of the ‘bridegroom’.

Tags: Orthodox Church, Contemplation, Gregory of Nyssa, Exile, Reconciliation, Virtues, Desire

Part 2: Exile & “diastema”

A characteristic of our fallen human condition is its separation from God, by which process, divine unity is broken. St Gregory develops the notion of “diastema” which has the connotation of a standing apart, an extension or an interval. When applied to theology, it implies a separation existing on the side of creation which has a beginning (arche) and end (telos), and thus temporal limitations of our present existence. It can therefore be understood as a temporal, thus temporary, exile:

“All our notions are bound by time; they attempt to transcend their proper limits but cannot. Intervals of time constitute all our thoughts as well as the thought content. Yet we have learned to seek and to cherish that which transcends all creation.” (Commentary of Ecclesiastes, 412).

However, “diastema” does not apply in any way to God, since no division nor succession can apply to Him:

“Every measure (diastema) of distance that we could discover is beneath the divine nature: so no ground is left for those who attempt to divide this pretemporal and incomprehensible being by distinctions of superior & inferior.” (Against Eunomius, J.79.5, 52).

“Those who draw a circular figure in plane geometry from a centre to the distance (diastema) of the line of circumference tell us there is no definite beginning to their figure; and that the line is interrupted by no ascertained end (diastema) any more than by any visible commencement.” (Against Eunomius, J.218.1, 4).

It is therefore in Creation only that temporal and spacial “separation” are found. In fact, “diastema” is omnipresent throughout every aspect of our material universe thereby becoming a defining characteristic of any alienation from God. Indeed, that separation also exists in our mind, because of our own mode of projecting temporal boundaries on the world, whereby we inherently insert mental “gaps” between us and God. This, in turn, burdens us with the intellectual awareness of our alienation from God and from the immediateness that characterises the God’s Presence of God:

“For seeing that human life, moving from stage to stage, advances in its progress from a beginning to an end, and our life here is divided between that which is past and that which is expected, so that the one is the subject of hope, the other of memory; on this account, as, in relation to ourselves, we apprehend a past and a future in this measurable extent, so also we apply the thought, though incorrectly, to the transcendent nature of God; not of course that God in his own existence leaves any interval (diastema) behind, or passes on afresh to something that lies before, but because our intellect can only conceive things according to our nature, and measures the eternal by a past and a future, where neither the past precludes the march of thought to the illimitable and infinite, nor the future tells us of any pause or limit of his endless life.” (Against Eunomius, J.360.16, 296).

In contrast to our incorporeal but temporal intellect, our soul is by nature spiritual, thus timeless and incorporeal, and therefore is more to the likeness of God, breaching that “infernal circle” of the mind’s “separateness”:

“What is the divinity which the soul resembles? It is not the body, [it] lacks form, likeness, quality, figure, depth, place, time and anything else which resembles material creation; rather, once all these attributes are stripped away, the soul reveals its nature which is spiritual, immaterial, invisible, incorporeal and unchangeable. If we contemplate the stamp of the archetype, the soul necessarily conforms itself according to that image. The soul is recognised by its characteristics, that is, as being immaterial, without form, spiritual and incorporeal.” (Concerning those who have died, 41).

Indeed, God

“[…] is simple by nature, immaterial, without quality, magnitude, composed of nothing, circumscribed by no form […]” (On the Making of Man, 209.50).

Thus, Man comprises at the same time the material, the temporal (intellectual) and the spiritual – a spark of the divine. As St Gregory writes, Man

“extends from the first to the last and is one image of Him Who is.” (On the making of Man, 406).

Therefore, in St Gregory’s mind the “diastema” does not preclude Man from transcending his material temporal limitations, on the contrary:

“In this life we can apprehend the beginning and the end of all things that exist, but the beatitude that is above the creature admits neither end nor beginning, but is above all that is connoted by either, being ever the same, self-dependent, not travelling on by degrees from one point to another in its life...For increase has no place in the infinite, and that which is by its nature passionless excludes all notion of decrease.” (Against Eunomius, 257).

This explains why man, however immersed in his material senses he may be, always has the potential to see, and desire the perpetual presence of the divine, and thus be reconciled with God. As we shall see later, desire is what can pull man from his earthly bonds, and set him on the path to reconciliation.

Tags: Orthodox Church, Exile, Gregory of Nyssa, Universe

Part 1: An introduction

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting and discussing translations of certain passages of St Gregory of Nyssa’s writings, that develop and explain the themes mentioned in this introduction. So stay tuned!
For now, let me introduce this extraordinary Father, and some of the main axes of his teaching.


His life
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, was born circa 335 into a pious and saintly family – his grandmother, mother, father, brothers and sisters have all been recognised as saints. Although he set off to become a teacher, he accepted to be appointed Bishop of Nyssa (a small town in Cappadocia, in modern day Turkey) in 372, at the demand of his brother, Basil the Great. He had an influential role in the Early Church, notably during the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, and in fighting various heresies such as Arianism. However, along the way he met much opposition to his ministry, which resulted in a period of exile. The death of the main supporter of his ministry his brother Basil and of his sister Macrina came as profound setbacks to his vocation as well. However, his influence was such that he was given the title “Father of the Fathers” at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787.

His main influences
Saint Gregory’s own influences are of course to be found in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, in illustrious predecessors such as Origen (regarding the final restoration of all things in Christ, apokatastasis), and his brother Basil. Basil, along with Gregory of Nazianzus, shaped Gregory’s view of the Holy Trinity, in that he considered each hypostasis to inherently imply the other two. Other influences can be found in Neoplatonism (Plotinus in particular, regarding the infinity of God). Thus, although his primary source, the Bible, was Semitic, he was fully immersed in the Hellenistic culture.

Differences with Origen
One of the main differences between St Gregory and Origen is in the unknowability of God. Unlike Origen (who in this was closer to Platonism), St Gregory held the view that God is infinite, and therefore cannot be defined. Indeed, he considered that if God was not limitless, he would therefore be limited by something greater than him, which is impossible. The direct corollary of God’s infinity is that He cannot be fully comprehended nor defined, and thus, cannot be reached. As we shall see, this has major implications when considering reintegration of all things in God.
Building upon Origen’s teachings, St Gregory provided a conceptual framework for bodily matter by placing its ontological transformation under the responsibility of the soul’s migration towards and away from God: the further we are from God, the denser the walls of our material prison.
St Gregory also went further than Origen regarding evil: since evil has no real existence, its “relative” existence will be annihilated at the end of time, through the purifying action of hell. Actually, in St Gregory’s mind, evil and Satan are not adversaries of God but of man. He compared purification by the fire of hell to the chemical purification of gold by fire, and to a muddy rope that is cleaned when passed through a small hole.

Preliminary doctrinal elements
St Gregory’s theosophy can be better understood in the light of three major notions: (i) the realisation that our immersion in the physical world requires us to work relentlessly at our reconciliation with God, thereby migrating from our current state towards God; (ii) God being infinite, he is eternally out of reach, thus our divinisation, i.e. the process through which one progresses on the path to God, is perpetual by nature; (iii) following Origen, all things are to be restored in Christ (apokatastasis), however only with their own accord.

Tags: Orthodox Church, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen