Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, Vol. 5 (Gregory of Nyssa)

...understood formula that the 'Αγεννησία Original: 'Αγεννησία. Meaning: "Unbegottenness." was the essence of the Father—an idea which Valens had repudiated in the Dated Creed.

What, then, was to be done? Eunomius seemed, by his parade of logic, to have dug a gulf forever between the Ungenerate and the Generate—in other words, between the Father and the Son. The merit and interest of this treatise of Gregory consist in showing this logician making endless mistakes in his own logic; in showing that anything short of "eternal generation" involved unspeakable absurdities or profanities; and lastly, that Eunomius was fighting by means of distinctions that were merely the result of mental analysis. We see, even then, the Conceptualism and Realism of the Middle Ages floating in the air, invoked for this last Arian controversy. When Eunomius retorted that this faculty of analysis cannot provide the name of God, and calls his opponents atheists for not recognizing the more than human source of the term 'Αγέννητος Original: 'Αγέννητος. Meaning: "Unbegotten.", the final word of Nicene orthodoxy must be uttered: that God is truly incomprehensible, and that here we can never know His name.

This should have led to a statement of the claims of the Sacraments as placing us in heart and spirit, but not in mind, in communion with this incomprehensible God. But this would have been useless with opponents like the Eunomians. Accuracy of doctrine and clarity of statement were salvation to them; mysteries were worse than nothing. Only in the intervals of the logical battle, and for the sake of the faithful, does Gregory recur to those moral and spiritual attributes which a true Christianity has revealed in the Deity, and upon which the doctrine of the Sacraments is built.

Such controversies are repeated now—that is, where truths that require a certain state of the affections to understand should be urged, but cannot be, on the one side; while truths which are purely logical, literary, or scientific are ranged on the other. An instance, though in another field, is the argument for and against the results of the "higher criticism" of the Old Testament, which exhibits this irreconcilable attitude.

Yet, in one respect, a great gain must have resulted to the Catholic cause from this long work. The counter-opposition of "Created" and "Uncreate," with which Gregory met the opposition of "Generate" and "Ungenerate"—which is a dichotomy founded on an essential difference—must have helped many minds distracted by the jargon of Arianism to see more clearly the preciousness of the Baptismal Formula as the casket containing the Faith. Indeed, the life-work of Gregory was to defend this formula.

The treatise On Virginity is probably the work of his youth, but it is none the less Christian for that. Here is done what students of Plato had long been asking for: that his "love of the Beautiful" should be spiritualized. Beginning with a bitter accusation of marriage, Gregory leaves the reader doubtful in the end whether celibacy is necessary or not for the contemplative life; he becomes so absorbed in showing the blessedness of those who look to the source of all visible beauty. But the result of this vision is not, as in Plato, a mere enlightenment as to the real value of visible things. There are so many more beautiful things in God than Plato saw; the Christian revelation has infinitely enriched the field of contemplation. The lover of the beautiful must now be a character of higher standing and have a more chastened heart, not merely be a more favored child of light than others. His enthusiasm shall be as strong as ever, but the model is higher now, and even an Aristotelian balance of moral extremes is necessary to guide him to the goal of a successful imitation of Christ.

It was right, too, that the Church should possess her own Phaedo Plato’s dialogue on the immortality of the soul., or death-bed dialogue; and Gregory has supplied this in his On the Soul and the Resurrection. But the copy becomes an original. The dialogue is between a sister and a brother; the one a saintly apologist, the other, for the sake of argument, a gainsayer who urges all the pleas of Greek materialism. Not only is the immortality of the soul discussed, but an exact definition is sought in the light of a truer psychology than Plato’s. His "chariot" is given up; sensation as the basis of all thought is freely recognized; and yet the passions are firmly separated from the actual essence of the soul. Furthermore, the "coats of skins" of fallen humanity, as symbolizing the wrong use of the passions, take the place of the "sea-weed" on the statue of Glaucus A reference to Plato's Republic, where the soul is compared to a sea-covered statue of Glaucus that must be cleaned to reveal its true nature.. The Christian philosopher’s grasp of the traits of a perfect humanity, so conspicuous in his Making of Man, gives him an advantage here over the pagan. As for the Resurrection of the flesh, it was a novel stroke to bring the beliefs of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and the later Platonists into one focus, and to show that the teaching of those philosophers as to the destinies of the soul recognized the possibility, or even the necessity, of the reassumption of some body. Grotesque objections to the Christian Resurrection, such as are urged nowadays, are brought forward and answered in this treatise.

The appeal to the Saviour regarding the inspiration of the Old Testament has raised again a...