Chapter 19 Gregory of Nyssa: The Spiritual

But not St. Gregory of Nyssa, who was the first Christian thinker to make a full and complete break from that classical world view. Change did not have to be a matter of deterioration and decline. It could also become a process of continual growth and the perpetual ascent to higher and higher stages.

Gregory did acknowledge that God had to be eternal in his inmost “essence” (ousia in Greek, a term which referred to the inner core of that which made him God). And if God’s essence was eternal, then God could never fail to exist, or cease to be more powerful than anything else that existed.

But God also had temporal energeiai, that is, energies, acts, or operations which entered the world of time, and were structured in terms of past, present, and future events. The created world was one of God’s temporal energies, and the realm of grace was another. Our human spirits exist now, and always will exist, in a transcendent dimension in which we will be conscious of sequences of events, ordered in terms of before and after and what I am experiencing right now. And this will be a realm where God’s divine energy will move through and in us, and we will talk back and forth with him (in conversations consisting of series of events taking place in time), and he will be our friend.

As Jean Daniélou put it in his introduction to his book From Glory to Glory:³⁴⁶
For the Platonist … change can only be deterioration; for the spiritual and the divine are identical, and the divine is unchangeable. But once we establish the transcendence of the divine with respect to the created spirit, another sort of change becomes possible, the movement of perpetual ascent …. the soul is conceived as a spiritual universe in eternal expansion towards the infinite Darkness.
A doctrine of the evolution of the soul: It is the destiny of the human soul to be involved in continuous evolution. Gregory of Nyssa’s Greek word for this was epektasis (epi + ek + tasis) which means evolution, development, or extension over time.³⁴⁷
My note: we need to be careful here, this is not the same word as the word epekstasis with an “s” in the middle, a Greek word which in fact does not exist, but would have to mean something like standing outside oneself in ecstasy. The word Gregory uses, ep-ek-tasis, does not come from the root sta meaning to stand, but from the roots teinô (to stretch) and tasis (a stretching or tension).³⁴⁸
Gregory of Nyssa got the word from Philippians 3:13, where Paul says, “Forgetting those things that are behind, and reaching forth [epekteinomenos] unto those things which are before, I press towards the mark.”³⁴⁹

In his Life of Moses, Gregory said that just as material bodies have a natural, automatic tendency to fall downwards under the pull of gravity unless something blocks their fall, so the human soul tends naturally and automatically to rise upward into the transcendent realm, moving toward the transcendent archetype of Goodness Itself:³⁵⁰

(We are reminded quite a bit here of the concept of the élan vital which was developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution. Bergson’s ideas were extremely important in French thought during the first half of the twentieth century, and were spread to the English speaking world by William James, who was one of his strongest supporters.)

St. Gregory likens Moses’s ascent up Mount Sinai to the angels climbing up Jacob’s Ladder, the set of sacred steps that lead us from earth to heaven:³⁵¹
[Just like climbing Jacob’s Ladder] Moses, moving ever upwards, did not stop in his upward climb. He set no limit to his rise to the stars. But once he had put his foot upon the ladder on which the Lord had leaned … he constantly kept moving to the next step; and he continued to go ever higher because he always found another step that lay beyond the highest one that he had reached.
Eros (love) as the dynamic driving power behind the healthy soul’s activities: That which “tunes the strings,” as it were, of the healthy soul, and gives that soul its vital tension, is an inbuilt drive — an Eros — for continually new and creative expressions of Goodness and Beauty. The soul which is fully alive looks into the dark abyss of what the atheist sees only as nothingness, destruction, meaninglessness, and death, and sees, instead of those negative things, the delight of fresh puzzles to be solved and new things to be learnt and mastered. It sees the opportunity to gain the rich satisfaction that comes from helping people who would otherwise have died, from comforting those who were suffering, and from bringing new hope to those who had given up. It sees a world in which real novelty and creativity can be brought into being. So as a result, the soul which is filled with the eternal life force looks into the existential abyss and feels, not paralyzing fear, but that Love or Eros which casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). The soul loves the dark abyss, because it sees, not an empty pit of nothingness, but an overflowing reservoir of bright-new-being-which-is-yet-to-be. The soul sees the dark abyss with the pleasure of a Michelangelo looking at a fine new uncarved marble block: it is not a rude chunk of featureless stone to him, but an opportunity to create a new statue of David or Moses that will delight the eyes of millions of other people for centuries to come.

For the truly good soul, the love which provides the driving force and tension is an Eros for God, because it is God-as-the-ground-of-being who is the source not only of the darkness but also of the opportunities for new light, new insight, new satisfactions, new rejoicings, and the constant appearance of ever-new divine consolations whenever we are feeling down. As Daniélou puts it,³⁵²

Eros [for St. Gregory of Nyssa] denotes the surge of love which sweeps the soul out of itself in proportion to its awareness of God’s infinite loveliness …. as God’s adorable presence becomes more and more intense, the soul is, as it were, forced to go out of itself by a kind of infatuation.
Eros expresses the experience of the soul as the infinite beauty of God becomes more and more present to it. The more the soul is aware of this beauty, the more it sees that it is inaccessible. And then it realizes that it attains this beauty more by desire than by actual possession, just as it comprehends it rather by darkness than in the light.
Gregory of Nyssa used this observation to provide a happy ending to an otherwise horrifying tale in the Song of Songs. A young woman, we remember, was in love with a young man, and he in turn seemed to be passionately in love with her, and begged her to run away with him, and become his beloved (Song of Songs 2:3, 2:8-10, and 2:14). But then everything plunged into a terrifying nightmare. Evening arrived, and after it grew totally dark, the young woman thought she heard someone knocking at her window. She went out into the darkened city to throw herself into the arms of her lover. But he was not there, and all she could see was the darkness, which in places was a pit of horrors with evil people falling upon her and beating her savagely as though she were a criminal, and tearing off her clothes as she lay there bleeding and sobbing (Song of Songs 5:2-8).

How do we provide a happy ending for that poor soul? For St. Gregory of Nyssa (and St. John of the Cross and Hannah Hurnard³⁵³ and all the other theologians who wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs), the human soul finds that if it keeps on trudging — through the darkness, the deserts, the mountains, the Slough of Despond, the briar patches, or whatever other kind of difficult terrain falls temporarily in its way — it always eventually finds God again in an effulgence of divine light and sweeping insight and glorious triumph which makes the whole struggle worth it. And the good soul eventually comes to love the hard parts of the journey just as much as the easy parts, in the same paradoxical fashion as a skilled mountain climber relishing the struggle up a particularly difficult peak, or an accomplished guitarist enjoying the effort that finally enables the performance (to speed) of a particularly challenging instrumental piece. Succeeding at the task would not have been nearly so enjoyable if it had been too easy. So Gregory of Nyssa, in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, says:³⁵⁴

The soul, having gone out at the word of the beloved, looks for Him but does not find Him …. But the veil of her grief is removed when she learns that the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on in her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates a further desire for the Transcendent [tou hyperkeimenou = that which lies yet further beyond] …. the bride realizes that she will always discover more and more of the incomprehensible and unhoped for beauty of her Spouse throughout all eternity. Then she is torn by an even more urgent longing …. For she has received within her God’s special arrow, she has been wounded in the heart by the arrow-point of faith, she has been mortally wounded by the bowmanship of love.
Gregory of Nyssa was mixing in a pre-Christian classical reference here. In its Roman form, the goddess of love was named Venus, and her son was named Cupid (Latin cupido = “desire”). Cupid had the power to make human beings fall in love by shooting them in the heart with one of his magical golden arrows. But in its classical Greek form — the version that Gregory was using, because he lived in the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire — the goddess was named Aphrodite and her son was named Eros, one of the ancient Greek words for Love.

The Greek word Eros meant, in particular, a kind of Love that was a burning desire to hold and possess the Beloved, or if that was impossible, to enjoy simply being in the presence of the Beloved for all time, so that one could look upon the Beloved and delight in all the Beloved’s words and gestures forever.

The two greatest architectonic philosophical systems of the twentieth century were Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929). As one can note immediately from the titles, a new realization was emerging within western philosophy of the importance of time and process. With this new realization there frequently came, however, a rebellion against all traditional philosophy. The standard patristic and medieval Roman Catholic authors, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas, were derided as outmoded and irrelevant.

Jean Daniélou however, as one of the most important continental European Catholic scholars of the twentieth century, was one of the earliest Christian scholars to realize that there was a tradition of early Judeo-Christian thought which could stand up to these modern criticisms, an ancient and worthy tradition which included Philo Judaeus, Origen, and especially St. Gregory of Nyssa.

The famous Aristotle scholar Werner Jaeger had also noted this in a book entitled Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius,³⁵⁶ which came out in 1954, around seven years before Daniélou and Musurillo’s book on Gregory of Nyssa. Jaeger, although primarily famous for his work on Aristotle and on classical Greek educational theory, devoted a significant part of his life to producing scholarly critical texts of Gregory of Nyssa’s works, so that this theologian would be better appreciated, including in particular the synergistic process in which God and the human soul co-operated in raising the soul to higher and higher levels of divine understanding.

In my own first major published work (published in 1977 by the French theological press Editions Beauchesne in Paris) I showed how process concepts were also included in the doctrine of time and free will which was taught by Origen’s disciple Eusebius of Caesarea, the first Christian historian and the ancient counter-balance to Augustine’s fatalism.

St. Gregory of Nyssa not only incorporated time and change into God, by distinguishing between God’s eternal essence and God’s temporal energies, but as we see here, also put time and change at the very heart of the soul’s being by defining salvation as a perfection in love involving a concept of perfection as perpetual progress.

But when we become willing to journey into the unknown darkness, and we begin to experience these occasions of greater and greater joy and insight — we not only learn to apprehend the true glory of God everywhere around us, but our own lives start becoming, ever more and more, mirror images and reflections of that glory. Like the icons on the walls of an Eastern Orthodox church, even if in a much lesser way, people look at our lives and are impressed with the glow (as it were) of serenity and compassion and sincerity which they see shining forth in our lives. And this becomes the most accurate and helpful “picture of God” which many people will ever see.

This theory was later developed in greater detail in 1909 by Henry B. Wright (1877-1923) in a book called The Will of God and a Man’s Lifework. Wright was Professor of Theology at Yale University from 1903 until his death at an early age in 1923 (he was only in his mid-forties).³⁶² He had no real training in New Testament studies however — there were no references in his book to any of the great New Testament scholars of that time, or the important discoveries that were being made in New Testament theology — so his book in fact was no more than a compendium of rather simple-minded Victorian and Edwardian era moralisms having little or nothing to do with the world of first-century Palestine or the real teaching of the historical Jesus.

The idea of these “absolutes” was not picked up by any of the real New Testament scholars of the period, because the theory of the Four Absolutes was simply not a useful way of looking at the teaching of Jesus. It flew in the face of Jesus’s insistence (in his parables for example, but many other places as well) that self-righteousness was the greatest danger to true spirituality. Jesus made it clear that the prayer of the tax collector (“God have mercy on me a sinner”)³⁶³ was the only safe prayer to utter if we wished to avoid falling into self-righteousness and maintain a proper attitude of humility, and this was later elaborated as the Jesus Prayer of the hesychastic Eastern Orthodox monks of Mount Athos (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”).

And not just in terms of good New Testament scholarship, but in terms of the basic history of Christian doctrine, it is clear that the teaching of the Four Absolutes was simply a version of the Pelagian heresy, and had to be rejected by Roman Catholics and any Protestants who wished to adhere to the principles of the classical sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, John Calvin, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and so on).

But Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group, discovered the theory of the Four Absolutes, and was so delighted with it that he turned it into a major part of Oxford Group teaching. And although the New York A.A. members broke with the Four Absolutes at a fairly early date, there were people in Akron who were still clinging to them for a while longer, and some of the Cleveland A.A. members still kept pushing the idea of the Four Absolutes long after 1939. Richmond Walker, the second most published A.A. author, continued to speak in Twenty-Four Hours a Day about the importance of practicing purity, honesty, unselfishness, and love, but he wisely refused to speak of them as “absolute,” which was the most dangerous part of the theory.

Bill Wilson, while writing the Big Book in 1938-1939, knew nothing about St. Gregory of Nyssa or the later figures in his tradition (such as St. John Climacus and the Ladder of Divine Ascent in the sixth century or St. Gregory Palamas and the hesychastic monks of Mount Athos in the fourteenth century). But Bill W. did have a good deal of spiritual wisdom and realized the dangers of the Four Absolutes. So in the great passage in the A.A. Big Book at the beginning of Chapter 5 (“How It Works”), the two and a half page statement read at the beginning of so many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings contains the key sentence: “We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.”

And Father Ed Dowling, who served as Bill Wilson’s spiritual director and sponsor for so many years, was certainly not going to be encouraging him to reject two thousand years of Christian teaching and start preaching Robert Speer’s naive idea of the Four Absolutes. Roman Catholic priests were required to have more than one year of seminary training!

There are many reasons for rejecting this idea of the Four Absolutes. St. Gregory of Nyssa however makes it especially clear why foolishly trying to live by the Four Absolutes would eventually cripple a person’s spiritual growth. The truth is that there is no “absolute” righteousness which a human soul could achieve. In the true spiritual life, each time we are able to “peel off one of the layers of the onion,” we will be able to glory in the new joy and happiness we have been given, but we will also soon afterwards discover yet another layer to the onion. At that point, if we continue pursuing the higher spiritual life as we ought, we will have to realize that we are being called upon to devise some yet further kind of spiritual discipline through which we can learn how to carry out this next phase in our spiritual growth. And this will go on forever — even, according to St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the life to come, which will be a series of unending new adventures of which our present earthbound minds cannot even truly imagine.