trolling body, body answering to spirit and yet at the same time supplying the nutriment upon which the vigour and efficacy of spirit, in this world at least, depends. This thought underlies his view of the material universe and of Holy Scripture, as well as of man’s nature. With regard to the last he says, ‘the intelligible cannot be realized in body at all, except it be commingled with sensation;’ and again, ‘as there can be no sensation without a material substance, so there can be no exercise of the power of thought without sensation”®,” The 27 Comment. in Rom. ii. 9, p. 486. 28 De Hom. Op. c. viii; De An. et Resurr. 205. 35 a] His Origenism.
spiritual or intelligent part of man (which he calls by various names, such as ‘the inner man,’ the Wuxn Aoyikn, vois or dSidvota, TO Gwonordv aitiov, or simply Wuyxn as throughout the treatise On the Soul), however alien in its essence from the bodily and sentient part, yet no sooner is united with this earthly part than it at once exerts power over it. In fact it requires this instrument before it can reach its perfection. ‘Seeing, then, man is a reasoning animal of a certain kind, it was necessary that the body should be prepared as an instrument appro- priate to the needs of his reason”®.’ So closely has this reason been united with the senses and the flesh that it performs itself the functions of the animal part; it is the ‘mind’ or ‘reason’ itself that sees, hears, &c.; in fact the exercise of mind depends on a sound state of the senses and other organs of the body; for a sick body cannot receive the ‘artistic’ impres- sions of the mind and, so, the mind remains inoperative. This is enough to show how far Gregory had got from pre-existence and the ‘fall into the prison of the flesh.’
His own theory of the origin of the soul, or at least that to which he visibly inclines, is stated in the treatise, De Animd et Resurrectione, p. 241. It is that of Tertullian and some Greek Fathers also: and goes by the name of ‘traducianism.’ The soul is transmitted in the generating seed. This of course is the opposite pole to Origen’s teaching, and is inconsistent with Gregory’s own spiritualism. The other alternative, Creationism, which a number of the orthodox adopted, namely that souls are created by God at the moment of conception, or when the body of the foetus is already formed, was not open to him to adopt; because, according to him, in idea the world of spirits was made, and in a determinate number, along with the world of unformed matter by the one creative act ‘in the beginning.’ In the plan of the universe, though not in reality as with Origen, all souls are already created. So the life of humanity contains them: when the occasion comes they take their beginning along with the body which enshrines them, but are not created then any more than that body. Such was the compromise between spiritualism and materialism to which Gregory was driven by the difficulties of the subject. Origen with his eye unfalteringly fixed upon the ideal world, and unconscious of the practical consequences that might be drawn from his teaching, cut the knot with his eternal pre-existence of souls, which avoided at once the alleged absurdity of creationism and the grossness of traducianism. But the Church, for higher interests still than those of pure idealism, had to reject that doctrine; and Gregory, with his extended knowledge in physic and his close observation of the intercommunion of mind and body, had to devise or rather select a theory which, though a makeshift, would not contradict either his knowledge or his faith.
Yet after admitting that soul and body are born together and attaching such importance to the ‘physical basis’ of life and thought, the influence of his master, or else his own uncon- trollable idealism, carries him away again in the opposite direction. After reading words in 29 De Hom. Op. c. viii. 36 His Origenism.
his treatise which Locke might have written we come upon others which are exactly the teaching of Berkeley. There is a passage in the De Anima et Resurrectione where he deals with the question how an intelligent Being could have created matter, which is neither intel- ligent or intelligible. But what if matter is only a concourse of qualities, €vvoint, or pid vorjata as he elsewhere calls them? Then there would be no difficulty in understanding the manner of creation. But even about this we can say so much, i.e. that not one of those things which we attribute to body is itself body: neither figure, nor colour, nor weight, nor extension, nor quantity, nor any other qualifying notion whatever: but every one of them is a thought: it is the combination of them all into a single whole that constitutes body. Seeing, then, that these several qualifications which complete the particular body are grasped by thought alone, and not by sense, and that the Deity is a thinking being, what trouble can it be to such a thinking agent to produce the thoughts whose mutual combination generate for us the substance of that body? and in the treatise, De Hom. Opif., c. 24, the intelligible vot is said to produce the intelligible 5vvcuec, and the concourse of these 5uvduets brings into being the material nature. The body itself, he repeats (contra Fatum, p. 67), is not a real substance; it is a soulless, unsubstantial thing. The only real creation is that of spirits. Even Origen did not go so far as that Matter with him, though it exists by concomitance and not by itself, nevertheless really exists. He avoided a rock upon which Gregory runs; for with Gregory not only matter but created spirit as well vanish in idealism. There remain with him only the voovueva and God.
This transcendent idealism embarrasses him in many ways, and makes his theory of the soul full of inconsistency. (1) He will not say unhesitatingly whether that pure humanity in the beginning created in the image of God had a body or not like ours. Origen at all events says that the eternally pre-existing spirits were invested with a body, even before falling into the sensible world. But Gregory, while denying the pre-existence of souls in the sense of Origen, yet in many of his treatises, especially in the De Hom. Opificio, seems to point to a primitive humanity, a predeterminate number of souls destined to live in the body though they had not yet lived, which goes far beyond Origen’s in its ideal character. “When Moses,” Gregory says, “speaks of the soul as the image of God, he shows that all that is alien to God must be excluded from our definition of the soul; and a corporal nature is alien to God.” He points out that God first “made man in His own image,’ and after that made them male and female; so that there was a double fashioning of our nature, | te mpdc TO OEiov OUOLWHEVN, Hf TE TPdS TH Sia~opav tavtnv (i.e. male and female) dinpnuevn. On the other hand, in the Oratio Catechetica, which contains certainly his more dogmatic statement on every point, this ideal and passionless humanity is regarded as still in the future: and it is represented that man’s double-nature is actually the very centre of the Divine Councils, and not the result of any mistake or sin; man’s soul from the very first was commingled (avaKpaots is Gregory’s favourite word) with a body, in order that in him, as representing 37 al His Origenism.
every stage of living things, the whole creation, even in its lowest part, might share in the divine. Man, as the paragon of animals, was necessary, in order that the union might be ef- fected between two otherwise irreconcilable worlds, the intelligible and the sensible. Though, therefore, there was a Fall at last, it was not the occasion of man’s receiving a body similar to animals; that body was given him at the very first, and was only preparatory to the Fall, which was foreseen in the Divine Councils and provided for. Both the body and the Fall were necessary in order that the Divine plan might be carried out, and the Divine glory manifested in creation. In this view the “coats of skins” which Gregory inherits from the allegorical treasures of Origen are no longer merely the human body itself, as with Origen, but all the passions, actions, and habits of that body after the Fall, which he sums up in the generic term maOn. If, then, there is to be any reconciliation between this and the former view of his in which the pure unstained humanity, the ‘image of God, is differentiated by a second act of creation as it were into male and female, we must suppose him to teach that immediately upon the creation in God’s image there was added all that in human nature is akin to the merely animal world. In that man was God’s image, his will was free, but in that he was created, he was able to fall from his high estate; and God, foreseeing the Fall, at once added the distinction of sex, and with it the other features of the animal which would befit the fall; but with the purpose of raising thereby the whole creation. But two great counter- influences seem always to be acting upon Gregory; the one sympathy with the speculations of Origen, the other a tendency to see even with a modern insight into the closeness of the intercommunion between soul and body. The results of these two influences cannot be al- together reconciled. His ideal and his actual man, each sketched with a skilful and discrim- inating hand, represent the interval that divides his aspirations from his observations: yet both are present to his mind when he writes about the soul. (2) He does not alter, as Origen does, the traditional belief in the resurrection of the body, and yet his idealism, in spite of his actual and strenuous defence of it in the carefully argued treatise On the Soul and Resur- rection, renders it unnecessary, if not impossible. We know that his faith impelled Origen, too, to°” contend for the resurrection of the flesh: yet it is an almost forced importation into the rest of his system. Our bodies, he teaches, will rise again: but that which will make us the same persons we were before is not the sameness of our bodies (for they will be ethereal, angelic, uncarnal, &c.) but the sameness of a Adyog within them which never dies (Adyoc Tic yKEITAL TH GHUATI, &~’ Od UN] POEIpoUEvoD Eyefpetal TO CHpa éEv &POapoi& 139, c. Cels. v. 23). Here we have the Adyo1 oneppatixol; which Gregory objected to as somehow connected in his mind with the infinite plurality of worlds. Yet his own account of the Re- surrection of the flesh is nothing but Origenism, mitigated by the suppression of these Adyot. With him, too, matter is nothing, it is a negative thing that can make and effect nothing: 30 He does so De Principiis I. preef. 5. C. Cels. II. 77, VIII. 49 sq. 38 His Origenism.
His Origenism.
the soul, the Gwrixn dvvapic does everything; it is gifted by him with a sort of ubiquity after death. “Nothing can break its sympathetic union with the particles of the body.’ It is not a long and difficult study for it to discern in the mass of elements that which is its own from that which is not its own. ‘It watches over its property, as it were, until the Resurrection, when it will clothe itself in them anew”!,’ It is only a change of names: the Adyoc has become this GwtiKr Sbvapts or Puxn, which seems itself, almost unaided, to effect the whole Resur- rection. Though he teaches as against Origen that the ‘elements’ are the same ‘elements,’ the body the same body as before, yet the strange importance both in activity and in substance which he attaches to the Wuyr even in the disembodied state seems to render a Resurrection of the flesh unnecessary. Here, too, his view of the plan of Redemption is at variance with his idealistic leanings. While Origen regarded the body, as it now is, as part of that ‘vanity’ placed upon the creature which was to be laid aside at last, Gregory’s view of the design of God in creating man at all absolutely required the Resurrection of the flesh*” (wo adv ovverapOein TG et& 251° to y& 187‘vov). Creation was to be saved by man’s carrying his created body into a higher world: and this could only be done by a resurrection of the flesh such as the Church had already set forth in her creed.
Again, however, after parting with Origen upon this point, he meets him in the ultimate contemplation of Christ’s glorified humanity and ofall glorified bodies. Both steadily refuse at last ‘to know Christ according to the flesh.’ They depict His humanity as so absorbed in deity that all traces of His bodily nature vanish; and as with Christ, so finally with His true followers. This is far indeed from the Lamb that was slain, and the vision of S. John. In this heaven of theirs all individual or generic differences between rational creatures necessarily cease.
Great, then, as are their divergences, especially in cosmogony, their agreements are maintained throughout. Gregory in the main accepts Origen’s teaching, as far as he can ac- commodate it to the now more outspoken faith of the Church. What*? Redepenning sum- marises as the groundplan of Origen’s whole way of thinking, Gregory has, with the necessary changes, appropriated. Both regard the history of the world as a movement between a begin- ning and an end in which are united every single spiritual or truly human nature in the world, and the Divine nature. This interval of movement is caused by the falling away of the free will of the creature from the divine: but it will come to an end, in order that the former union may be restored. In this summary they would differ only as to the closeness of the original union. Both, too, according to this, would regard ‘man’ as the final cause, and the explanation, and the centre of God’s plan in creation.
His Origenism.
Even in the special sphere of theology which the later needs of the Church forced into prominence, and which Gregory has made peculiarly his own, that of the doctrine of the Trinity, Gregory employs sometimes a method which he has caught from Origen. Origen supposes, not so much, as Plato did, that things below are images of things above, as that they have certain secret analogies or affinities with them. This is perhaps after all only a peculiar application for his own purpose of Plato’s theory of ideas. There are mysterious sympathies between the earth and heaven. We must therefore read within ourselves the re- flection of truths which are too much beyond our reach to know in themselves. With regard to the attributes of God this is more especially the case. But Origen never had the occasion to employ this language in explaining the mystery of the Trinity. Gregory is the first Father who has done so. He finds a key to it in the** triple nature of our soul. The votc, the Adyos, and the soul, form within us a unity such as that of the Divine hypostases. Gregory himself confesses that such thoughts about God are inadequate, and immeasurably below their object: but he cannot be blamed for employing this method, as if it was entirely superficial. Not only does this instance illustrate trinity in unity, but we should have no contents for our thought about the Father, Son, and Spirit, if we found no outlines at all of their nature within ourselves. Denis*? well says that the history of the doctrine of the Trinity confirms this: for the advanced development of the theory of the Adyoc, a purely human attribute in the ancient philosophy, was the cause of the doctrine of the Son being so soon and so widely treated: and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit came into prominence only when He began to be regarded as the principle of the purely human or moral life, as Love, that is, or Charity. Gregory, then, had reason in recommending even a more systematic use of the method which he had received from Origen: “Learn from the things within thee to know the secret of God; recognise from the Triad within thee the Triad by means of these matters which you realise: it is a testimony above and more sure than that of the Law and the Gospel*®’ He carries out elsewhere also more thoroughly than Origen this method of reading parables. He is an actual Mystic in this. The mysterious but real correspondences between earth and heaven, upon which, Origen had taught, and not upon mere thoughts or the arti- fices of language, the truth of a parable rests, Gregory employed, in order to penetrate the meaning of the whole of external nature. He finds in its facts and appearances analogies with the energies, and through them with the essence, of God. They are not to him merely indications of the wisdom which caused them and ordered them, but actual symptoms of the various energies which reside in the essence of the Supreme Being; as though that essence, having first been translated into the energies, was through them translated into the material 34 This is an independent division to that mentioned above. 35 De la Philosophie D’Origéne (Paris, 1884). 36 De eo quod immut.,, p. 30. 40 el His Origenism.
creation; which was thus an earthly language saying the same thing as the heavenly language, word for word. The whole world thus became one vast allegory? 7, and existed only to manifest the qualities of the Unseen. Akin to this peculiar development of the parable is another characteristic of his, which is alien to the spirit of Origen; his delight in natural scenery, his appreciation of it, and power of describing it.
With regard to the question, so much agitated, of the ’Anoxatdotaotc, it may be said that not Gregory only but Basil and Gregory Nazianzen also have felt the influence of their master in theology, Origen. But it is due to the latter to say that though he dwells much on the “all in all” and insists much more on the sanctifying power of punishment than on the satisfaction owed to Divine justice, yet no one could justly attribute to him, as a doctrine, the view of a Universal Salvation. Still these Greek Fathers, Origen and ‘the three great Cappadocians,’ equally showed a disposition of mind that left little room for the discussions that were soon to agitate the West. Their infinite hopes, their absolute confidence in the goodness of God, who owes it to Himself to make His work perfect, their profound faith in the promises and sacrifice of Christ, as well as in the vivifying action of the Holy Spirit, make the question of Predestination and Grace a very simple one with them. The word Grace occurs as often in them as in Augustine: but they do not make original sin a monstrous in- novation requiring a remedy of a peculiar and overwhelming intensity. Passion indeed seems to Gregory of Nyssa himself one of the essential elements of the human soul. He borrows from the naturalists many principles of distinction between classes of souls and lives: he insists incessantly on the intimate connexion between the physical growth and the development of the reason, and on the correlation between the one and the other: and we arrive at the conclusion that man in his eyes, as in Clement’s, was not originally perfect, except in possibility; that being at once reasoning and sentient he must perforce feel within himself the struggle of reason and passion, and that it was inevitable that sin should enter into the world: it was a consequence of his mixed nature. This mixed nature of the first man was transmitted to his descendants. Here, though he stands apart from Origen on the question of man’s original perfection, he could not have accepted the whole Augustinian scheme of original sin: and Grace as the remedy with him consists rather in the purging this mixed nature, than in the introduction into it of something absolutely foreign. The result, as with all the Greek Fathers, will depend on the co-operation of the free agent in this re- medial work. Predestination and the ‘bad will’ are excluded by the Possibility and the ‘free will’ of Origen and Gregory.
37 See De iis qui premature abripiuntur, p. 231, quoted above, p. 4.
41 ll His Teaching on the Holy Trinity.
Chapter IV.—His Teaching on the Holy Trinity.
To estimate the exact value of the work done by S. Gregory in the establishment of the doctrine of the Trinity and in the determination, so far as Eastern Christendom is concerned, of the terminology employed for the expression of that doctrine, is a task which can hardly be satisfactorily carried out. His teaching on the subject is so closely bound up with that of his brother, S. Basil of Ceesarea,—his “master,” to use his own phrase,—that the two can hardly be separated with any certainty. Where a disciple, carrying on the teaching he has himself received from another, with perhaps almost imperceptible variations of expression, has extended the influence of that teaching and strengthened its hold on the minds of men, it must always be a matter of some difficulty to discriminate accurately between the services which the two have rendered to their common cause, and to say how far the result attained is due to the earlier, how far to the later presentment of the doctrine. But the task of so dis- criminating between the work of S. Basil and that of S. Gregory is rendered yet more com- plicated by the uncertainty attaching to the authorship of particular treatises which have been claimed for both. If, for instance, we could with certainty assign to S. Gregory that treatise on the terms ovota and bmdotaotc, which Dorner treats as one of the works by which he “contributed materially to fix the uncertain usage of the Church®®,” but which is found also among the works of S. Basil in the form of a letter addressed to S. Gregory himself, we should be able to estimate the nature and the extent of the influence of the Bishop of Nyssa much more definitely than we can possibly do while the authorship of this treatise remains uncertain. Nor does this document stand alone in this respect, although it is perhaps of more importance for the determination of such a question than any other of the disputed treatises. Thus in the absence of certainty as to the precise extent to which S. Gregory’s teaching was directly indebted to that of his brother, it seems impossible to say how far the “fixing of the uncertain usage of the Church” was due to either of them singly. That together they did contribute very largely to that result is beyond question: and it is perhaps superfluous to endeavour to separate their contributions, especially as there can be little doubt that S. Gregory at least conceived himself to be in agreement with S. Basil upon all important points, if not to be acting simply as the mouth-piece of his “master’s” teaching, and as the defender of the statements which his “master” had set forth against possible misconceptions of their meaning. Some points, indeed, there clearly were, in which S. Gregory’s presentment of the doctrine differs from that of S. Basil; but to these it may be better to revert at a later stage, after considering the more striking variation which their teaching displays from the language of the earlier Nicene school as represented by S. Athanasius.
The council held at Alexandria in the year 362, during the brief restoration of S. Ath- anasius, shows us at once the point of contrast and the substantial agreement between the 38 See Dorner, Doctrine of the Person of Christ, Div. I. vol. ii. p. 314 (English Trans.). 42 al His Teaching on the Holy Trinity.
Western school, with which S. Athanasius himself is in this matter to be reckoned, and the Eastern theologians to whom has been given the title of “Neo-Nicene.” The question at issue was one of language, not of belief; it turned upon the sense to be attached to the word Umdotaoic. The Easterns, following a use of the term which may be traced perhaps to the influence of Origen, employed the word in the sense of the Latin “Persona,” and spoke of the Three Persons as tpeic Umootdoetc, whereas the Latins employed the term “hypostasis” as equivalent to “sub-stantia,” to express what the Greeks called ovoia,—the one Godhead of the Three Persons. With the Latins agreed the older school of the orthodox Greek theo- logians, who applied to the Three Persons the phrase tpia mpdowma, speaking of the Godhead as Ula Umdotaotc. This phrase, in the eyes of the newer Nicene school, was suspected of Sabellianism>”, while on the other hand the Westerns were inclined to regard the Eastern phrase tpeic vmootdoetc as implying tritheism. The synodal letter sets forth to us the means by which the fact of substantial agreement between the two schools was brought to light, and the understanding arrived at, that while Arianism on the one hand and Sabellianism on the other were to be condemned, it was advisable to be content with the language of the Nicene formula, which employed neither the phrase pia Umdotacic nor the phrase tpeic bnootéoeic’?. This resolution, prudent as it may have been for the purpose of bringing to- gether those who were in real agreement, and of securing that the reconciled parties should, at a critical moment, present an unbroken front in the face of their common and still dan- gerous enemy, could hardly be long maintained. The expression tpeic¢ UmootdoEIc was one to which many of the orthodox, including those who had formerly belonged to the Semi- Arian section, had become accustomed: the Alexandrine synod, under the guidance of S. Athanasius, had acknowledged the phrase, as used by them, to be an orthodox one, and S. Basil, in his efforts to conciliate the Semi-Arian party, with which he had himself been closely connected through his namesake of Ancyra and through Eustathius of Sebastia, saw fit definitely to adopt it. While S. Athanasius, on the one hand, using the older terminology, says that Undotaoic is equivalent to ovoia, and has no other meaning“’, S. Basil, on the other hand, goes so far as to say that the terms ovoia and Undotaotc, even in the Nicene anathema, are not to be understood as equivalent*. The adoption of the new phrase, even after the explanations given at Alexandria, was found to require, in order to avoid miscon- 39 It isto be noted further that the use of the terms “Persona” and npdowmov by those who avoided the phrase TpEIG UMOOTKoEIG no doubt assisted in the formation of this suspicion. At the same time the Nicene anathema favoured the sense of Umdotaotc as equivalent to ovota, and so appeared to condemn the Eastern use.
40S. Athanasius, Tom. ad Antioch, 5.
41 Ad Afr. Episc. $4. S. Athanasius, however, does not shrink from the phrase tpeic bnootdoetc in contradis- tinction to the pia ovota: see the treatise, In illud, ‘Omnia mihi tradita sunt.’ $6.
42S. Bas. Ep. 125 (being the confession of faith drawn up by S. Basil for the subscription of Eustathius). 43 His Teaching on the Holy Trinity.
struction, a more precise definition of its meaning, and a formal defence of its orthodoxy. And herein consisted one principal service rendered by S. Basil and S. Gregory; while with more precise definition of the term Umdotaoic there emerged, it may be, a more precise view of the relations of the Persons, and with the defence of the new phrase as expressive of the Trinity of Persons a more precise view of what is implied in the Unity of the Godhead.