which have been scattered this way and that over the surface of the sea (for he seizes any bit that comes to hand, and lets all the rest drift away), in the same way the soul, being by nature incapable of dissolution along with the atoms, will, if she finds it hard to be parted from the body altogether, cling to some one of them; and if we take this view, con- sistency will no more allow us to regard her as immortal for living in one atom than as mortal for not living in a number of them.
But the intelligent and undimensional, she replied, is neither contracted nor diffused!””” (contraction and diffusion being a property of body only); but by virtue of a nature which is formless and bodiless it is present with the body equally in the contraction and in the diffusion of its atoms, and is no more narrowed by the compression which attends the uniting of the atoms than it is abandoned by them when they wander off to their kindred, 1776 _i.e.as we have already seen (p. 433). The fact of the continuity of the soul was there deduced from its being incomposite. So that the yap here does not give the ground for the statement immediately preceding. Gregory (p. 431) had suggested two alternatives:—1. That the soul dissolves with the body. This is answered by the soul’s “incompositeness.” 2. That the union of the immaterial soul with the still material atoms after death cannot be maintained. This is answered by the analogy given in the present section, of God’s presence in an uncongenial universe, and that of the soul in the still living body. The yap therefore refers to the answer to 1, without which the question of the soul con- tinuing in the atoms could not have been discussed at all.
1777 her vessel. Of course this is not the “vehicle” of the soul (after death) which the later Platonists speak of, but the body itself. The word dynua is used in connection with a ship, Soph. Trach. 656; and though in Plato (Timeus, p. 69), whose use of this word for the body was afterwards followed, it is not clear whether a car or a ship is most thought of, yet that the latter is Gregory’s meaning appears from his next words.
1778 at once. Reading (with Codd. A, B, C, and Uff.) kata tavtév.
1779 ote Siaxeitat. Oehler translates wrongly “noch dehnt es sich aus”; because the faculty of extension is ascribed to the intelligence (cf. exteiveoOan, diatervop_evov, napeKtervouevn, below), but diffusion is denied of it, both here, and in the words d1aoyietot (above and below), didKprots, and diaonéta, i.e. separation in space.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
however wide the interval is held to be which we observe between alien atoms. For instance, there is a great difference between the buoyant and light as contrasted with the heavy and solid; between the hot as contrasted with the cold; between the humid as contrasted with its opposite; nevertheless it is no strain to an intelligent essence to be present in each of those elements to which it has once cohered; this blending with opposites does not split it up. In locality, in peculiar qualities, these elemental atoms are held to be far removed from each other; but an undimensional nature finds it no labour to cling to what is locally divided, seeing that even now it is possible for the mind at once to contemplate the heavens above us and to extend its busy scrutiny beyond the horizon, nor is its contemplative power at all distracted by these excursions into distances so great. There is nothing, then, to hinder the soul’s presence in the body’s atoms, whether fused in union or decomposed in dissolution. Just as in the amalgam of gold and silver a certain methodical force is to be observed which has fused the metals, and if the one be afterwards smelted out of the other, the law of this method nevertheless continues to reside in each, so that while the amalgam is separated this method does not suffer division along with it (for you cannot make fractions out of the in- divisible), in the same way this intelligent essence of the soul is observable in the concourse of the atoms, and does not undergo division when they are dissolved; but it remains with them, and even in their separation it is co-extensive with them, yet not itself dissevered nor discounted!®° into sections to accord with the number of the atoms. Such a condition be- longs to the material and spacial world, but that which is intelligent and undimensional is not liable to the circumstances of space. Therefore the soul exists in the actual atoms which she has once animated, and there is no force to tear her away from her cohesion with them. What cause for melancholy, then, is there herein, that the visible is exchanged for the invisible; and wherefore is it that your mind has conceived such a hatred of death?
Upon this I recurred to the definition which she had previously given of the soul, and I said that to my thinking her definition had not indicated'7*" distinctly enough all the 1781 évdedeiyOa1. Gregory constantly uses évdeixvuo8a1 (middle) transitively, e.g. 202 C, 203 A, C, 208 B, and above, 189 A, so that it is possible that we have here, in the passive form, a deponent (transitive) perfect; moreover the sense seems to require it. Gregory objects that in what has been said all the powers which analysis finds in the soul have not been set forth with sufficient fulness: an exhaustive account of them has not been given; and he immediately proceeds to name other duvdépets and évépyeiat which have not been taken into consideration. That this view of the passage is correct is further shown by 202 C, where, the present objection having been treated at length, it is concluded that there is no real ground for quarrelling with the definition of soul we éAAeindc Evderauevw trv pvow. Krabinger therefore is right in dropping Evvoovpevy), which two of his mss. exhibit, and which Sifanus translates as governing tac...duvduets, as if the sense were, “When I consider all the powers of the soul, I do not think that your definition has been made good.”
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
powers of the soul which are a matter of observation. It declares the soul to be an intellectual essence which imparts to the organic body a force of life by which the senses operate. Now the soul is not thus operative only in our scientific and speculative intellect; it does not produce results in that world only, or employ the organs of sense only for this their natural work. On the contrary, we observe in our nature many emotions of desire and many of anger; and both these exist in us as qualities of our kind, and we see both of them in their manifest- ations displaying further many most subtle differences. There are many states, for instance, which are occasioned by desire; many others which on the other hand proceed from anger; and none of them are of the body; but that which is not of the body is plainly intellectual. Now!”* our definition exhibits the soul as something intellectual; so that one of two altern- atives, both absurd, must emerge when we follow out this view to this end; either anger and desire are both second souls in us, and a plurality of souls must take the place of the single soul, or the thinking faculty in us cannot be regarded as a soul either (if they are not), the intellectual element adhering equally to all of them and stamping them all as souls, or else excluding every one of them equally from the specific qualities of soul.
You are quite justified, she replied, in raising this question, and it has ere this been dis- cussed by many elsewhere; namely, what we are to think of the principle of desire and the principle of anger within us. Are they consubstantial with the soul, inherent in the soul’s very self from her first organization!’* , or are they something different, accruing to us af- terwards? In fact, while all equally allow that these principles are to be detected in the soul, investigation has not yet discovered exactly what we are to think of them so as to gain some fixed belief with regard to them. The generality of men still fluctuate in their opinions about this, which are as erroneous as they are numerous. As for ourselves, if the Gentile philosophy, which deals methodically with all these points, were really adequate for a demonstration, it qi784 would certainly be superfluous to ad a discussion on the soul to those speculations.
1782 The syllogism implied in the following words is this:— The emotions are something intellectual (because incorporeal). Therefore the emotions are soul (or souls). This conclusion is obviously false; logically, by reason of the fallacy of “the undistributed middle”; ontologically, because it requires a false premise additional (i.e. “everything intellectual is soul”) to make it true. Macrina directly after this piece of bad logic deprecates the use of the syllogism. Is this accidental? It looks almost like an excuse for not going into technicalities and exposing this fallacy, which she has detected in her opponent’s statement. Macrina actually answers as if Gregory had urged his objection thus. “The emotions are not purely intellectual, but are conditioned by the bodily organism: but they do belong to the expression and the substance of the soul: the soul therefore is dependent on the organism and will perish along with it.”
1783 mapa tv MPWTNHV (i.e. pav understood). This is the reading of all the Codd. for the faulty mapa trv avtrv of the Editions.
1784 mpooti8évan. Sifanus translates “illorum commentationi de anima adjicere sermonem,” which Krabinger wonders at. The Greek could certainly bear this meaning: but perhaps the other reading is better, i.e. tpotiWEva, “to propose for consideration.”
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
But while the latter proceeded, on the subject of the soul, as far in the direction of supposed consequences as the thinker pleased, we are not entitled to such licence, I mean that of af- firming what we please; we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings. We must therefore neglect the Platonic chariot and the pair of horses of dissimilar forces yoked to it, and their driver, whereby the philosopher allegorizes these facts about the soul; we must neglect also all that is said by the philosopher who succeeded him and who followed out probabilities by rules of art diligently investigated the very question now before us, declaring that the soul was morta by reason of these two principles; we must neglect all before and since their time, whether they philosophized in prose or in verse, and we will adopt, as the guide of our reasoning, the Scripture, which lays it down as an axiom that there is no excellence in the soul which is not a property as well of the Divine nature. For he who declares the soul to be God’s likeness asserts that anything foreign to Him is outside the limits of the soul; similarity cannot be retained in those qualities which are diverse from the original. Since, then, nothing of the kind we are considering is included in the conception of the Divine nature, one would be reasonable in surmising that such things are not consubstantial with the soul either. Now to seek to build up our doctrine by rule of dialectic and the science which draws and destroys conclusions, involves a species of discussion which we shall ask to be excused from, as being 1786 that the soul was mortal. Aristotle, guided only by probabilities as discoverable by the syllogism, does indeed define the soul, “the first entelechy of a physical, potentially living, and organic body.” Entelechy is more than mere potentiality: it is “developed force” (“dormant activity;” see W. Archer Butler’s Lectures, ii. p. 393), capable of manifestation. The human soul, uniting in itself all the faculties of the other orders of animate existence, is a Microcosm. The other parts of the soul are inseparable from the body, and are hence perishable (De Anima, ii. 2); but the votc exists before the body, into which it enters from without as something divine and immortal (De Gen. Animal. ii. 3). But he makes a distinction between the form-receiving, and the form-giving vobc: sub- stantial eternal existence belongs only to the latter (De Animié, iii. 5). The secret of the difference between him and Plato, with whom “all the soul is immortal” (Pheedrus, p. 245 C), lies in this; that Plato regarded the soul as always in motion, while Aristotle denied it, in itself, any motion at all. “It is one of the things that are impossible that motion should exist in it” (De Anim, i. 4). It cannot be moved at all; therefore it cannot move itself. Plotinus and Porphyry, as well as Nemesius the Platonizing Bishop of Emesa (whose treatise De Anima is wrongly attributed to Gregory), attacked this teaching of an “entelechy.” Cf. also Justin Martyr (ad Grec. cohort, c. 6, p. 12); “Plato declares that all the soul is immortal; Aristotle calls her an ‘entelechy,’ and not immortal. The one says she is ever-moving, the other that she is never-moving, but prior to all motion.” Also Gregory Naz., Orat. xxvii. “Away with Aristotle’s calculating Providence, and his art of logic, and his dead reasonings about the soul, and purely 1” human doctrine On the Soul and the Resurrection.
a weak and questionable way of demonstrating truth. Indeed, it is clear to every one that that subtle dialectic possesses a force that may be turned both ways, as well for the overthrow of truth!787 as for the detection of falsehood; and so we begin to suspect even truth itself when it is advanced in company with such a kind of artifice, and to think that the very in- genuity of it is trying to bias our judgment and to upset the truth. If on the other hand any one will accept a discussion which is in a naked unsyllogistic form, we will speak upon these points by making our study of them so far as we can follow the chain’ *”” of Scriptural tradition. What is it, then, that we assert? We say that the fact of the reasoning animal man being capable of understanding and knowing is most surely!”®?
attested by those outside our faith; and that this definition would never have sketched our nature so, if it had viewed anger and desire and all such-like emotions as consubstantial with that nature. In any other case, one would not give a definition of the subject in hand by putting a generic instead of a specific quality; and so, as the principle of desire and the principle of anger are observed equally in rational and irrational natures, one could not rightly mark the specific quality by means of this generic one. But how can that which, in defining a nature, is superfluous and worthy of exclusion be treated as a part of that nature, and, so, available for falsifying the definition? Every definition of an essence looks to the specific quality of the subject in hand; and whatever is outside that speciality is set aside as having nothing to do with the required definition. Yet, beyond question, these faculties of anger and desire are allowed to be common to all reasoning and brute natures; anything common is not identical with that which is peculiar; it is imperative therefore that we should not range these faculties amongst those whereby humanity is exclusively meant: but just as one may perceive the principle!’ of sensation, and that of nutrition and growth in man, and yet not shake thereby the given definition of his soul (for the quality A being in the soul does not prevent the quality B being in it too), so, when one detects in humanity these emotions of anger and desire, one cannot on that account fairly quarrel with this definition, as if it fell short of a full indication of man’s nature.
What then, I asked the Teacher, are we to think about this? For I cannot yet see how we can fitly repudiate faculties which are actually within us.
1787 _ for the overthrow of the truth. So c. Eunom. iii. (ii. 500).
1788 eippdv.
1789 most surely, 1}. This is the common reading: but the Codd. have mostly xai.
1790 Aristotle, Ethic. i. 13, dwells upon these principles. Of the last he says, i.e. the common vegetative, the principle of nutrition and growth: “One would assume such a power of the soul in everything that grows, even in the embryo, and just this very same power in the perfect creatures; for this is more likely than that it should be a different one.” Sleep, in which this power almost alone is active, levels all.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
You see, she replied, there is a battle of the reason with them and a struggle to rid the soul of them; and there are men in whom this struggle has ended in success; it was so with Moses, as we know; he was superior both to anger and to desire; the history testifying of him in both respects, that he was meek beyond all men (and by meekness it indicates the absence of all anger and a mind quite devoid of resentment), and that he desired none of those things about which we see the desiring faculty in the generality so active. This could not have been so, if these faculties were nature, and were referable to the contents of man’s essence!’?!, For it is impossible for one who has come quite outside of his nature to be in Existence at all. But if Moses was at one and the same time in Existence and not in these conditions, then!”
it follows that these conditions are something other than nature and not nature itself. For if, on the one hand, that is truly nature in which the essence of the being is found, and, on the other, the removal of these conditions is in our power, so that their removal not only does no harm, but is even beneficial to the nature, it is clear that these conditions are to be numbered amongst externals, and are affections, rather than the essence, of the nature; for the essence is that thing only which it is. As for anger, most think it a fer- menting of the blood round the heart; others an eagerness to inflict pain in return for a previous pain; we would take it to be the impulse to hurt one who has provoked us. But none of these accounts of it tally with the definition of the soul. Again, if we were to define what desire is in itself, we should call it a seeking for that which is wanting, or a longing for pleasurable enjoyment, or a pain at not possessing that upon which the heart is set, or a state with regard to some pleasure which there is no opportunity of enjoying. These and such-like descriptions all indicate desire, but they have no connection with the definition of the soul. But it is so with regard to all those other conditions also which we see to have some relation to the soul, those, I mean, which are mutually opposed to each other, such as cowardice and courage, pleasure and pain, fear and contempt, and so on; each of them seems akin to the principle of desire or to that of anger, while they have a separate definition to mark their own peculiar nature. Courage and contempt, for instance, exhibit a certain phase of the irascible impulse; the dispositions arising from cowardice and fear exhibit on the other hand a diminution and weakening of that same impulse. Pain, again, draws its mater- ial both from anger and desire. For the impotence of anger, which consists in not being able to punish one who has first given pain, becomes itself pain; and the despair of getting objects of desire and the absence of things upon which the heart is set create in the mind this same sullen state. Moreover, the opposite to pain, I mean the sensation of pleasure!””?, like pain, 1791 ovoia.
1792 It is best to keep dpa: dpa is Krabinger’s correction from four Codd.: and he reads 6 for ei above: but only one class of Codd. support these alterations.
1793 I mean the sensation of pleasure. This (vénua) is Krabinger’s reading: but Oehler reads from his Codd.
voonya: and H. Schmidt suggests kivnua, comparing (205 A) below, “any other such-like emotion of the soul.”
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
divides itself between anger and desire; for pleasure is the leading motive of them both. All these conditions, I say, have some relation to the soul, and yet they are not the soul!74, but only like warts growing out of the soul’s thinking part, which are reckoned as parts of it because they adhere to it, and yet are not that actual thing which the soul is in its essence.
And yet, I rejoined to the virgin, we see no slight help afforded for improvement to the virtuous from all these conditions. Daniel’s desire was his glory; and Phineas’ anger pleased the Deity. We have been told, too, that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and learnt from Paul that salvation is the goal of the “sorrow after a godly sort.” The Gospel bids us have a contempt for danger; and the “not being afraid with any amazement” is nothing else but a describing of courage, and this last is numbered by Wisdom amongst the things that are good. In all this Scripture shows that such conditions are not to be considered weaknesses; weaknesses would not have been so employed for putting virtue into practice.
I think, replied the Teacher, that Iam myself responsible for this confusion arising from different accounts of the matter; for I did not state it as distinctly as I might have, by intro- ducing a certain order of consequences for our consideration. Now, however, some such order shall, as far as it is possible, be devised, so that our essay may advance in the way of logical sequence and so give no room for such contradictions. We declare, then, that the speculative, critical, and world-surveying faculty of the soul is its peculiar property by virtue of its very nature!””° , and that thereby the soul preserves within itself the image of the divine grace; since our reason surmises that divinity itself, whatever it may be in its inmost nature, is manifested in these very things,—universal supervision and the critical discernment between good and evil. But all those elements of the soul which lie on the border-land!’”° and are capable from their peculiar nature of inclining to either of two opposites (whose eventual determination to the good or to the bad depends on the kind of use they are put to), anger, for instance, and fear, and any other such-like emotion of the soul divested of which human nature cannot be studied—all these we reckon as accretions from without, 1794 have some relation to the soul, and yet they are not the soul. Macrina does not mean that the Passions are altogether severed from the soul, as the following shows: and so Oehler cannot be right in reading and translating “Das Alles hat nichts mir der Seele zu schaffen.” The Greek mepi trv uxt is to be parallelled by ot Tepi tov IlepiKAéa, “Pericles’ belongings,” or “party”; passing, in later Greek, almost into “Pericles himself.” 1795 Reading kata pvow avdtry, Kati tij¢ Beoedobc xaprtos, k. t. A. with Sifanus.
1796 doa de tijg Wuxiis Ev UePopi& 251° Keita. Moller (Gregorii Nysseni doctrina de hominis natura) remarks rightly that Krabinger’s translation is here incorrect: “queecunque autem in anime confinio posita sunt”; and that tij¢ Wuxiis should on the contrary be joined closely to doa. The opposition is not between elements which lie in, and on the confines of the soul, but between the divine and adventitious elements within the soul: ue8opi& 251° refers therefore to “good and bad,” below.
1797 This is no contradiction of the passage above about Moses: there it was stated that the Passions did not belong to the essence (ovoia) of man.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
because in the Beauty which is man’s prototype no such characteristics are to be found. Now let the following statement!” be offered as a mere exercise (in interpretation). I pray that it may escape the sneers of cavilling hearers. Scripture informs us that the Deity proceeded by a sort of graduated and ordered advance to the creation of man. After the foundations of the universe were laid, as the history records, man did not appear on the earth at once; but the creation of the brutes preceded his, and the plants preceded them. Thereby Scripture shows that the vital forces blended with the world of matter according to a gradation; first, it infused itself into insensate nature; and in continuation of this advanced into the sentient world; and then ascended to intelligent and rational beings. Accordingly, while all existing things must be either corporeal or spiritual, the former are divided into the animate and inanimate. By animate, I mean possessed of life: and of the things possessed of life, some have it with sensation, the rest have no sensation. Again, of these sentient things, some have reason, the rest have not. Seeing, then, that this life of sensation could not possibly exist apart from the matter which is the subject of it, and the intellectual life could not be embod- ied, either, without growing in the sentient, on this account the creation of man is related as coming last, as of one who took up into himself every single form of life, both that of plants and that which is seen in brutes. His nourishment and growth he derives from veget- able life; for even in vegetables such processes are to be seen when aliment is being drawn in by their roots and given off in fruit and leaves. His sentient organization he derives from aes and is a the brute creation. But his faculty of thought and reason is incommunicable peculiar gift in our nature, to be considered by itself. However, just as this nature has the instinct acquisitive of the necessaries to material existence—an instinct which, when mani- 1798 de 51). The Teacher introduces this Adyog with some reserve. “We do not lay it down ex cathedra, we put it forward as open to challenge and discussion as we might do in the schools (ws €v yopvaci& 251°).” It is best then to take Siapvyor as a pure optative. Gregory appears in his answer to congratulate her on the success of this “exercise.” “To any one that reflects...your exposition...bears sufficiently upon it the stamp of correctness, and hits the truth.” But he immediately asks for Scripture authority. So that this Adyoc, though it refers to Genesis, is not yet based upon Scripture. It is a “consecutive” and consistent account of human nature: but it is virtually identical with that advanced at the end of Book I. of Aristotle’s Ethics. It is a piece of secular theorizing. The sneers of cavillers may well be deprecated. Consistent, however, with this view of the Adyoc here offered by Macrina, there is another possible meaning in we €v yopvaot& 251’, x.t. A., i.e. “Let us put forward the following account with all possible care and circumspection, as if we were disputing in the schools; so that cavillers may have nothing to find fault with”: wc av expressing purpose, not a wish. The cavillers will thus refer to sticklers for Greek method and metaphysics: and Gregory’s congratulation of his sister’s lucidity and grasp of the truth will be all the more significant.
1799 Following the order and stopping of Krabinger, duixtov got Kal ididov Eni tavTIS THs PUOEWS, EQ’ Eavtod, k. T. A.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
fested in us men, we call Appetite—and as we admit this appertains to the vegetable form of life, since we can notice it there too like so many impulses working naturally to satisfy themselves with their kindred aliment and to issue in germination, so all the peculiar condi- tions of the brute creation are blended with the intellectual part of the soul. To them, she continued, belongs anger; to them belongs fear; to them all those other opposing activities within us; everything except the faculty of reason and thought. That alone, the choice product, as has been said, of all our life, bears the stamp of the Divine character. But since, according to the view which we have just enunciated, it is not possible for this reasoning faculty to exist in the life of the body without existing by means of sensations, and since sensation is already found subsisting in the brute creation, necessarily as it were, by reason of this one condition, our soul has touch with the other things which are knit up with it!8. and these are all those pheenomena within us that we call “passions”; which have not been allotted to human nature for any bad purpose at all (for the Creator would most certainly be the author of evil, if in them, so deeply rooted as they are in our nature, any necessities of wrong-doing were found), but according to the use which our free will puts them to, these emotions of the soul become the instruments of virtue or of vice. They are like the iron which is being