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Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
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This Part: 128 Pages
Page 32
After recounting these and the like matters, he proceeds to introduce also his teaching concerning the dispensation with regard to man, why the Word was made flesh. For seeing that it is clear to all that God Who is over all has in Himself nothing as a thing created or imported, not power nor wisdom, nor light, nor word, nor life, nor truth, nor any at all of those things which are contemplated in the fulness of the Divine bosom (all which things the Only-begotten God is, Who is in the bosom of the Father [560] , the name of "creation" could not properly be applied to any of those things which are contemplated in God, so that the Son Who is in the Father, or the Word Who is in the Beginning, or the Light Who is in the Light, or the Life Who is in the Life, or the Wisdom Who is in the Wisdom, should say, "the Lord created me." For if the Wisdom of God is created (and Christ is the Power of God and the Wisdom of God [561] ), God, it would follow, has His Wisdom as a thing imported, receiving afterwards, as the result of making, something which He had not at first. But surely He Who is in the bosom of the Father does not permit us to conceive the bosom of the Father as ever void of Himself. He Who is in the beginning is surely not of the things which come to be in that bosom from without, but being the fulness of all good, He is conceived as being always in the Father, not waiting to arise in Him as the result of creation, so that the Father should not be conceived as at any time void of good, but He Who is conceived as being in the eternity of the Father's Godhead is always in Him, being Power, and Life, and Truth, and Wisdom, and the like. Accordingly the words "created me" do not proceed from the Divine and immortal nature, but from that which was commingled with it in the Incarnation from our created nature. How comes it then that the same, called wisdom, and understanding, and intelligence, establishes the earth, and prepares the heavens, and breaks up the deeps, and yet is here "created for the beginning of His works [562] "? Such a dispensation, he tells us, is not set forward without great cause. But since men, after receiving the commandment of the things we should observe, cast away by disobedience the grace of memory, and became forgetful, for this cause, "that I may declare to you the things that happen day by day for your salvation, and may put you in mind by recounting the things from everlasting, which you have forgotten (for it is no new gospel that I now proclaim, but I labour at your restoration to your first estate),--for this cause I was created, Who ever am, and need no creation in order to be; so that I am the beginning of ways for the works of God, that is for men. For the first way being destroyed, there must needs again be consecrated for the wanderers a new and living way [563] , even I myself, Who am the way." And this view, that the sense of "created me" has reference to the Humanity, the divine apostle more clearly sets before us by his own words when he charges us, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ [564] ," and also where (using the same word) he says, "Put on the new man which after God is created. [565] "
[560] S. John i. 18
[561] 1 Cor. i. 24.
[562] The quotation is an inexact reproduction of Prov. viii. 22 (LXX.).
[563] Cf. Heb. x. 20
[564] Rom. xiii. 14.
[565] Eph. iv. 24.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-2.asp?pg=32
