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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 10
Now the meaning of "life" and "death" is manifold, and not always understood in the same way. For as regards the flesh, the energy and motion of the bodily senses is called "life," and their extinction and dissolution is named "death." But in the case of the intellectual nature, approximation to the Divine is the true life, and decadence therefrom is named "death": for which reason the original evil, the devil, is called both "death," and the inventor of death: and he is also said by the Apostle to have the power of death [903] . As, then, we obtain, as has been said, from the Scriptures, a twofold conception of death, He Who is truly unchangeable and immutable "alone hath immortality," and dwells in light that cannot be attained or approached by the darkness of wickedness [904] : but all things that participate in death, being far removed from immortality by their contrary tendency, if they fall away from that which is good, would, by the mutability of their nature, admit community with the worse condition, which is nothing else than death, having a certain correspondence with the death of the body. For as in that case the extinction of the activities of nature is called death, so also, in the case of the intellectual being, the absence of motion towards the good is death and departure from life; so that what we perceive in the bodiless creation [905] does not clash with our argument, which refutes the doctrine of heresy. For that form of death which corresponds to the intellectual nature (that is, separation from God, Whom we call Life) is, potentially, not separated even from their nature; for their emergence from non-existence shows mutability of nature; and that to which change is in affinity is hindered from participation in the contrary state by the grace of Him Who strengthens it: it does not abide in the good by its own nature: and such a thing is not eternal. If, then, one really speaks truth in saying that we ought not to estimate the Divine essence and the created nature in the same way, nor to circumscribe the being of the Son of God by any beginning, lest, if this be granted, the other attributes of creation should enter in together with our acknowledgment of this one, the absurd character of the teaching of that man, who employs the attributes of creation to separate the Only-begotten God from the eternity of the Father, is clearly shown. For as none other of the marks which characterize the creation appears in the Maker of the creation, so neither is the fact that the creation has its existence from some beginning a proof that the Son was not always in the Father,--that Son, Who is Wisdom, and Power, and Light, and Life, and all that is conceived of in the bosom of the Father.
[903] Cf. Heb. ii. 14
[904] Cf. 1 Tim. iii. 16.
[905] i.e.the order of spiritual beings, including angels and human souls. Of these S. Gregory argues that they are capable of an akinesia pros to agathon which is death in them, as the absence of motion and sense is bodily death: and that they may therefore be said to have an end, as they had a beginning: so far as they are eternal it is not by their own power, but by their mutable nature being upheld by grace from this state of akinesia pros to agathon. On both these grounds therefore--that they have an end, and that such eternity as they possess is not inherent, but given ab extra, and contingent--he says they are not properly eternal, and he therefore rejects the proposed parallel.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-3.asp?pg=10
