|
HOME | GREEK LANGUAGE |
LIBRARIES |
BLOG | HELP | SEARCH | BOOKSTORE | FREEWARE |
|
|
Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
|
This Part: 128 Pages
Page 108
For to think it the essential point in piety to attribute the invention of words to God, Whose praise the whole world and the wonders that are therein are incompetent to celebrate--must it not be a proceeding of extreme folly so to neglect higher grounds of praise, and to magnify God on such as are purely human? His fiat preluded Creation, but it was recorded by Moses after human fashion, though Divinely issued. That will of God, then, which brought about the creation of the world by His Divine power, consisted, says our careful student of the Scriptures, in the teaching of words. And as though God had said, "Let there be a word," or, "Let speech be created," or, "Let this or that have such or such an appellation," so, in advocacy of his trifling, he brings forward the fact that it was by the impulse of the Divine will that Creation took place. For with all his study and experience in the Scriptures he knows not even this, that the impulse of the mind is frequently spoken of in Scripture as a voice. And for this we have the evidence of Moses himself, whose meaning he frequently perverts, but whom on this point he simply ignores. For who is there, however slightly acquainted with the holy volume, who does not know this, that the people of Israel who had just escaped [1126] from Egypt were suddenly affrighted in the wilderness by the pursuit of the Egyptians, and when dangers encompassed them on all sides, and on one side the sea cut off their passage as by a wall, while the enemy barred their flight in the rear, the people coming together to the Prophet charged him with being the cause of their helpless condition? And when he comforted them in their abject terror, and roused them to courage, a voice came from God, addressing the Prophet by name, "Wherefore criest thou unto Me? [1127] " And yet before this the narrative makes no mention of any utterance on the part of Moses. But the thought which the Prophet had lifted up to God is called a cry, though uttered in silence in the hidden thought of his heart. If, then, Moses cries, though without speaking, as witnessed by Him Who hears, those "groanings which cannot be uttered [1128] ," is it strange that the Prophet, knowing the Divine will, so far as it was lawful for him to tell it and for us to hear it, revealed it by known and familiar words, describing God's discourse after human fashion, not indeed expressed in words, but signified by the effects themselves? "In the beginning," he says, "God created," not the names of heaven and earth, but, "the heaven and the earth [1129] ." And again, "God said, Let there be light," not the name Light: and having divided the light from the darkness, "God called," he says, "the light Day, and the darkness He called Night."
[1126] apodrantes. So also the Paris editt. The Munich ms. has apodrasantes, which form of the aorist is not found at all in classic Greek, and is only used as Oehler notices by Epiphanius (e.g. Panar. liv. 1; lxviii. 4) and a few other writers of a debased style.
[1127] Exod. xiv. 15.
[1128] Rom. viii. 26.
[1129] Gen. i. 1, sqq.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/against-eunomius-3.asp?pg=108
