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40 Pages
Page 13
III. Spirit.' Speaking of the soul, Gregory asks, How can that which is incomposite be dissolved?' i.e. the soul is spirit, and spirit is incomposite and therefore indestructible.
But care must be taken not to infer too much from this his favourite expression spirit' in connexion with the soul. God is spirit' too; and we are inclined to forget that this is no more than a negative definition, and to imagine the human spirit of equal prerogative with Deity. Gregory gives no encouragement to this; he distinctly teaches that, though the soul is incomposite, it is not in the least independent of time and space, as the Deity is.
In fact he almost entirely drops the old Platonic division of the Universe into Intelligible (spiritual) and Sensible, which helps to keep up this confusion between human and divine spirit,' and adopts the Christian division of Creator and Created. This difference between Creator and Created is further figured by him as that between
1. The Infinite and The Finite.
2. The Changeless and The Changeable.
3. The Contradiction-less and The Contradictory.
The result of this is that the Spirit-world itself has been divided into Uncreate and Created.
With regard, then, to this created Spirit-world we find that Gregory, as Basil, teaches that it existed, i.e. it had been created, before the work of the Six Days began. God made all that is, at once' (athroos). This is only his translation of the verse, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth;' the material for heaven' and earth,' i.e. spirits and chaos, was made in a moment, but God had not yet spoken the successive Words of creation. The souls of men, then, existed from the very beginning of creation, and in a determinate number; for this is a necessary consequence of the simultaneous creation.' This was the case with the Angels too, the other portion of the created Spirit-world. Gregory has treated the subject of the Angels very fully. He considers that they are perfect: but their perfection too is contingent: it depends on the grace of God and their own wills; the angels are free, and therefore changeable. Their will necessarily moves towards something: at their first creation the Beautiful alone solicited them. Man a little lower than the Angels' was perfect too; deathless, passionless, contemplative. The true and perfect soul is single in its nature, intellectual, immaterial [16] .' He was as the Angels' and if he fell, Lucifer fell too. Gregory will not say, as Origen did, that human souls had a body when first created: rather, as we have seen, he implies the contrary; and he came to be considered the champion that fought the doctrine of the pre-existence of embodied souls. He seems to have been influenced by Methodius' objections to Origen's view. But his magnificent idea of the first man gives way at once to something more Scriptural and at the same time more scientific; and his ideal becomes a downright forecast of Realism.
[16] On the Making of Man, c. xiv.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/life-works.asp?pg=13
