On the Life And Works of St Gregory of Nyssa

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It was a second time made the vehicle of error. Apollinaris adopted it, in order to expound that the Divine Logos took the place, in the tripartite soul of Christ, of the reasonable soul' or spirit of other men. Gregory, in pressing for a simpler treatment of man's nature, thus snatched a vantage-ground from a sagacious enemy. His own psychology is only one instance of a tendency which runs through the whole of his system, and which may indeed be called the dominating thought with which he approached every question; he views each in the light of form and matter; spirit penetrating and controlling body, body answering to spirit and yet at the same time supplying the nutriment upon which the vigour and efficacy of spirit, in this world at least, depends. This thought underlies his view of the material universe and of Holy Scripture, as well as of man's nature. With regard to the last he says, the intelligible cannot be realized in body at all, except it be commingled with sensation;' and again, as there can be no sensation without a material substance, so there can be no exercise of the power of thought without sensation [29] .' The spiritual or intelligent part of man (which he calls by various names, such as the inner man,' the psuche logike, nous or dianoia, to zoopoion aition, or simply psuche as throughout the treatise On the Soul), however alien in its essence from the bodily and sentient part, yet no sooner is united with this earthly part than it at once exerts power over it. In fact it requires this instrument before it can reach its perfection. Seeing, then, man is a reasoning animal of a certain kind, it was necessary that the body should be prepared as an instrument appropriate to the needs of his reason [30] .' So closely has this reason been united with the senses and the flesh that it performs itself the functions of the animal part; it is the mind' or reason' itself that sees, hears, &c.; in fact the exercise of mind depends on a sound state of the senses and other organs of the body; for a sick body cannot receive the artistic' impressions of the mind and, so, the mind remains inoperative. This is enough to show how far Gregory had got from pre-existence and the fall into the prison of the flesh.'

His own theory of the origin of the soul, or at least that to which he visibly inclines, is stated in the treatise, De Animâ et Resurrectione, p. 241. It is that of Tertullian and some Greek Fathers also: and goes by the name of traducianism.' The soul is transmitted in the generating seed. This of course is the opposite pole to Origen's teaching, and is inconsistent with Gregory's own spiritualism. The other alternative, Creationism, which a number of the orthodox adopted, namely that souls are created by God at the moment of conception, or when the body of the foetus is already formed, was not open to him to adopt; because, according to him, in idea the world of spirits was made, and in a determinate number, along with the world of unformed matter by the one creative act in the beginning.' In the plan of the universe, though not in reality as with Origen, all souls are already created. So the life of humanity contains them: when the occasion comes they take their beginning along with the body which enshrines them, but are not created then any more than that body. Such was the compromise between spiritualism and materialism to which Gregory was driven by the difficulties of the subject. Origen with his eye unfalteringly fixed upon the ideal world, and unconscious of the practical consequences that might be drawn from his teaching, cut the knot with his eternal pre-existence of souls, which avoided at once the alleged absurdity of creationism and the grossness of traducianism. But the Church, for higher interests still than those of pure idealism, had to reject that doctrine; and Gregory, with his extended knowledge in physic and his close observation of the intercommunion of mind and body, had to devise or rather select a theory which, though a makeshift, would not contradict either his knowledge or his faith.

[29] De Hom. Op. c. viii.; De An. et Resurr. 205.

[30] De Hom. Op. c. viii.

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