|
HOME | GREEK LANGUAGE |
LIBRARIES |
BLOG | HELP | SEARCH | BOOKSTORE | FREEWARE |
|
|
Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online.Please note that a bilingual edition (Greek original / English translation) is being prepared and will be published in print soon; if you are interested bookmark this page to know when it is ready and available.
|
53 Pages
Page 12
That those atoms, I rejoined, should unite and again be separated, and that this constitutes the formation and dissolution of the body, no one would deny. But we have to consider this. There are great intervals between these atoms; they differ from each other, both in position, and also in qualitative distinctions and peculiarities. When, indeed, these atoms have all converged upon the given subject, it is reasonable that that intelligent and undimensional essence which we call the soul should cohere with that which is so united; but once these atoms are separated from each other, and have gone whither their nature impels them, what is to become of the soul when her vessel [1778] is thus scattered in many directions? As a sailor, when his ship has been wrecked and gone to pieces, cannot float upon all the pieces at once [1779] which have been scattered this way and that over the surface of the sea (for he seizes any bit that comes to hand, and lets all the rest drift away), in the same way the soul, being by nature incapable of dissolution along with the atoms, will, if she finds it hard to be parted from the body altogether, cling to some one of them; and if we take this view, consistency will no more allow us to regard her as immortal for living in one atom than as mortal for not living in a number of them.
But the intelligent and undimensional, she replied, is neither contracted nor diffused [1780] (contraction and diffusion being a property of body only); but by virtue of a nature which is formless and bodiless it is present with the body equally in the contraction and in the diffusion of its atoms, and is no more narrowed by the compression which attends the uniting of the atoms than it is abandoned by them when they wander off to their kindred, however wide the interval is held to be which we observe between alien atoms. For instance, there is a great difference between the buoyant and light as contrasted with the heavy and solid; between the hot as contrasted with the cold; between the humid as contrasted with its opposite; nevertheless it is no strain to an intelligent essence to be present in each of those elements to which it has once cohered; this blending with opposites does not split it up. In locality, in peculiar qualities, these elemental atoms are held to be far removed from each other; but an undimensional nature finds it no labour to cling to what is locally divided, seeing that even now it is possible for the mind at once to contemplate the heavens above us and to extend its busy scrutiny beyond the horizon, nor is its contemplative power at all distracted by these excursions into distances so great. There is nothing, then, to hinder the soul's presence in the body's atoms, whether fused in union or decomposed in dissolution. Just as in the amalgam of gold and silver a certain methodical force is to be observed which has fused the metals, and if the one be afterwards smelted out of the other, the law of this method nevertheless continues to reside in each, so that while the amalgam is separated this method does not suffer division along with it (for you cannot make fractions out of the indivisible), in the same way this intelligent essence of the soul is observable in the concourse of the atoms, and does not undergo division when they are dissolved; but it remains with them, and even in their separation it is co-extensive with them, yet not itself dissevered nor discounted [1781] into sections to accord with the number of the atoms. Such a condition belongs to the material and spacial world, but that which is intelligent and undimensional is not liable to the circumstances of space. Therefore the soul exists in the actual atoms which she has once animated, and there is no force to tear her away from her cohesion with them. What cause for melancholy, then, is there herein, that the visible is exchanged for the invisible; and wherefore is it that your mind has conceived such a hatred of death?
[1778] her vessel. Of course this is not the "vehicle" of the soul (after death) which the later Platonists speak of, but the body itself. The word ochema is used in connection with a ship, Soph. Trach. 656; and though in Plato (Timaeus, p. 69), whose use of this word for the body was afterwards followed, it is not clear whether a car or a ship is most thought of, yet that the latter is Gregory's meaning appears from his next words.
[1779] at once. Reading (with Codd. A, B, C, and Uff.) kata tauton.
[1780] oute diacheitai. Oehler translates wrongly "noch dehnt es sich aus"; because the faculty of extension is ascribed to the intelligence (cf. ekteinesthai, diateinomenon, parekteinomene, below), but diffusion is denied of it, both here, and in the words diaschizetai (above and below), diakrisis, and diaspatai, i.e. separation in space.
[1781] katakermatizetai
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/soul-resurrection.asp?pg=12
