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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.
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53 Pages
Page 29
In fact, in the Beautiful no limit is to be found so that love should have to cease with any limit of the Beautiful. This last can be ended only by its opposite; but when you have a good, as here, which is in its essence incapable of a change for the worse, then that good will go on unchecked into infinity. Moreover, as every being is capable of attracting its like, and humanity is, in a way, like God, as bearing within itself some resemblances to its Prototype, the soul is by a strict necessity attracted to the kindred Deity. In fact what belongs to God must by all means and at any cost be preserved for Him. If, then, on the one hand, the soul is unencumbered with superfluities and no trouble connected with the body presses it down, its advance towards Him Who draws it to Himself is sweet and congenial. But suppose [1846] , on the other hand, that it has been transfixed with the nails of propension [1847] so as to be held down to a habit connected with material things,--a case like that of those in the ruins caused by earthquakes, whose bodies are crushed by the mounds of rubbish; and let us imagine by way of illustration that these are not only pressed down by the weight of the ruins, but have been pierced as well with some spikes and splinters discovered with them in the rubbish. What then, would naturally be the plight of those bodies, when they were being dragged by relatives from the ruins to receive the holy rites of burial, mangled and torn entirely, disfigured in the most direful manner conceivable, with the nails beneath the heap harrowing them by the very violence necessary to pull them out?--Such I think is the plight of the soul as well when the Divine force, for God's very love of man, drags that which belongs to Him from the ruins of the irrational and material. Not in hatred or revenge for a wicked life, to my thinking, does God bring upon sinners those painful dispensations; He is only claiming and drawing to Himself whatever, to please Him, came into existence. But while He for a noble end is attracting the soul to Himself, the Fountain of all Blessedness, it is the occasion necessarily to the being so attracted of a state of torture. Just as those who refine gold from the dross which it contains not only get this base alloy to melt in the fire, but are obliged to melt the pure gold along with the alloy, and then while this last is being consumed the gold remains, so, while evil is being consumed in the purgatorial [1848] fire, the soul that is welded to this evil must inevitably be in the fire too, until the spurious material alloy is consumed and annihilated by this fire. If a clay of the more tenacious kind is deeply plastered round a rope, and then the end of the rope is put through a narrow hole, and then some one on the further side violently pulls it by that end, the result must be that, while the rope itself obeys the force exerted, the clay that has been plastered upon it is scraped off it with this violent pulling and is left outside the hole, and, moreover, is the cause why the rope does not run easily through the passage, but has to undergo a violent tension at the hands of the puller. In such a manner, I think, we may figure to ourselves the agonized struggle of that soul which has wrapped itself up in earthy material passions, when God is drawing it, His own one, to Himself, and the foreign matter, which has somehow grown into its substance, has to be scraped from it by main force, and so occasions it that keen intolerable anguish.
[1846] But suppose, &c. Möller (Gregorii doctrina de hom. natur., p. 99) shows that the following view of Purgatory is not that taught by the Roman Church.
[1847] by the nails of propension. This metaphor is frequently used by Gregory. Cf. De Virginit. c. 5: "How can the soul which is riveted (proselotheisa) to the pleasures of the flesh, and busied with merely human longings, turn a disengaged eye upon its kindred intellectual light?" So De Beatitud. Or. viii. (I. p. 833), &c.
[1848] purgatorial, katharsi& 251;. Five of Krabinger's Codd. and the versions of Augentius and Sifanus approve this reading. That of the Editions is akoimeto. [This last epithet is applied to God's justice (dike) by Isidore of Pelusium, Ep. 90: and to the "worm," and, on the other hand, the Devil, by Cyril Alexand. Act. Ephes., p. 252. Cf. S. Math. iii. 12; S. Mark ix. 48.] It is the same with aioni& 251; before puri just below. The Editions have it; the Codd. and Latin versions have not: Krabinger therefore has not hesitated to expunge it.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/soul-resurrection.asp?pg=29
