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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 50
His end is one, and one only; it is this: when the complete whole of our race shall have been perfected from the first man to the last,--some having at once in this life been cleansed from evil, others having afterwards in the necessary periods been healed by the Fire, others having in their life here been unconscious equally of good and of evil,--to offer to every one of us participation in the blessings which are in Him, which, the Scripture tells us, "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," nor thought ever reached. But this is nothing else, as I at least understand it, but to be in God Himself; for the Good which is above hearing and eye and heart must be that Good which transcends the universe. But the difference between the virtuous and the vicious life led at the present time [1922] will be illustrated in this way; viz. in the quicker or more tardy participation of each in that promised blessedness. According to the amount of the ingrained wickedness of each will be computed the duration of his cure. This cure consists in the cleansing of his soul, and that cannot be achieved without an excruciating condition, as has been expounded in our previous discussion. But any one would more fully comprehend the futility and irrelevancy of all these objections by trying to fathom the depths of our Apostle's wisdom. When explaining this mystery to the Corinthians, who, perhaps, themselves were bringing forward the same objections to it as its impugners to-day bring forward to overthrow our faith, he proceeds on his own authority to chide the audacity of their ignorance, and speaks thus: "Thou wilt say, then, to me, How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die; And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain; But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him." In that passage, as it seems to me, he gags the mouths of men who display their ignorance of the fitting proportions in Nature, and who measure the Divine power by their own strength, and think that only so much is possible to God as the human understanding can take in, but that what is beyond it surpasses also the Divine ability. For the man who had asked the Apostle, "how are the dead raised up?" evidently implies that it is impossible when once the body's atoms have been scattered that they should again come in concourse together; and this being impossible, and no other possible form of body, besides that arising from such a concourse, being left, he, after the fashion of clever controversialists, concludes the truth of what he wants to prove, by a species of syllogism, thus: If a body is a concourse of atoms, and a second assemblage of these is impossible, what sort of body will those get who rise again? This conclusion, involved seemingly in this artful contrivance of premisses, the Apostle calls "folly," as coming from men who failed to perceive in other parts of the creation the masterliness of the Divine power. For, omitting the sublimer miracles of God's hand, by which it would have been easy to place his hearer in a dilemma (for instance he might have asked "how or whence comes a heavenly body, that of the sun for example, or that of the moon, or that which is seen in the constellations; whence the firmament, the air, water, the earth?"), he, on the contrary, convicts the objectors of inconsiderateness by means of objects which grow alongside of us and are very familiar to all. "Does not even husbandry teach thee," he asks, "that the man who in calculating the transcendent powers of the Deity limits them by his own is a fool?"
[1922] Reading with Krabinger, en to nun kairo instead of en to meta tauta, which cannot possibly refer to what immediately precedes, i.e. the union with God, by means of the Resurrection. If meta tauta is retained, it must = meta touton ton bion. Gregory here implies that the Resurrection is not a single contemporaneous act, but differs in time, as individuals differ; carrying out the Scriptural distinction of a first and second Resurrection.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/nyssa/soul-resurrection.asp?pg=50
