Gregory Of Nyssa Quotes

Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.

Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.

Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything.

Truly barren is a secular education. It is always in labor, but never gives birth.

Christ is the artist, tenderly wiping away all the grime of sin that disfigures the human face and restoring God's image to its full beauty.

and the creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise.

Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.

Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.

Since with all my soul I behold the face of my beloved, therefore all the beauty of his form is seen in me.

Anger is a perversion of courage, as lust is a perversion of love.

The soul’s desire is fulfilled by the very fact of its remaining unsatisfied, for really to see God is never to have had one’s fill of desiring him.” —Saint Gregory of Nyssa

The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb—the majority of people scarcely reach its base. —Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labor? Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom?

Just as at sea those who are carried away from the direction of the harbor bring themselves back on course by a clear sign, on seeing a tall beacon light or some mountain peak coming into view, so Scripture may guide those adrift on the sea of the life back into the harbor of the divine will.

I got me slave-girls and slaves.' For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God? God said, Let us make man in our own image and likeness. If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or, rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable. God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God's?

GREGORY OF NYSSA. How vain moreover is prayer for those who live by fate; Divine Providence is banished from the world together with piety, and man is made the mere instrument of the sidereal motions. For these they say move to action, not only the bodily members, but the thoughts of the mind. In a word, they who teach this, take away all that is in us, and the very nature of a contingency; which is nothing less than to overturn all things. For where will there be free will? but that which is in us must be free.

SOCIAL ANIMAL ALWAYS COME ACROSS SEVERAL COMPLICATIONS

Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us.

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest—for, being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to (as Gregory of Nyssa so acutely observes). Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on in its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to come, and beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

the Christian bishop Gregory of Nyssa (331-395) argued that it was as acceptable to call God either ‘mother’ or ‘father’, insisting that: ‘Both terms mean the same, because the divine is neither male nor female’.6

The reward of the search is to go on searching. The soul’s desire is fulfilled by the very fact of its remaining unsatisfied, for really to see God is never to have had one’s fill of desiring Him. Gregory of Nyssa

But desire must also be cultivated; the beautiful does not always immediately commend itself to every taste; Christ's beauty, like that of Isaiah's suffering servant, is not expressed in vacuous comeliness or shadowless glamor, but calls for a love that is charitable, that is not dismayed by distance or mystery, and that can repent of its failure to see; this is to acquire what Augustine calls a taste for the beauty of God (Soliloquia 1.3-14). Once this taste is learned, divine beauty, as Gregory of Nyssa says, inflames desire, drawing one on into an endless epektasis, a stretching out toward an ever greater embrace of divine glory. And,

A thousand years earlier, a Cappadocian monk named Gregory of Nyssa was the first to see Moses’s cloud as a cipher for the spiritual life. “Moses’s vision began with light,” he wrote. “Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”2 In the same way, Gregory said, those of us who wish to draw near to God should not be surprised when our vision goes cloudy, for this is a sign that we are approaching the opaque splendor of God. If we decide to keep going beyond the point where our eyes or minds are any help to us, we may finally arrive at the pinnacle of the spiritual journey toward God, which exists in complete and dazzling darkness.

Just as many questions might be started for debate among people sitting up at night as to the kind of thing that sunshine is, and then the simple appearing of it in all its beauty would render any verbal description superfluous, so every calculation that tries to arrive conjecturally at the future state will be reduced to nothingness by the object of our hopes, when it comes upon us.

God has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace. When we get there, we are never sure just how it happened, and God does not seem to care who gets the credit, as long as our growth continues. As St. Gregory of Nyssa already said in the fourth century, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

Time had not altered the beauty of his countenance, nor darkened the brightness of his eyes. He continued on the same, preserved in an incorruptible beauty in the corruptibleness of nature.

...we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings.

He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist.

The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak, Sufism’s ‘ishq or passionately adherent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’s pyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the mirror of the Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of his wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The

Supporters of apokatastasis in roughly chronological order: - [c. 30-105] Apostle Paul and various NT authors - [c. 80-150] Scattered likely references among Apostolic Fathers o Ignatius o Justin Martyr o Tatian o Theophilus of Antioch (explicit references) - [130-202] Irenaeus - [c. 150-200] Pantaenus of Alexandria - [150-215] Clement of Alexandria - [154-222] Bardaisan of Edessa - [c. 184-253] Origen (including The Dialogue of Adamantius) - [♱ 265] Dionysius of Alexandria - [265-280] Theognustus - [c. 250-300] Hieracas - [♱ c. 309] Pierius - [♱ c. 309] St Pamphilus Martyr - [♱ c. 311] Methodius of Olympus - [251-306] St. Anthony - [c. 260-340] Eusebius - [c. 270-340] St. Macrina the Elder - [conv. 355] Gaius Marius Victorinus (converted at very old age) - [300-368] Hilary of Poitiers - [c. 296-373] Athanasius of Alexandria - [♱ c. 374] Marcellus of Ancrya - [♱378] Titus of Basra/Bostra - [c. 329-379] Basil the Cappadocian - [327-379] St. Macrina the Younger - [♱387] Cyril of Jerusalem (possibly) - [c. 300-388] Paulinus, bishop of Tyre and then Antioch - [c. 329-390] Gregory Nazianzen - [♱ c. 390] Apollinaris of Laodicaea - [♱ c. 390] Diodore of Tarsus - [330-390] Gregory of Nyssa - [c. 310/13-395/8] Didymus the Blind of Alexandria - [333-397] Ambrose of Milan - [345-399] Evagrius Ponticus - [♱407] Theotimus of Scythia - [350-428] Theodore of Mopsuestia - [c. 360-400] Rufinus - [350-410] Asterius of Amaseia - [347-420] St. Jerome - [354-430] St. Augustine (early, anti-Manichean phase) - [363-430] Palladius - [360-435] John Cassian - [373-414] Synesius of Cyrene - [376-444] Cyril of Alexandria - [500s] John of Caesarea - [♱520] Aeneas of Gaza - [♱523] Philoxenus of Mabbug - [475-525] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite - [♱543] Stephen Bar Sudhaili - [580-662] St. Maximus the Confessor - [♱ c. 700] St. Isaac of Nineveh - [c. 620-705] Anastasius of Sinai - [c. 690-780] St. John of Dalyatha - [710/13-c. 780] Joseph Hazzaya - [813-903] Moses Bar Kepha - [815-877] Johannes Scotus Eriugena

Gregory of Nyssa, in contrast, tries to advance philosophical and theological arguments to prove that the pains of hell cannot be co-eternal with God. His main argument is based on the essential superiority of good over evil; for evil, in its essence, can never be absolute and unlimited. The sinner inevitably reaches a limit when all his evil is done and he cannot go farther, just as the night, after having reached its peak, turns toward the day.18 This reasoning corresponds to the example of a physician who allows a boil to mature until it can be lanced. Thus the Incarnation, too, occurred only when evil had reached its climax.19 Gregory’s position has never been condemned.

Apokatastasis, as is clear from some passages cited and many others, depends on illumination and instruction, which goes hand in hand with correction. This is fully consistent with Origen's ethical intellectualism, a Platonic-Socratic and Stoic heritage that is found in other Fathers as well, such as Gregory of Nyssa. How one behaves depends on what one knows and how one thinks and regards reality; will depends on the intellect and is not an autonomous force. As a consequence, evil is never chosen qua evil, but because it is mistaken for a good, out of an error of judgment, due to insufficient knowledge and/or obnubilation (e.g., Hom. 1 in Ps. 37.4; Hom. in Ez. 9.1). Hence the importance of instruction. If one's intellect is illuminated, and achieves the knowledge of the Good, one will certainly adhere to the Good. Apokatastasis itself, as the end of Book 2 of Περὶ ἀρχῶν, is described as an illumination and a direct vision of the truth, as opposed to the mere 'shadows' that the logika knew beforehand (Origen is reminiscent not only of Plato's Cave myth, but also of 1 Tim 2:4-6, that God wants all humans to reach the knowledge of the truth, and of 1 Cor 13:12 on eventually knowing God 'face to face'). Only with full knowledge is choice really free, and a choice done with full knowledge is a choice for the Good. A choice for evil is not really free: it results from obnubilation, ignorance, and passion. This is why Origen was convinced that divine providence will bring all logika to salvation by means of education and rational persuasion, instruction and illumination – or fear of punishments, but only initially, when reason is not yet developed, and not by means of compulsion, since the adhesion to the Good must be free, and to be free it must rest on a purified intellectual sight. This is why for Origen divine providence will lead all to salvation, but respecting each one's free will; each logikon will freely adhere to God, and to do so each will need its own times, according to its choices and development, so that both divine justice first and then divine grace are saved. (pp. 178-179)

So when did these last two originate? They transcend “whenness,” but if I must give a naive answer—when the Father did. When was that? There has not been a “when” when the Father has not been in existence. This, then, is true of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Put another question and I will answer it. Since when has the Son been begotten? Since as long as the Father has not been begotten.

Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. Just a few months after I began going to St. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip. A woman—perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck—caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. “From my church,” I said proudly. “What church is that?” the woman asked. She leaned forward, in a friendly way. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality; wealth; feminism; and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. The church I'd unknowingly landed in turned out to be a scandal, a dirty joke at airport restaurants, a sign—in fact, thank God, a sure bet—that I was going to eat with sinners.

We see the universal harmony in the wondrous sky and on the wondrous earth; how elements essentially opposed to each other are all woven together in an ineffable union to serve one common end, each contributing its particular force to maintain the whole; how the unmingling and mutually repellent do not fly apart from each other by virtue of their peculiarities, any more than they are destroyed, when compounded, by such contrariety; how those elements which are naturally buoyant move downwards, the heat of the sun, for instance, descending in the rays, while the bodies which possess weight are lifted by becoming rarefied in vapour, so that water contrary to its nature ascends, being conveyed through the air to the upper regions; how too that fire of the firmament so penetrates the earth that even its abysses feel the heat; how the moisture of the rain infused into the soil generates, one though it be by nature, myriads of differing germs, and animates in due proportion each subject of its influence; how very swiftly the polar sphere revolves, how the orbits within it move the contrary way, with all the eclipses, and conjunctions, and measured intervals of the planets. We see all this with the piercing eyes of mind, nor can we fail to be taught by means of such a spectacle that a Divine power, working with skill and method, is manifesting itself in this actual world, and, penetrating each portion, combines those portions with the whole and completes the whole by the portions, and encompasses the universe with a single all-controlling force, self-centred and self-contained, never ceasing from its motion, yet never altering the position which it holds.

I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If, then, anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. Happily, however, if the Christian story is true, that love cannot now end in failure or tragedy. The descent into those depths--where we seek out and find those who are lost, and find our own salvation in so doing--is not a lonely act of spiritual heroism, or a futile rebellion of our finite wills against a merciless eternity. For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already an decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone. Thus all shall have their share in--as Gregory [of Nyssa] says in his great mystical commentary On the Song of Songs--"the redeemed unity of all, united one with another by their convergence upon the One Good." Only thus will humanity "according the the devine image" come into being, and only thus will God be truly all in all.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God’s existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.

I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If, then, anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. Happily, however, if the Christian story is true, that love cannot now end in failure or tragedy. The descent into those depths -- where we seek out and find those who are lost, and find our own salvation in so doing -- is not a lonely act of spiritual heroism, or a futile rebellion of our finite wills against a merciless eternity. For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already an decisively gone down into that abyss for us, to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair; and hence the love that has made all of us who we are, and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone. Thus all shall have their share in -- as Gregory [of Nyssa] says in his great mystical commentary On the Song of Songs -- "the redeemed unity of all, united one with another by their convergence upon the One Good." Only thus will humanity "according the the divine image" come into being, and only thus will God be truly all in all.

...while we confess the invariable character of the nature, we do not deny the difference in respect of cause, and that which is caused, by which alone we apprehend that one Person is distinguished from another — by our belief, that is, that one is the Cause, and another is of the Cause; and again in that which is of the Cause we recognize another distinction. For one is directly from the first Cause, and another by that which is directly from the first Cause; so that the attribute of being Only-begotten abides without doubt in the Son, and the interposition of the Son, while it guards His attribute of being Only-begotten, does not shut out the Spirit from His relation by way of nature to the Father.

Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus of Lyons, Maximus the Confessor.

Biblical Trinitarianism is the subversive fulfilment of Unitarianism and polytheism, or in the words of Gregory of Nyssa, the Trinity is distinguished by “destroying each heresy and yet accepting everything useful from each.”15

In a famous sermon, Gregory of Nyssa described his encounters with public opinion in fifth-century Constantinople. ‘If in this city you ask anyone for change, he will discuss with you whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten; if you ask about the quality of bread, you will receive the answer that the Father is greater, the Son is less; if you suggest that a bath is desirable, you will be told that there was nothing before the Son was created.’2 Were these preoccupations simply a matter of fashion?

For Plato or Aristotle, or for Christian thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, or Thomas Aquinas, true human freedom is emancipation from whatever constrains us from living the life of rational virtue, or from experiencing the full fruition of our nature; and among the things that constrain us are our own untutored passions, our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices.

one turns away from those who induce evil, one directs one's thoughts to the best and turns one's back - so to speak - to vice, puts one's own soul - which is like a mirror - before the hope of goods, and thus imprints upon the purity of one's soul the images and reflections of the virtue shown to him by God.

The ancient and mediaeval church had always acknowledged that the Bible ought to be read allegorically in many instances, according to the spiritual doctrines of the church, and that the principal truths of scripture are not confined to its literal level, which often reflects only the minds of its human authors. Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—all denied that, for instance, the creation story in Genesis was an actual historical record of how the world was made

Living in the body and yet in the same way as of the immaterial beings, they were not bowed down by the weight of the body, but their life was exalted to the skies, and they walked on high in company with the powers of Heaven. –St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of St. Macrina

expiation: A sacrifice that wipes away sin. • The expression is used multiple times in the Greek OT for the mercy seat, or golden lid that covered the Ark of the Covenant (Ex 25:17; Heb 9:5). The high priest of Israel sprinkled blood on the mercy seat once a year on the Day of Atonement to expiate the sins of the people and restore them to fellowship with Yahweh (Lev 16:1-34). For Paul, the mercy seat typifies Christ as the living seat of God's presence and the place where atonement is made with sacrificial blood (CCC 433). • Christ, who became an expiation by blood, teaches us to follow his example by the mortification of our members (St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection). Back

St. Gregory (A. D. 240), bishop of Neo-Cæsarea in Pontus, was another celebrated Christian Father, born of Pagan parents and educated a Pagan. He is called Thaumaturgus, or the wonder-worker, and is said to have performed miracles when still a Pagan. [413:4] He, too, was an Alexandrian student. This is the Gregory who was commended by his namesake of Nyssa for changing the Pagan festivals into Christian holidays, the better to draw the heathen to the

Gutberlet answers this question suc cinctly as follows: " First and above all we uphold the idea of the mystical slaying of the sacrificial Victim by means of the double Consecration. In connection with this, the preparation of the food signifies the preparation of the slain lamb for the sacrificial feast. In this sense the preparation of the sacrificial food continues, supple ments, and completes the mystic slaying. Only a lifeless lamb that has been sacrificed can be eaten, as St. Gregory of Nyssa says. Because the Eucharist is also a Sacra ment, the Consecration, as an offering, reduces the Body of the Lord to the condition of food, which condition 18 fjS-r} r6 awfia IrtQvro* l» V. supra, pp. 162 sqq. 370 THE EUCHARIST AS A SACRIFICE is at the same time that of a sacrificial lamb/' 20 Cfr. i Cor. V, 7: " Etenim Pascha nostrum immolatus est Christus — For Christ our pasch is sacrificed.

Gregory of Nyssa said, ‘Ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing.’

The first theological insight I learned from Gregory of Nyssa—and I suspect the last to which I shall cling when all others fall away—is that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim, but also an eschatological claim about the world’s relation to God, and hence a moral claim about the nature of God in himself. In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness. (from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17)

As, when the sun shines above the earth, the shadow is spread over its lower part, because its spherical shape makes it impossible for it to be clasped all round at one and the same time by the rays, and necessarily, on whatever side the sun’s rays may fall on some particular point of the globe, if we follow a straight diameter, we shall find shadow upon the opposite point, and so, continuously, at the opposite end of the direct line of the rays shadow moves round that globe,

it is not punishment chiefly and principally that the Deity, as Judge, afflicts sinners with; but He operates, as your argument has shown, only to get the good separated from the evil and to attract it into the communion of blessedness.

Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived

It is necessary, therefore, to regard the opinions the persons have taken up and to frame your argument in accordance with the error into which each has fallen, by advancing in each discussion certain principles and reasonable propositions, that thus, through what is agreed upon on both sides, the truth may conclusively be brought to light...Should [somone] say there is no God, then from the consideration of the skillful and wise economy of the Universe he will be brought to acknowledge that there is a certain overmastering power manifested through these channels.

The belief in God rests on the art and wisdom displayed in the order of the world.

Gregory of Nyssa observed, “most judge the credibility of what they hear according to the measure of their own experience, and what is beyond the power of hearers they insult with the suspicion of falsehood as outside the truth.

But if all things equally fall short of this dignity, one thing there is that is not beneath the dignity of God, and that is, to do good to him that needed it.

by whom was man to be recalled to the grace of his original state? To whom belonged the restoration of the fallen one, the recovery of the lost, the leading back the wanderer by the hand? To whom else than entirely to Him Who is the Lord of his nature? For Him only Who at the first had given the life was it possible, or fitting, to recover it when lost. This is what we are taught and learn from the Revelation of the truth, that God in the beginning made man and saved him when he had fallen.

the Christian universalists of the Greek and Syrian East in later centuries: Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Makrina, Diodore of Tarsus, and so on.

I did mention that ancient Rabbinic view of the first human as a hermaphrodite, and the writings of Gregory of Nyssa and Origen.

If, on the other hand, he should have no doubt as to the existence of Deity, but should be inclined to entertain the presumption of a plurality of Gods, then we will adopt against him some such train of reasoning as this: 'does he think Deity is perfect or defective?' and if, as is likely, he bears testimony to the perfection in the Divine nature, then we will demand of him to grant a perfection throughout in everything that is observable in that divinity, in order that Deity may not be regarded as a mixture of opposites, defect and perfection. But whether as respects power, or the conception of goodness, or wisdom and imperishability and eternal existence, or any other notion besides suitable to the nature of Deity, that is found to lie close to the subject of our contemplation, in all he will agree that perfection is the idea to be entertained of the Divine nature, as being a just inference from these premises. If this, then, be granted us, it would not be difficult to bring round these scattered notions of a plurality of Gods to the acknowledgment of a unity of Deity. For if he admits that perfection is in every respect to be ascribed to the subject before us, though there is a plurality of these perfect things which are marked with the same character, he must be required by a logical necessity, either to point out the particularity in each of these things which present no distinctive variation, but are found always with the same marks, or, if (he cannot do that, and) the mind can grasp nothing in them in the way of particular, to give up the idea of any distinction. For if neither as regards 'more and less" a person can detect a difference (in as much as the idea of perfection does not admit of it), nor as regards 'worse' and 'better' (for he cannot entertain a notion of Deity at all where the term 'worse' is not got rid of), nor as regards 'ancient' and 'modern' (for what exists not for ever is foreign to the notion of Deity), but on the contrary the idea of Godhead is one and the same, no peculiarity being on any ground of reason to be discovered in any one point, it is an absolute necessity that the mistaken fancy of a plurality of Gods would be forced to the acknowledgment of a unity of Deity. For if goodness, and justice, and wisdom, and power may be equally predicated of it, then also imperishability and eternal existence, and every orthodox idea would be in the same way admitted. As then all distinctive difference in any aspect whatever has been gradually removed, it necessarily follows that together with it a plurality of Gods has been removed from his belief, the general identity bringing round conviction to the Unity.

Woman is in the image of God equally with man. The sexes are of equal worth. Their virtues are equal, their struggles are equal … Would a man be able to compete with a woman who lives her life to the full? Gregory of Nyssa Let us make Man in our Image and Likeness, 2nd

You will behold this bodily envelopment, which is now dissolved in death, woven again out of the same atoms, not indeed into this organization with its gross and heavy texture, but with its threads worked up into something more subtle and ethereal, so that you will not only have near you that which you love, but it will be restored to you with a brighter and more entrancing beauty.

the soul exchanges one man for another man, so that the life of humanity is continued always by means of the same souls, which, being exactly the same in number, are being born perpetually first in one generation, then in another. As for ourselves, we take our stand upon the tenets of the Church,

Therefore it is by that fact clearly proved that vice is not prior in time to the act of beginning to live, and that our nature did not thence derive its source, but that the all-disposing wisdom of God was the Cause of it:

one single feast is to be kept by the whole rational creation, and that in that assembly of the saints the inferiors are to join the dance with their superiors.

the priests alone had the right of entering within the Curtain, and that only for the service of the sanctuary; while even to the priests the darkened shrine of the Temple, where stood the beautiful Altar with its jutting horns, was forbidden, except to one of them, who held the highest office of the priesthood,

whenever the time comes that the tabernacle of our nature is as it were to be fixed up again in the Resurrection, and all the inveterate corruption of sin has vanished from the world, then a universal feast will be kept around the Deity by those who have decorated themselves in the Resurrection; and one and the same banquet will be spread for all, with no differences cutting off any rational creature from an equal participation in it; for those who are now excluded by reason of their sin will at last be admitted

The Apostle says the same thing more plainly when he indicates the final accord of the whole Universe with the Good: That to Him every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth: And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father:

How, for instance, with a shout and the sound of trumpets (in the language of the Word) all dead and prostrate things shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye into immortal beings.

Well, to sketch the outline of so vast a truth and to embrace it in a definition, we will say that the Resurrection is  the reconstitution of our nature in its original form.

Just so our nature, becoming passional, had to encounter all the necessary results of a life of passion: but when it shall have started back to that state of passionless blessedness, it will no longer encounter the inevitable results of evil tendencies.

It is folly, then, when we are to expect a different state of things in the life to come, to object to the doctrine of the Resurrection on the ground of something that has nothing to do with it.

One thing, and one thing only, is required for the operation of the Resurrection; viz. that a man should have lived, by being born; or, to use rather the Gospel words, that a man should be born into the world; the length or briefness of the life, the manner, this or that, of the death, is an irrelevant subject of inquiry in connection with that operation.

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

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.

In the same fashion the human being deposits in death all those peculiar surroundings which it has acquired from passionate propensities; dishonour, I mean, and corruption and weakness and characteristics of age; and yet the human being does not lose itself. It changes into an ear of grain as it were; into incorruption, that is, and glory and honour and power and absolute perfection; into a condition in which its life is no longer carried on in the ways peculiar to mere nature, but has passed into a spiritual and passionless existence.

For it is the peculiarity of the natural body to be always moving on a stream, to be always altering from its state for the moment and changing into something else; but none of these processes, which we observe not in man only but also in plants and brutes will be found remaining in the life that shall be then.

The first man Adam, that is, was the first ear; but with the arrival of evil human nature was diminished into a mere multitude ; and, as happens to the grain on the ear, each individual man was denuded of the beauty of that primal ear, and mouldered in the soil: but in the Resurrection we are born again in our original splendour; only instead of that single primitive ear we become the countless myriads of ears in the cornfields.

When from the nutritive part within them everything that is the reverse or the counterfeit of it has been picked out, and has been committed to the fire that consumes everything unnatural, and so has disappeared, then in this class also their humanity will thrive and will ripen into fruit-bearing, owing to such husbandry, and some day after long courses of ages will get back again that universal form which God stamped upon us at the beginning.

In fact all thought about how we are to go on living is occasioned by the fear of dying.

Gregory of Nyssa, in his Life of Moses, commented that the “knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb—the majority of people scarcely reach its base.

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?

we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings. We must therefore neglect the Platonic chariot and the pair of horses of dissimilar forces yoked to it, and their driver, whereby the philosopher allegorizes these facts about the soul; we must neglect also all that is said by the philosopher who succeeded him and who followed out probabilities by rules of art , and diligently investigated the very question now before us, declaring that the soul was mortal by reason of these two principles; we must neglect all before and since their time, whether they philosophized in prose or in verse, and we will adopt, as the guide of our reasoning, the Scripture, which lays it down as an axiom that there is no excellence in the soul which is not a property as well of the Divine nature.

Indeed, it is clear to every one that that subtle dialectic possesses a force that may be turned both ways, as well for the overthrow of truth as for the detection of falsehood; and so we begin to suspect even truth itself when it is advanced in company with such a kind of artifice, and to think that the very ingenuity of it is trying to bias our judgment and to upset the truth.

But if Moses was at one and the same time in Existence and not in these conditions, then it follows that these conditions are something other than nature and not nature itself.

anger, for instance, and fear, and any other such-like emotion of the soul divested of which human nature cannot be studied — all these we reckon as accretions from without, because in the Beauty which is man's prototype no such characteristics are to be found.

To them, she continued, belongs anger; to them belongs fear; to them all those other opposing activities within us; everything except the faculty of reason and thought. That alone, the choice product, as has been said, of all our life, bears the stamp of the Divine character.

Thus too, with ourselves, if these instincts are not turned by reasoning into the right direction, and if our feelings get the mastery of our mind, the man is changed from a reasoning into an unreasoning being, and from godlike intelligence sinks by the force of these passions to the level of the brute.

As Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 396) said, if one does not read scripture in a “philosophical” fashion one will see only myths and contradictions.

A brilliant student, John Wesley pursued his education at Oxford University from 1720 until 1724. He was adept in a number of languages and appreciated classical culture. He became very interested in the writings of the church fathers (especially St. Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, and later Macarius). He meditated on Bishop Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Living and Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying

Like other Christian thinkers, Augustine believed that happiness was found in likeness to God, and, like Gregory of Nyssa, he knew that likeness to God did not mean becoming divine but cleaving to God and living in fellowship with God. As we draw near to God we are filled with his life and light and holiness.

Now seeing that the Word declares that the living in God is the life of the soul, and seeing that this living is knowledge according to each man's ability, and that ignorance does not imply the reality of anything, but is only the negation of the operation of knowing, and seeing that upon this partaking in God being no longer effected there follows at once the cancelling of the soul's life, which is the worst of evils — because of all this the Producer of all Good would work in us the cure of such an evil. A cure is a good thing, but one who does not look to the evangelic mystery would still be ignorant of the manner of the cure. We have shown that alienation from God, Who is the Life, is an evil; the cure, then, of this infirmity is, again to be made friends with God, and so to be in life once more. When such a life, then, is always held up in hope before humanity, it cannot be said that the winning of this life is absolutely a reward of a good life, and that the contrary is a punishment (of a bad one); but what we insist on resembles the case of the eyes. We do not say that one who has clear eyesight is rewarded as with a prize by being able to perceive the objects of sight; nor on the other hand that he who has diseased eyes experiences a failure of optic activity as the result of some penal sentence. With the eye in a natural state sight follows necessarily; with it vitiated by disease failure of sight as necessarily follows. In the same way the life of blessedness is as a familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the senses of the soul; but when the blinding stream of ignorance prevents our partaking in the real light, then it necessarily follows that we miss that, the enjoyment of which we declare to be the life of the partaker.

The new ideal of virginity and widowhood opened up a new era of sympathetic collaboration between men and women, and for male-female friendship. By establishing a category of women who were understood to be off-limits with respect to romantic entanglements, writers like Gregory were able to support and even celebrate a feminine version of Christianity without being afraid to seem as if they had fallen under the influence of feminine charms.

Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Greek theologian…, had the (to us) strange insight that desire relates crucially to what might be called the “glue” of society. The erotic desire that initially draws partners together sexually has aIso to last long enough, and to be so refined in God, as to render back to society what originally gave those partners the possibility of mutual joy: that means (beyond the immediate project of child-rearing and family) service to the poor and the outcast, attention to the frail and the orphans, a consideration of the fruit of the earth and its limitations, a vision of the whole in which all play their part, both sacrificially and joyously. It may seem odd now to say that that is where eros should tend; for we have so much individualized and physicalized desire that we assume that sexual enactment somehow exhausts it (and so to run out completely in old age, as bodily strength withers).

In the same manner as the sea, those who are swept away from the course leading to the harbor correct their aim by a clear mark, looking for a lighthouse on high, or a certain mountain appearing. In the same manner Scripture by the example of Abraham and Sarah will direct us once more to the safe harbor of the divine will for those who have drifted out in the sea of life with a mind lacking a navigator.

the pastoral office was once compatible with robust theological scholarship. Irenaeus, Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Anselm, Calvin, Edwards, Wesley, etc., all demonstrate the historic and native relationship between theological leadership and the pastoral vocation. But we have lost sight of this

Mercy is a voluntary sorrow which enjoins itself to the suffering of another. -St. Gregory of Nyssa

St Gregory of Nyssa once said All the arts and sciences have their roots in the struggle against death.