Well, good to see you all again, alive and awake, despite the ice and all the other storms. Thank you for your patience and for being here. Today I wanted to reflect with you about St. Gregory of Nyssa. another one of the Cappadocian fathers, who's perhaps more of a household word today for Catholics and for Christians in general than than Gregory of Nazianzus is. It's interesting that that has not been the case for a long, for very long. Gregory of Nyssa is a relatively new addition to the people that are kind of main foci of interest among church fathers. He was sort of rediscovered back in the 1920s. When historians of Greek philosophy, first of all, began to take an interest in his works and to read him as a kind of a late Platonist, as somebody who reads the Platonic tradition through a Christian lens, but nevertheless draws heavily on Platonic and Neoclatonic vocabulary and treatises.

[01:12]

And then in the late 20s, a German classicist named Werner Jaeger, who taught at that time at Harvard, began editing the works of Gregory Agnes. They had never been edited in a critical way before, unlike a lot of other people, and so they weren't really available, except in the media, which is sometimes not very reliable. And so Jaeger began bringing out a new edition of these works in very good form, very slowly, they're still coming out. But this kind of opened up the possibility of studying him in a more reliable way. But I think it was really because of the content of his works that people got to be interested in him in the 30s and then the 40s and 50s, and there's still a great deal of interest in Gregory of Nyssa as a sort of unusual and yet very revealing early Christian theologian. Before that, I think, there was a certain reluctance to take his works very seriously. And it's kind of hard to know why.

[02:13]

One reason, I think, is that he is a great follower of origin. And origin was suspect, too, as you mentioned the other day. in the Greek tradition, especially, as being slightly inclined toward heresy, as being the person who lays the foundation for Arianism and other late heresy, and as being maybe a little bit too intellectual as well, being a little bit too much of an egghead and therefore not really suitable for ordinary folks. I remember an Orthodox theologian told me a few years ago that it was interesting that there are very few icons of Gregory of Nica. and the ones that we have are almost all modern, actually became fashionable. And there are also no churches dedicated to Gregory of Nazareth, he said, except in California. And he said, that will tell you something. But in Greece and in other Orthodox countries, there are virtually no churches dedicated to Gregory of Nazareth. We have icons of what they call the Three Holy Hierarchs, the three kind of classic church fathers, who are Gregory of Nazareth,

[03:19]

Basil of Caesarea, Gregory's older brother, and John Chrysostom, a little bit later patriarch of Constantinople. But Gregory of Nyssa is not included among them. And it's interesting, I think, to ask why, especially today when we think of him as one of the most important, if unique, representatives of early Christian theology. I think one thing besides his originism is the fact that he is, in many ways, essentially a spiritual theologian, somebody who reflects on the life of prayer, the life of grace and growth towards God. And those were things, surprisingly perhaps, that didn't really attract much attention from the scholastic, either Protestant or Catholic scholastic. He didn't seem to be contributing something new towards the development of doctrine, people thought, towards the development of a Chalcedonian picture of Christ or an understanding of some of the other central doctrines of the faith, though I will try to make it clear that I think he's very centrally involved in the development of our understanding of the Trinity.

[04:26]

But it's a little bit more difficult to understand and also didn't seem to be on the money as much as Gregory of Nazianzus was. And then, too, I think people were suspicious of where his work was heading. He's somebody who talks a lot about change, about growth, about development, as kind of essential to the human person, as never leaving it. And that, I think, was incompatible with a more rigid and sort of rationalistic scholastic theology, Protestant or Catholic, until the 20th century, and so made people, I think, uncomfortable. And then finally, as a disciple of Origen, he does believe in universal salvation. He believes that all creatures, whatever their present situation, ultimately will be brought back to God. Even the demon, even Satan, will ultimately be redeemed, he believes, through the death of Jesus. And he develops this in a number of his works. And that, I think, was enough to make a lot of people at least nervous about him, if not to reject him wholly.

[05:29]

There's an interesting treatise I came across one time from the 6th century, by a patriarch of Constantinople, who argues that all the passages where he says this must be forgery, must be kind of later interpolation, because Gregory is a saint and couldn't have said that. So I think you get a sense of the presupposition that people start with and what that leads them to think about representatives of the early church. But it was really in the 1930s, I think, that Catholic theologians, and then Protestants after them, and Orthodox after them, began to take a new interest in Gregory of Nyssa and to read his works, and to find there a richness that people hadn't guessed at before. One thinks of people like Henri de Lubac, His pupil, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote a book on Gregory of Nyssa, and talks about him a lot. Jean Danielou, who was also a pupil of de Lubac, and wrote a big and important book on Gregory of Nyssa, and some of their pupils later on.

[06:30]

The French and also the Germans, who had a French connection, really were the ones who revived the study of Gregory of Nyssa in the 20th century, I think. Almost an obsession, I think. He is, as I say, a very fascinating and attractive, although somewhat puzzling, thinker. It's hard to systematize Gregory's thought. He doesn't lend himself to being kind of neatly summarized. And in fact, in many of his works, he contradicts things that he says in other works, not in a major way, but in a small way. So you can't put so much weight on what he says in one place that you think this is what he's going to say all the time. He's clearly somebody who's thought of developing, which is, I think, what makes him attractive to modern readers. He's also somebody who lays a great emphasis on change, as I said just before. As he says in a number of places, to be creative is to be in a position of change.

[07:36]

Only God is without change. And so every creature can go one way or the other. We grow, we take on material components and give off material components. Our bodies are constantly in flux. But also our spirits are constantly growing in virtue or in vice, growing more attached to the world or more attached to God. And salvation for Gregory is not an end to change. but a kind of a fixation of all of us changeable creatures in a direction that only leads us deeper into God. In fact, I'll mention later on, one of his fascinating theories, I think, which he repeats in a number of places, is that for the Christian, for the creature, salvation is never standing still. There's no perfect state that we ever will reach, even in the next life. Rather, salvation is constant growth, constant plunging into the depths of God's life, so that we're always reaching out beyond where we are to grow more deeply in union with God.

[08:45]

And that, I think, is something that has made him very attractive to a modern world where we also are very aware of change. We look for dynamic signs of growth rather than a kind of a static picture of perfection. Another thing that makes Gregory, I think, interesting to modern readers is that he's very interested in science. in the science of his own day. Obviously, this is a different kind of science from what we think of as science. But Gregory, however he did it, he clearly knows a lot about the best scientific theories of his own time. He knows a lot about medicine, for instance. In almost every one of his works, he's using medicine as an analogy. And the medicine of late antiquity was pretty good on the whole. I mean, a lot of what we know about the body was already known by Galen and some of the other ancient Greek physicians. And Gregory had read a lot about this, and was able to use this as part of his explanation.

[09:46]

But he also knows a lot about plants, about the stars, about the universe, according to the Greek science of his own time. And for him, this is an important part of being a theologian, to be able to draw on this and to appeal to it in developing your understanding of the gospel. Unlike Gregory of Nazianzus, whom we talked about yesterday, we don't know much about Gregory in this life. What we do know tends to be sort of oblique. He doesn't tell us anything about his own life, unlike Gregory and Isianda, who's telling us about his own life all the time, and who uses it as kind of a place to reflect on God-fading activity in the world. We know he was from the same family as Basil of Siberia, I mentioned yesterday, and of Matrina, their older sister, and a number of other members of the family, siblings. He seems to have been, if not the youngest, at least one of the youngest in the family.

[10:50]

He was probably born around, between 335 and 340, so perhaps 10 years younger than Gregory of Nazianzus. We don't know anything about his education, either. We know from his writings that he was a highly educated person, like I say, in science, as well as in the Greek language and in rhetoric. Many of his works are rhetorically also very powerful, like Gregory and Evian. And rhetoric in those days was seen as one of the great achievements of an educated person. Not a negative thing at all, but something that enabled the person to persuade and to communicate ideas clearly and beautifully and persuasively. Gregory was an accomplished rhetorician. And you just wonder where he got there. He may have been trained simply in the native Cappadocia. His father was a professor of rhetoric. the elder basil, or he may himself have done some traveling, but there's no concrete evidence that he ever went to the Athens or to Alexandria.

[11:53]

He was married, from what we can tell. In fact, he says this himself in one of his earliest works on virginity. It's a treatise in praise of virginity from one who is not a virgin, from one who says that this is the easy way to get your life together, and I have the much harder choice, which is being a married man. Some letters hint that he also had a son, but we don't know what the son's name was. His wife's name apparently was Theo Sebea, And she seemed to have lived until the late 380s also. There's also a very fascinating letter, which I didn't bring, that's okay, by Gregory of Nazianzus to a certain Gregory that comes from around the mid-360s. Some manuscripts of the letters of Gregory of Nazianthus say this is addressed to Gregory of Mithra. A few others say this is addressed to Gregory, but not Mithra, but somebody else.

[12:57]

So there's some question about whether it is the same guy. But if it is Gregory of Mithra who received this letter from his namesake, Gregory of Nazianthus, it would be very interesting. Because the situation is this, that Gregory of Nazianthus, who is himself not ordained yet, writes to this other Gregory, and says, I'm going to speak frankly to you, you have just abandoned your vocation in a way that's going to damage young people. apparently the Gregory he's writing to had been a lector in the church, so he was ordained to one of the minor ministries and was a lector. And a lector in those days was not only the reader at the liturgy, but apparently also taught patekethics and was a kind of junior instructor in the church. And he says, you've given this position up in order to teach rhetoric to young people in general, to be a school teacher. who probably is written in the years after Julian had been vaccinated.

[13:57]

Julian, who had forbidden the Christians to teach Greek literature, had died, killed by one of his own soldiers. And the Christians started almost immediately preaching in the school together. It was very important to them to claim their culture as Christian. And Gregory, if it's the same guy, seems to have done that, to have been a minister in the church and then to have started teaching rhetoric in a more secular way. But Gregory, in the end, instead of doing that, you're giving the signal that Plato and the literary writers are more important than the Gospel. And so you should go back and commit yourself to the ministry of the church. It'd be interesting to know if this is the St. Gregory, and we can only kind of guess at that. But if it is, it shows that he really felt comfortable in both kinds of occupation in his early life. As I mentioned the other day, Basil, when he becomes a bishop, is concerned to sort of stack the house with sympathetic bishops, so people who back the Nicene cause, and so he persuades both Gregory Nazianzen, his friend, and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother, to be made bishops in 372, and from that point he is a bishop in the church, and takes an increasingly active role in the debates and the controversies of the church.

[15:21]

Early on in his career, probably about 375, he's accused of embezzlement. He's Bishop of Nyssa, which is a small town, and according to the historians, some of the party of the Emperor, who were anti-knighting, accused him of mismanaging funds in a knowing way. Gregory apparently left town before he was put on trial, but the Emperor issued a decree of banishment, the Emperor being an anti-Nazi from Wallen, and so he was sent to southern Asia Minor, down near Antioch, to Seleucia, where he lived until 378. Now that's the same time that Gregory of Nazianzus was living down in the same region, in kind of self-imposed exile, reading and writing, so they might have been nearby each other and to have kept up their friendship. But at that time, he seems to have begun writing in a serious way, written some of his early treatises.

[16:25]

And then in 378, when the emperor died, and the new emperor was a Nicene, Theodosius, he went back to his own city, to Mytha, and was basically situated there until his death sometime after 395. We don't know exactly when he died. So maybe almost 20 years, he's back in Mytha acting bishop. Nyssa is not a very important city, it's kind of a middle-sized town, but it was a good base for him to be in contact with people all around the church. Basil died January 1st, 379, by tradition, and Gregory Sinton, present when he died, a great blow to the church but also to the family, He went up shortly after that, he tells us, to be with his sister Makrina, who's still up in the family estate up in the mountains. And it's with her when she died. She is already sick with some sort of terminal illness. And we have a couple of works from that period that talk about these things.

[17:29]

It's a great dialogue on the soul and the resurrection, frankly. is set in his visit to Matrina up in the north. When he comes to see her, he realizes that she's dying, he's grief-stricken again, and she tells him that, as Christians, we cannot grieve in the faith of death, because death is a blessing. And so he begins saying, well, how can that be? I can accept this on faith, but I don't really feel it, I don't understand it. And so they start talking about the immortality of the soul, and then the hope of resurrection. And it's one of the great works we have on resurrection from the early church. He also wrote a life of his sister Macrina, which is a great classic of hagiography and a great witness of the beginnings of monastic life in early Asia Minor. Macrina was not formally a woman monastic. but she was living an ascetical life, as I mentioned yesterday, with the people who lived on their land, and in a sense had formed, liturgically and in their manner of life, a kind of monastic community.

[18:35]

And Gregory tells, in a very moving way, the story of her life, and especially of her death, her holiness, of her unity with Christ in death, and of the effect that this left on the people living in the area. In the 380s, Gregory seems to become kind of a public figure in the church. We know from some of the letters that he was invited to various parts of the East, to Palestine, for instance, to Jerusalem, to Arabia, to advise local churches on who were good choices for a new bishop. It was a time that the church wasn't changed. anti-Nicene party had been favored by the emperors for 30 years. And suddenly, we had an emperor in who was in favor of Nicaea. There was a council being held in Count Thannonople in 381, to kind of reform things. And so many bishops, many churches rather, if the bishop had died, were interested in finding a new bishop who would be in line with the Nicene theology.

[19:41]

And Gregory was able to go around. He was very well connected by family and by politics, and so traveled around giving some advice on whom to select. He attended the Council of Constantinople in 381, June and July 381, and seemed to have been one of the more notable people there. It was a great collection of stars. St. Jerome was there, Evagrius of Pontus, the great monastic theologian, Didymus of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianthus. But Gregory of Nyssa was the one who was asked to give the funeral oration when the presiding bishop, Meletius of Antioch, suddenly died in the course of the Council. So he must have been somebody very much looked up to, I think, as a representative of the Church's tradition and also as a great preacher. He gives that funeral oration, and he's invited several times in the next 10 years to give funeral orations for other prominent people, and we had them.

[20:43]

He gave one for the Princess Colcheria, the sister of the Emperor. He gave another for the Empress, Coquilla. And that shows, I think, that he is somebody who is expected to appear at major occasions, even though he's kind of an upcountry bishop himself. He engages in controversy with various groups of people, especially the Apollinarians. He writes a number of major works in this period, including some biblical commentaries. We have a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nica, about the moral life, which is very interesting. And then one of his latest works is one of his most famous works, his famous commentary on the Song of Songs, which is one of the early treatises on the mystical life, on ascent through love to union with God, based on the Song of Songs. There are homilies actually on the Song of Songs, 15 homilies on the Song of Songs.

[21:48]

they had not been translated into English, and so were not really accessible to English writers until just now. But there's a new translation which is really excellent, which is about to come out, isn't out yet, but I'm on the board of a series of bringing it out, by Richard Norris, who died a year and a half ago, and who is a great linguistic scholar. There's an earlier translation by a travest of Spencer, which the Greek Orthodox press put out, but it's very unreliable, so you don't want to use that. But the new one, which is about to come, is really good, and I think when it's out, it will make a huge difference in what we know about Gregory of Nyssa in English. Anyway, there are other late works of Gregory of Nyssa which are also very important, and we'll talk about them a little bit. What we know about him, I have to say, is kind of pieced together from little hints and from his works themselves. He, like Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil, his older brother,

[22:56]

was very much a part of this articulation of the distinctive Christian view of God that we mentioned yesterday. I think, as I say, it's fair to say that the Cappadocian Fathers, the three of them especially, kind of developed for us, invented for us, if you want, our classic understanding of God of Trinity. Now to say that is a little bit challenging perhaps. Clearly people had thought about God as Father and Son and Holy Spirit since the time of the Gospel of Matthew. But there wasn't a kind of set of categories and terms and concepts that enable us to kind of say how is God one or how is God three until the late fourth century. And the Cappadocians at least advance us a long way toward getting a common tradition, a common vocabulary to talk about there. The three of them are quite different from each other, and the more you read them, the more you see they have different emphases and approaches. But they do at least agree in developing a kind of terminology for thinking about how God is

[24:04]

one, a single, and how God is triple, and how those two are related to each other, which is, of course, a great mystery of our Christian faith. I just want to mention a couple of places where he himself deals with this, and how his approach is a little distinctive compared, say, to Gregory of Nazareth, whom we talked about yesterday. One place where he talks about this is a letter that apparently he wrote to his brother Peter on the question of the Trinity. I say apparently because it's not a hundred percent certain that Gregory of Nyssa is the author of this letter. It appears also in the collection of Basil's letters, and so there's a great problem. Is it by Basil? Is it by Gregory of Nyssa? The style seems to be more like Gregory of Nyssa, and there are enough manuscripts that identify it with Gregory of Nyssa that most people today would say it's pretty clearly by him. But it's not 100% certain. Basil also was interested in the Trinity.

[25:08]

But it's in that letter that the author, probably Gregory of Nyssa, makes the point that we deal all the time with uses of language that, on the one hand, imply many different individuals are one, and that, on the other hand, make distinctions between them. I mean, the problem that philosophy has always been dealing with is unity and multiplicity. So we look at three horses in the field, and you say, well, they're all horses. The black one is a horse, and the brown one is a horse, and the white one is a horse. And yet, they're not the same horse. So we have Dobbin and Black Beauty and Old Paint, or whatever you want to call them. Let me give them a proper name. And so Gregory says, we're always doing this. We do it with humans as well. We have three people, Peter, Paul, and Mary, if you want to. Manny, Moe, and Jack, or whoever you want to name them.

[26:11]

And we say, well, they're all human beings. They may even all be male human beings or female human beings, and yet we give them different proper names. So what are we doing there? And he makes the argument that when we say, this is a human being, we're referring to the substance or nature. We're answering the question, what is it? On a morning like this, you can go out in the field and you can see these three shapes moving around, and you're not sure if they're horses or cows until you get close enough. And so you say, what is it? And the answer to that is not black beauty, but it's a horse. We give it a substance name, a name that categorizes it, that answers the question, what? But if you want to then distinguish between three members of the same species, then you give proper names. And in doing that, we're talking not about a substance, or about a nature, but about individuals.

[27:14]

The word for individual in Greek is hypostasis, and he and Basil started using this. A hypostasis in a human context is what we would call a person. But they would say that more than just a human person, any individual that you can group in a larger class... you could call a hypostasis. A hypostasis really means an individual thing, a concrete individual thing. Well, where does this get us? I mean, the first move that Gregor makes is to say, well, this is really what we're talking about in God. We have a single reality, which we call God, and yet in that single reality we have three hypostases, three individuals, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. And so they're related to each other by sharing the same nature, sharing the same substance, being the same what, but they're different from each other in being different who's and what.

[28:18]

They have a different whore, a different center of their being. That's certainly an advance, and it's something that sticks in the Christian tradition, both in East and West. St. Augustine talks about this in his work on the Trinity and says, well, he's not entirely happy with it, he sees there are problems with it, but he says we have to say that Father and Son of Spirit are three something, so we may as well say they're three hypostases or persons in Latin as anything else, but we have to be careful because they're not persons in the sense that you and I are persons. But Gregory realizes, it seems right off, that the danger here is that we could say Father and Son and Spirit are three members of a class. Just as we say that the three horses are three members of a larger class. And that's not exactly what we're talking about when we talk about God. That God is not just a generic substance. That God is the ultimate reality.

[29:19]

And so he makes that a second kind of analogy, which is the analogy of the rainbow. And he says, if we see a rainbow, You see this arc in the sky that has all the different colors, and the colors sort of merge into each other. And it's hard to say where the blue leaves off and the green begin. This is before, you know, modern spectroscopy and so on that can actually show little black lines between the colors. But in their time, you're looking at it through a lens, and you simply see colors merging into each other. And he said, in a way, that's the way God is, too. It's a single light, a single substance that can't be controlled, that moves instantly where it will. And yet in that single ray of light, that single substance, are three different, more than three different colors, but three different colors in God. And you can't exactly tell where Father leaves off and comes again.

[30:21]

One kind of brings the other into being. This idea or this analogy of light for God is something, as we've seen, that people use a lot because it's a little bit more fluid, maybe, than thinking of God as water or as dough for cake or something like that. It's an experience that we have that isn't quite so concrete. Gregory uses this analogy for the Trinity too, of a rainbow as diffractions of a single light. The problem even there is, do we want to say that Father and Son and Spirit are simply portions of what is a single immaterial substance? That they're parted off from each other by sharing only a certain spectrum of what God does. And he would ultimately say, no, we want to say more than that.

[31:25]

So he's continuing to ruffle with this issue. How do we talk about Father and Son and Holy Spirit all as God? And why is it important to do that? So a couple of his other works, I think, make this a little bit clearer. He has several treatises that he wrote in the 380s against a group of non-Nicene theologians called eunomians. They were followers of a certain eunomius who was bishop of Syzicus, a town across the Bosporus from Constantinople. And Eunomius was kind of the last generation of the Arian party, the anti-Nicene party. Eunomius was philosophically trained, and his idea, and that of his followers, who were kind of radical Arians, was you can't use language properly unless you know what you mean by it. And if we're going to talk about God and worship God, we have to have a clear definition of what God is. And God, for Eunomius and his followers, was, first of all, the one who is without beginning.

[32:34]

The one who is not generated, not produced. God just is everything else produced by God. So God is the ungenerated one, for Eunomius. That's the definition, that's what we mean by God. But if Jesus is the Son of God, and a son is by definition a generated person, one who is brought into being by another, then the sun, by definition, cannot be God. And that's kind of his basic theory, and he developed it in a lot of different ways. But he wants to say, not only is our language about the sun inexact, if we call the sun God in the full sense, we're saying an untruth. The Son is a creature. He's the first of creatures, the most noble of creatures and so on, but he's produced and therefore he's created. Well, this is a big problem for Orthodox theologians and a lot of the work that the Cappadocians do on the Trinity is meant to counteract Eunomius.

[33:37]

and this kind of highly logical, rationalistic approach to defining God. And Gregory of Nyssa's argument, over and over again, is that God is, by definition, indefinable, if you want. That the one thing we have to say about God is that we cannot form a clear and distinct idea of God's being. God lies beyond human speech and human ideas and human knowledge. And so we can't form a clear and distinct idea of God's essence. We can't define God as that which is ungenerated. In fact, that's only a negative statement anyway. It's saying what God isn't. But that doesn't tell us what God is. And so, while he agrees that God is ungenerated, that doesn't define the essence of God. In fact, we never can put our hand around or our mind around the essence of God. But what we know is that God has created us, which is what God has done. That God has done this through the Logos and through the Holy Spirit.

[34:40]

We know that God has saved us through sending his Son into the world. And salvation is another thing that God does. And we know that God continues to work on us and give us the Spirit and unite us to Christ. And all these things are what we can say about God, but they're about what God does and not what God is in God's own being. And that distinction, which has been emphasized ever since, really, in Greek theology, and also in Augustine, I think is really important. People talk about apophatic theology, which means theology that denies rather than affirms. It says we can only know what God isn't, but we can't know what God is. And that approach to theology has been very influential in Christian thought ever since, especially in mystical theology and spiritual theology. One is united to God in a way that goes beyond our ability to describe. We have the Scriptures, we have Revelation, we have the teaching of the Church to give us a start.

[35:42]

But these things are always said of God only by analogy, only a high-class metaphor, and not as definition, as scientific language anymore. One of Gregory's most famous works on the Trinity is a short one, and it's, I think, a very interesting one. It's translated, among other things, in this little collection, The Christology of the Later Fathers, which you have in the library. And it's a nice collection of patristic works. But this is a little treatise that he wrote, probably in the 380s, called To Ablabia, on why we do not say there are three gods. We don't know who Ablabius was, he's a friend of his, and this is something, a question that Ablabius must have asked him. And so this little treatise, about ten pages in English, is a very interesting struggle with this whole question of talking about the essence and the being of God. And the title is, Why We Do Not Say There Are Three Gods. And he starts with the idea that

[36:46]

like the religion of Israel, Christian faith, insists that God is radically one. And whatever we say about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can't be seen to be a contradiction with that. That radical uniqueness of God, that God alone is God, is affirmed throughout the Bible. So what we say about Jesus and about the Holy Spirit in some way has to tease that out and fit with that rather than contradicting that. You know, Islam, one of the main criticisms Islam makes of Christianity is that they built the doctrine of the Trinity, that they believe that the Trinity endangers the radical oneness of Allah, of God. And that has been a big problem, I think, in Christian apologetics, but the Cappadocians are very concerned to avoid that, and to say that the Trinity is not something that contradicts the oneness of God. I think this is probably meant to sort of counteract some misinterpretations about this language of substance and hypostasis or individual that Gregory himself had developed in his letter to his brother, Creta.

[37:59]

So what he says in this Cretaceous to Oblivious thing is very interesting. He starts off with the idea that even in the case of creatures, when we talk about three horses or three humans, we're sort of bending the rules a little bit. Three horses aren't three distinct substances. What we should say is we see three individuals in the field, all of whom participate in the substance horse in different ways. But, of course, that's too long-winded. We can't say that. So we say there are three horses out there. But we know that that's kind of shorthand and it's deliberately playing with language. Now, whether we agree with that or not, but at least he says that even when we apply substance language to individuals. We're doing it with a distinction in mind. And we're not implying that there are three unique individuals here. But he says, well, with humans or horses, there's no problem in being inexact in our language.

[39:04]

With God, there is. As he says, being inexact in our language about God is danger. Why is it dangerous? Well, I think it's dangerous because there are some little Aryans running around who end up with kind of a different notion of God altogether, a different notion of Christ, and what salvation is, and what the Church is. But for them, the Cappadocian, as we mentioned with Gregory of Nazianzus yesterday, in a sense, the heart of ministry is communicating to people a correct notion of God, or at least a notion of God in which we can base our worship, and know that we're not being led astray. So that, for Gregory, it's very important to get people's idea of the Trinity right. In fact, that's where the faith of a church began. Not the sort of thing that one preaches today a lot, but I think it's an important conviction from that early church. So, he goes on then to say that in speaking about God, we're always pointing to what God does,

[40:09]

But we're not defining God's being, God's essence. Because we have to realize that we can never say what God is in God's essence. All right, wait here. Most people think that the word divinity refers to God's nature in a special way. Just as the heaven, the sun, or any other of the world elements is denoted by a proper name which signifies a subject, so they say that in reference to the transcendent and divine nature, the word divinity is fitly applied like some proper name to what it represents. to find it. We, however, following the suggestions of Holy Scripture, have learned that God's nature cannot be named, and is inequitable.

[41:11]

Think of Exodus 3. We say that every name, whether invented by human custom or handed down by the Scriptures, is indicative of our conceptions of the divine nature, but it does not signify what that nature is in itself. There's something he says over and over in different ways. We have to be clear that we're not naming successfully what God is in God's self. But rather, when we talk about God, he says, really what we're talking about is how we experience God working in the world and in our lives. What we say about God really refers to God's action, or God's operation, God's energy, there's a later tradition with it, but not God's essence. That tradition, that distinction between God's essence and God's energy, really becomes very important in the Eastern Orthodox tradition of spirituality as well, as you might know. It's taken up, Gregory of Nyssa is the first one to formulate it, but it's taken up by De Souto Dionysius in the 5th century, who had a lot of influence on St.

[42:19]

Thomas Aquinas and on medieval mystics. It's taken up by Maximus Confessor, And then in the Middle Ages, it's taken up in a big way by St. Gregory of Palamas, one of the great spiritual writers and theologians of the 14th century. And it's in some way kind of obvious, it's also part of the Western tradition, St. Thomas says the same thing in a different way, that God's being is beyond our conception, but God's activities are the ways that God reaches out to us, and that we are the product of God's activities, God's energies or operations. And so when we talk about God, we're really talking about the God we experience in God's operations in the world. The thing is, in God, we don't have three separate groups of operations. He uses the analogy of three shoemakers. You could have three people, all are shoemakers, all are trained to be shoemakers, and they're all making shoes.

[43:24]

And so we say we have three shoemakers, and one guy makes women's shoes, and one guy makes men's shoes, and they're all doing different shoes, but they have a similar skill. What we want to say about God is something different again. We don't want to say the Father does something, and the Son does something, and the Holy Spirit does something. But they all do great things. That would be kind of the Shoemaker model. It's kind of what Origen has in mind. But Gregory insists, and this is a thing that's picked up by the later tradition, that what God does, God does always as a single, mysterious actor. So all the actions of God are done by all three persons together. And that's kind of a basic thesis you find in Thomas Aquinas too. All the operations of the Trinity are common. So, which we don't often think about, but when we say God is the Creator, we're not referring just to the Father, we're referring to the whole Trinity. Now, it's true that the Father, in a sense, is related to Son and Spirit in distinctive ways, but His relation to the work of creating comes out distinctively.

[44:36]

He creates through the Son and the Spirit, but all three are Creator. Dini, Creator, Spirit. We talked about the work of redemption. Only the Son, the Word, is made flesh. And it's through that making flesh that we're redeemed. And yet the Father is involved in sending them, and the Spirit is involved in coming down upon them and being the instrument of redemption. So all three are the Redeemer, although in different ways. All three are the sanctifiers. All three bring to perfection the work of transformation that begins in Christ. Gregory really insists on it strongly, and it sort of flows into the Christian tradition from him. I have to read you another little passage here. With regard to the divine nature, things are otherwise.

[45:38]

He's just given this analogy of the three shoemakers, and he says, We do not learn that the Father does something on his own if the Son does not cooperate, or again, that the Son acts on his own without the Spirit. Rather, does every operation which extends from God to creation, and is designated according to our differing conceptions of it, have its origin in the Father, proceed through the Son, and reach its completion by the Holy Spirit? It's for this reason that the word for the operation is not divided among the persons involved, for the action of each in any matter is not separate and individualized. But whatever occurs, whether in reference to God's providence for us, or to the government and constitution of the universe, occurs through the free person, and is not three separate things. Interestingly, even though we're related to the free person in all of these things in distinctive ways, the action is one. One thinks of the Eucharist. We offer the Eucharist in prayer to the Father, praising and thanking the Father for the gifts of creation and redemption.

[46:42]

And then in the midst of doing that, we commemorate the action of Jesus at the Last Supper and the gift of his own flesh and blood in the Eucharist. and then we invoke the Holy Spirit. God gets to bring us together in this Eucharistic community. In the Orthodox tradition, it's only when the Spirit is invoked, as you know, the Epictetus, that the transformation of the elements is thought to happen. Otherwise, it is not a complete prayer. The West has not followed along with that understanding, but it's still our new canon, especially all have an invocation of the Spirit after the with the institution because the Eucharist is a Trinitarian event. It's a prayer to the Trinity commemorating the reality of the Trinity and hoping to enter into that reality through sharing in the flesh and blood of Christ and the power of the Spirit. But this kind of relation to the three persons as one is really very much a part of our Christian tradition.

[47:44]

He says, the Holy Trinity brings to effect every operation in a similar way, as not by a separate action according to the number of the person, but there is one motion and this division of the good will which proceeds from the Father through the Son to the Spirit. We do not call those who produce a single wife three life givers, nor do we say they are three good beings who are seen to share the same goodness. nor do we speak as to their other attributes. In the same way, we cannot enumerate as three gods those who jointly and separably and mutually exercise their divine power and activity of overseeing us and the whole creation. All of them together are God and are what God is, and they do what God does. I don't know if you saw, just this past week, the Congregation for the Faith replied on the question of the words used in baptism, an issue that really was a hot issue back in the 80s. Many people hoping

[48:49]

to be more inclusive in their language, were suggesting that one should speak not no longer of Father and Son and Holy Spirit, but of Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, which are getting at the same thing. And so, baptisms were performed in the name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier. This was done in Boston, I know, in a church there, in the 80s, which reported the archbishop who immediately told them to stop, and told them to re-baptize everybody who had been baptized that way, because they were invalid baptizing. Well, this would refer to Rome, and it's gone through the usual process, but the congregation for the faith has come up with the same conclusion, and the answer was, are these baptisms valid if done in the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier? And the answer was no. And should people therefore be re-baptized, or so baptized, the answer is yes. And the reason is because we mean something different by Father, Son, and Spirit. than the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. All of them are the Creator, and all of them are the Redeemer, and all of them are the Sanctifier.

[49:51]

And the Trinity is not a way of dividing up functions in God. So it sounds like a technical point, but it's one that's really central to the faith. And I think part of the argument is, if somebody who was brought up in another Christian community, which was, say, a bit more liberal-minded on these things, came to be received in the Catholic Church, and presented a document that said, I was baptized in water in the name of the Creator, redeemed by a sanctifier, the baptism would not be recognized. Just as if you only baptized in the name of God, you would re-baptize a person. So these are kind of conditions that we have had for centuries about validity. We have to use water and not milk, and so on. So they're just applying the principles to the Catholic community. The roots of this are in Gregory Ness, I think, and I've got another picture right here.

[50:55]

I didn't want to get involved in these battles. But you don't have to worry about that. So you don't have to worry about these things. Well, that's right. But we always have new problems and new errors. One final thing in this treatise, which I think is interesting, is just in the last couple of pages, he then gets to the question of, well, then how do we distinguish Father, Son, and Spirit? If we say that they all are involved in every action that comes from God, how do we distinguish them? Because he wants to say that Father and Son and Spirit are never to be thought of as the same hypothesis, the same concrete thing, the same person. we say, but rather as the same substance, the same actor, who are personally related to each other.

[52:01]

In Gregory, you first find this idea, which you find later in Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, the only thing that's different between father, son, and spirit, the only thing that differentiates them is precisely their relationship to each other, their origin. that they each are fully God, and they do what God does, but they have this substance, and they've had this activity in different ways. They receive their Godhead, if you want, in unique ways that are related to each other. The Father, he would say, just is. The Son is God who has received his divinity by being generated, by being brought into being from the Father. And so the Son is always dependent and yet always full of God. And the Spirit, although his origin is a little harder to define, is not another son or another big one begotten, but rather is produced from the Father

[53:09]

through the activity of the sun. It's not quite the filioque, but it's something like it. Let me just read you what he said. Although we acknowledge the nature of God is undifferentiated, We do not deny a distinction with respect to causality. So Gregory talks about in terms of causality, the cause of there being God. That is the only way by which we can distinguish one person, one hypothesis from the other. By believing that is that the one is the cause and the other depends on the cause. Again we recognize another distinction with regard to that which depends on the cause. There is that which depends on the first cause and that which is derived from what immediately depends on the first cause. So think of sun and spirit. Thus the attribute of being only begotten without doubt remains with the sun. Now we do not question that the Spirit is derived from the Father, for the mediation of the Son, while it guards his prerogative of being only begotten, does not exclude the relation which the Spirit has by nature to the Father.

[54:23]

So we have the Son as only begotten, the Spirit as being brought into being from the Father through the mediation of the Son, however we understand that. The Son is, in some sense, a means through which the Spirit comes into being. When we speak of a cause and that which depends on it, we do not, by these words, refer to nature. For no one will hold that cause and nature are identical. Rather, do we indicate a difference in the manner of existence? And he goes on to say, it's like you have three trees, and they're all trees. But you can say, was this one wild? Or is this one planted and cultivated? Is this one the way it is by grafting? or is it simply a kind of natural form? And when we talk that way, we're talking about, say, tree-cherry-tree, but we're talking about a different way that they came to be what they are. And so it would be with, in some ways, with Father and Son and Spirit, that we have three beings who together are a single God, who act as a single God, but who have their being as part of that single God in a dependent way, in a different way.

[55:36]

there are different causalities. That's not exactly an explanation, but it's a way, it's kind of a rule of language. It's a grammar for talking about Father, Son, and Spirit, which becomes classical, and which is repeated by John of Damascus, by other Greek theologians, and then taken up by Aquinas and the Western tradition. That the only differences between the Trinity are their modes of origin, and that all their operations are common. So that within those operations, the son acts in a distinctive way simply by being the son. And that's the reason that only the word becomes flesh. But the father is involved as the one whom we call father, and the spirit as the one whom we greet as little father. It's obviously difficult to meditate on, but I think for these writers it was tremendously important, and I think for us too. because our whole life in Christ is really a life lived, Gregory would say, in the power that Jesus communicates to us, you know, as children of God, sharing in the divine nature.

[56:51]

Deification, as I'll mention later on, is very important to him. It's what salvation is all about. The transformation of a human by the presence of the Word in our humanity. And so if we understand what our relationship to God is through Christ, we can understand better what we're called to. I want to talk more about his Christology, which is also very interesting and distinctive, and we can do that maybe this evening, and also then about his conception of the human person, because that again is very distinctive in Gregory of Nyssa, and it's one of the reasons I think people find him attractive, his mystical theology, if you want, his vision of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. But maybe this is enough for this morning. I reproduced for today a... I wanted to pick something that was fairly short and that also would be maybe spiritually nourishing. So, there are a lot of things we could take, but I took his sixth homily on the beatitude.

[57:57]

Gregory has a number of sets of homilies, including a set on the Lord's Prayer, which are very beautiful, and then a set on the beatitude. And you remember the sixth beatitude is, blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. And so he asked the question, can anybody see God? How is it possible to see God, if God is ineffable by definition? And what does it mean to be clean of heart? And how does that affect our ability to see God? So this is, it's classical Gregory of Nyssa, and he's always talking about this kind of thing. But it's a lovely homily, I think, and quite well-known, and so you might find at least a good jumping in place to get a sense of what he's talking about. I've got a kind of semi-conventional or simplified thing, like, you know, Dr. Gideon, That's not heretical to say exactly what classical Trinitarian theology is about. And trying to understand what that means, of course,

[59:02]

The definition of a human person is a sender of incommunicability. In other words, you can't possibly give yourself to me totally in a variety of years. Totally, as long as you're a digital criminal or a digital martyr, you can't do it. But somehow, a person could, because it's only a delusion. And also human personality, people today would want to say, is kind of defined by relationship, that we become who we are over against others, in giving ourselves to others and in receiving from others, even though we can never do that completely. But it's that attempt to communicate the incommunicable, to share in what the other person is, to show what I am with the other person, that I become a person in the first place. And I think there's a lot of that same notion in Gregory Mitchell, especially, and Matthew Anford.

[60:21]

That's a copy of the famous one in Moscow by Rublyov, which is early 16th century, I think, about 1510 or something, and it's understood. He was a very theologically you know, educated painter, and I believe he even said himself, but it's certainly been accepted in the Orthodox tradition, that this is meant to represent the Trinity, as well as the three guests who come to Abraham, whom they saw in the early church as being a representation of the Trinity. And there's probably also a Eucharistic illusion there in the cup in the middle, they're gathered around a table, and they're sort of sharing in the Eucharist, which is the meal of unity. But it does represent kind of as three equal and yet different individuals, what we understand of the Trinity to be. I mean, they're different colored clothes and yet they're all pretty much the same shape. And they're all kind of sharing the mystic meal that they're sharing with us.

[61:39]

the Eucharist. Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist is always very Trinitarian, and we tend to forget that in the West. There's a beautiful document that the Orthodox Catholic Dialogue brought out in 1978, the Munich Statement, about the Eucharist and common understanding, and it's very Trinitarian. it emphasizes this Trinitarian theology of every time we celebrate the Eucharist. But yeah, that's certainly a Trinitarian, one way of imagining the Trinity. You mean the three guests at the table? I don't know if there's anything earlier than this. It may have come through a spiritual tradition, but I'm not sure where he got that from. But to connect the three guests of Abraham with the Trinity, it goes way back.

[62:49]

I think Origen even talks about that. Abraham is visited, we read, by three visitors. And then later on, the text says, the Lord said to him. And so he's assuming that the three visitors are the Lord. They are representatives of God's message. In the West you sometimes, in the 16th century, in the Spanish school, you had these pictures of the Trinity. I remember we had one in our house in Oxford when I was studying there, in which the father is represented as an elderly man in a kind of a Eucharist, or a coat, a vestment, a Eucharistic vestment, on a throne, and he's holding the dead body of Christ in his arms, sort of slumped over, and the spirit is kind of hovering as a dove over his head. So that's a different depiction, which is centered on the death of Christ and the sacrifice. But, you know, people struggle in their imagination.

[63:50]

How do you depict it? How do you do it? You do it with diagrams, with triangles, with a shamrock. Do you do it with something like this? Is there a Holy Spirit in that as well? Yeah. My question would be, what would happen And my problem with it at the time was that I was at the end of it.

[64:58]

I was suffering and ran into it. And my father there was, when he said it to him, was, how do you, how do you, how do you, uh, express yourself? Of course, you've got to cool it down. And he said, I'll tell you what, one of the, that was my father's question, he said, four times I was exposed to it, uh, I went to the church. I mean, it's hard to know, because that's not the way that our Creator has been communicated to us. I mean, I think in the Old Testament, there are a number of places where God is referred to as kind of maternal characteristics. And so to think of God as father doesn't mean that God isn't also mother in some ways.

[66:02]

God, you know, like a mother who never forgets her child and so on. But I think you could say that the kind of the primary image in the Old Testament for the God of Israel is that of a of a senior male ancestor, like the head of a clan or something. And I think it's partly because this is the way people lived, not just my own particular father, but the senior member of our whole tribe, Abraham or whatever it is, after whom we name ourselves. And I think also there may be, I mean you could make an argument for this anyway, that The role of the father in a family and the role of the mother in the family are different. The father, in a sense, is more remote. I mean, he's a source. The ancient biology thought of the male as being, in a sense, the ultimate source of life. And in planting a seed in the womb of the mother, his wife, he communicated this to a sort of a fertile environment. But we didn't know about the female ovum until, I think, 1834.

[67:08]

The discovery of the ovum happened in the 19th century in Germany. And so biology was not really aware of all the implications. But the father also was seen as I think, more remote. The mother is identified, say, with the world, with nature, with the church, you know, because we're more kind of closely physically identified with our mothers. I think we're nursed by our mothers, held in our mother's lap. The father, at least in ancient society, is a little bit more distant, and yet ultimately a source of life. And I think it's a way of saying, of emphasizing God's transcendence, whereas in Indian religion I think the divinity is identified with all that is, with kind of the cosmos around us. It's a more pantheistic approach to things. Right. Right. Right. But I think it's true that there's some religions that identify more the divine principle with the material world we live in.

[68:24]

Whereas I think the Jewish and Christian tradition tends to see God as more mysterious, more remote. And that would probably fit better with a father image than with a mother image, but it's hard to... and it isn't just a rational thing, it comes from a tradition, it comes from the accidents of history. Hmm.

[68:44]

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