————————————

Basil, great amongst the saints, had departed from this life to God; and the impulse to mourn for him was shared by all the churches. But his sister the Teacher was still living; and so I journeyed to her¹⁷⁴⁷

1747 Gregory himself tells us, in his life of S. Macrina, that he went to see her after the Council of Antioch. (This and Basil’s death occurred in the year 379: so that this Dialogue was probably composed in 380.) “The interval during which the circumstances of our times of trials prevented any visits had been long.” He goes on to say (p. 189 B.); “And that she might cause me no depression of spirits, she somehow subdued the noise and concealed the difficulty of her breathing, and assumed perfect cheerfulness: she not only started pleasant topics herself, but suggested them as well by the questions which she asked. The conversation led naturally to the mention of our great Basil. While my very soul sank and my countenance was saddened and fell, she herself was so far from going with me into the depths of mourning, that she made the mention of that saintly name all opportunity for the most sublime philosophy. Examining human nature in a scientific way, disclosing the divine plan that underlies all afflictions, and dealing, as if inspired by the Holy Spirit, with all the questions relating to a future life, she maintained such a discourse that my soul seemed to be lifted along with her words almost beyond the compass of humanity, and, as I followed her argument, to be placed within the sanctuary of heaven.” Again (p. 190 B): “And if my tract would not thereby be extended to an endless length, I would have reported everything in its order; i.e. how her argument lifted her as she went into the philosophy both of the soul, and of the causes of our life in the flesh, and of the final cause of Man and his mortality, and of death and the return thence into life again. In all of it her reasoning continued clear and consecutive: it flowed on so easily and naturally that it was like the water from some spring falling unimpeded downwards.”

¹⁷⁴⁸

1748 Two grounds are here given why this practice of grief for the departed is difficult to give up. One lies in the natural abhorrence of death, showing itself in two ways, viz. in our grief over others dying, and in recoiling from our own death, expressed by two evenly balanced sentences, οὔτε τῶν ὁρώντων…οἷς τε ἄν…; in the latter a second οὔτε might have been expected; but such an anacoluthon is frequent in dialogue. Oehler is wrong in giving to the second τε an intensive force, i.e. “much more.” The other ground lies in the attitude of the law towards death.

1749 Reading περιέχοντι: the same word is used below, “as long as the breath within was held in by the enveloping substance”(see p. 432, note 8). Here it means “the air”: as in Marcus Antoninus, Lib. iv. 39.

Why, what is the especial pain you feel, asked the Teacher, in the mere necessity itself of dying? This common talk of unthinking persons is no sufficient accusation.

What! is there no occasion for grieving, I replied to her, when we see one who so lately lived and spoke becoming all of a sudden lifeless and motionless, with the sense of every bodily organ extinct, with no sight or hearing in operation, or any other faculty of apprehension that sense possesses; and if you apply fire or steel to him, even if you were to plunge a sword into the body, or cast it to the beasts of prey, or if you bury it beneath a mound, that dead man is alike unmoved at any treatment? Seeing, then, that this change is observed in all these ways, and that principle of life, whatever it might be, disappears all at once out of sight, as the flame of an extinguished lamp which burnt on it the moment before neither remains upon the wick nor passes to some other place, but completely disappears, how can such a change be borne without emotion by one who has no clear ground to rest upon? We hear the departure of the spirit, we see the shell that is left; but of the part that has been separated we are ignorant, both as to its nature, and as to the place whither it has fled; for neither earth, nor air, nor water, nor any other element can show as residing within itself this force that has left the body, at whose withdrawal a corpse only remains, ready for dissolution.

Whilst I was thus enlarging on the subject, the Teacher signed to me with her hand¹⁷⁵⁰

1750 Reading κατασείσασα τῇ χειρὶ, instead of the vox nihili μετασείσασα of the two Paris Editions, which can be accounted for by μετα being repeated in error from μεταξυ. The question which this gesture accompanied is one to which it would be very appropriate. The reading adopted is that of the Codex Uffenbach, and this phrase, κατασείειν τῇ χειρὶ, is unimpeachable for “commanding silence,” being used by Polybius, and Xenophon (without χειρὶ). Wolf and Krabinger prefer this reading to that of most of the Codd., κατασιγήσασα: and doubtless Sifanus read it (“manu silentio imperato”).

I answered rather audaciously, and without due consideration of what I said, for my passionate grief had not yet given me back my judgment. In fact, I said that the Divine utterances seemed to me like mere commands compelling us to believe that the soul lasts for ever; not, however, that we were led by them to this belief by any reasoning. Our mind within us appears slavishly to accept the opinion enforced, but not to acquiesce with a spontaneous impulse. Hence our sorrow over the departed is all the more grievous; we do not exactly know whether this vivifying principle is anything by itself; where it is, or how it is; whether, in fact, it exists in any way at all anywhere. This uncertainty¹⁷⁵¹

1751 ἴσας…ἀδηλία. This is Krabinger’s reading (for ἴσως…ἡ δειλία in the Parisian Editions) with abundant ms. authority.

Away, she cried, with that pagan nonsense! For therein the inventor of lies fabricates false theories only to harm the Truth. Observe this, and nothing else; that such a view about the soul amounts to nothing less than the abandoning of virtue, and seeking the pleasure of the moment only; the life of eternity, by which alone virtue claims the advantage, must be despaired of.

And pray how, I asked, are we to get a firm and unmovable belief in the soul’s continuance? I, too, am sensible of the fact that human life will be bereft of the most beautiful ornament that life has to give, I mean virtue, unless an undoubting confidence with regard to this be established within us. What, indeed, has virtue to stand upon in the case of those persons who conceive of this present life as the limit of their existence, and hope for nothing beyond?

Well, replied the Teacher, we must seek where we may get a beginning for our discussion upon this point; and if you please, let the defence of the opposing views be undertaken by yourself; for I see that your mind is a little inclined to accept such a brief. Then, after the conflicting belief has been stated, we shall be able to look for the truth.

When she made this request, and I had deprecated the suspicion that I was making the objections in real earnest, instead of only wishing to get a firm ground for the belief about the soul by calling into court¹⁷⁵²

1752 ἀντιπιπτόντων πρὸς τὸν σκοπὸν τοῦτον ὑποκληθέντων: the reading of the Parisian Editions. But the preponderance of ms. authority is in favour of ὑπεκλυθέντων, “si quæ ad hoc propositum opponuntur soluta fuerint,” Krabinger. The force of ὑπὸ will then be “by way of rejoinder.” The idea in σκοπὸν seems to be that of a butt set up to be shot at. All the mss. but not the Paris Editions, have the article before ἀντιπιπτότων: but it is not absolutely necessary, for Gregory not unfrequently omits it before participles, when his meaning is general, i.e. “Everything that,” &c.

Would not the defenders of the opposite belief say this: that the body, being composite, must necessarily be resolved into that of which it is composed? And when the coalition of elements in the body ceases, each of those elements naturally gravitates towards its kindred element with the irresistible bias of like to like; the heat in us will thus unite with heat, the earthy with the solid, and each of the other elements also will pass towards its like. Where, then, will the soul be after that? If one affirm that it is in those elements, one will be obliged to admit that it is identical with them, for this fusion could not possibly take place between two things of different natures. But this being granted, the soul must necessarily be viewed as a complex thing, fused as it is with qualities so opposite. But the complex is not simple, but must be classed with the composite, and the composite is necessarily dissoluble; and dissolution means the destruction of the compound; and the destructible is not immortal, else the flesh itself, resolvable as it is into its constituent elements, might so be called immortal. If, on the other hand, the soul is something other than these elements, where can our reason suggest a place for it to be, when it is thus, by virtue of its alien nature, not to be discovered in those elements, and there is no other place in the world, either, where it may continue, in harmony with its own peculiar character, to exist? But, if a thing can be found nowhere, plainly it has no existence.

The Teacher sighed gently at these words of mine, and then said; Maybe these were the objections, or such as these, that the Stoics and Epicureans collected at Athens made in answer to the Apostle. I hear that Epicurus carried his theories in this very direction. The framework of things was to his mind a fortuitous¹⁷⁵³

1753 ὡς τυχαία, κ.τ.λ. It is better to connect this directly with Epicurus himself, than to refer it, by bracketing the preceding sentence (with Oehler), to his followers. Macrina infers from the opinions known to her of Epicurus, what he must have said about the human soul: i.e. that it was a bubble; and then what his followers probably said. There is no evidence that Epicurus used this actual figure: still Gregory may be recording his very words.—Lucian (Charon, 68) enlarges on such a simile: and his ὠκύμορον φύσημα, as a description of man, is reproduced by Gregory himself in Orat. de Beatitud. p. 768 D.

1754 τῷ περιέχοντι. Sifanus takes this of the surrounding atmosphere. So also Krabinger, “aere circumfuso,” just as above (182 A.) it does certainly mean the air, and Wolf quotes a passage to that effect from Marcus Antoninus and the present instance also. Still there is no reason that it should not here mean the body of the man, which is as it were a case retentive of the vital breath within; and the sense seems to require it. As to the construction, although πομφόλυξ is sometimes masculine in later Greek, yet it is much more likely that περιταθέντος (not περιτεθέντος of the Paris Editt.) is the genitive absolute with τοῦ σώματος: τῶ περιέχοντι would then very naturally refer to this.

That is the very point, I said, upon which our adversaries cannot fail to have doubts; viz. that all things depend on God and are encompassed by Him, or, that there is any divinity at all transcending the physical world.

It would be more fitting, she cried, to be silent about such doubts, and not to deign to make any answer to such foolish and wicked propositions; for there is a Divine precept forbidding us to answer a fool in his folly; and he must be a fool, as the Prophet declares, who says that there is no God. But since one needs must speak, I will urge upon you an argument which is not mine nor that of any human being (for it would then be of small value, whosoever spoke it), but an argument which the whole Creation enunciates by the medium of its wonders to the audience¹⁷⁵⁵

1755 But Dr. Hermann Schmidt sees even more than this in this bold figure. The Creation preaches, as it were, and its tones are first heard in our hearts (ἐνηχοῦντος τῇ καρδιᾷ): and these tones are then reflected back from the heart to the contemplating eye, which thus becomes not a seeing only, but a hearing (ἀκροατὴς γίνεται) organ, in its external activity.

1756 ἐναρμονίους ἀποστάσεις, i.e. to which the music of the spheres was due: see Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis, c. 4: for the “retrograde” motion of the planets above, see Joannes de Sacro Bosco, Sphæra (1564), p. 47, sqq.

And pray how, I asked, does this belief in the existence of God prove along with it the existence of the human soul? For God, surely, is not the same thing as the soul, so that, if the one were believed in, the other must necessarily be believed in.

She replied: It has been said by wise men that man is a little world¹⁷⁵⁷

1757 See On the Making of Man, c. viii. 5.

I rejoined, Nay, it may be very possible to infer a wisdom transcending the universe from the skilful and artistic designs observable in this harmonized fabric of physical nature; but, as regards the soul, what knowledge is possible to those who would trace, from any indications the body has to give, the unknown through the known?

Most certainly, the Virgin replied, the soul herself, to those who wish to follow the wise proverb and know themselves, is a competent¹⁷⁵⁸

1758 ἱκανὴ. This is the reading of Codd. A and B (of Krabinger, but the common reading is εἰ κἂν ἡ!

What then, I asked, is the soul? Perhaps there may be some possible means of delineating its nature; so that we may have some comprehension of this subject, in the way of a sketch.

Its definition, the Teacher replied, has been attempted in different ways by different writers, each according to his own bent; but the following is our opinion about it. The soul is an essence created, and living, and intellectual, transmitting from itself to an organized and sentient body the power of living and of grasping objects of sense, as long as a natural constitution capable of this holds together.

Saying this she pointed to the physician¹⁷⁵⁹

1759 It may be noticed that besides the physician several others were present. Cf. 242 D, τοὶς πολλοῖς παρακαθημένοις

1760 Krabinger’s Latin “in intentione,” though a literal translation, hardly represents the full force of this passage, which is interesting because, the terms being used specially, if not only, of fevers or inflammation, it is evident that the speaker has her own illness in mind, and her words are thus more natural than if she spoke of patients generally. If ἐν ἐπίτασει is translated “at its height,” this will very awkwardly anticipate what follows, ἐπὶ τοσόνδε…ἡ ἐπίτασις. The doctor is supposed simply to class the complaint as belonging to the order of those which manifest themselves δι᾽ ἐπιτάσεως, as opposed to those which do so δι᾽ ἀνέσεως: he then descends to particulars, i.e. ἐπὶ τοσόνδε. The demonstrative in τῶνδε τῶν σπλάγχνων has the same force as in τὸ ἐν τῶδε θέρμον, 214 C, “such and such;” the nobler organs (viscera thoracis) of course are here meant. Gregory himself gives a list of them, 250 C.

1761 A trochaic line to this effect from the comedian Epicharmus is quoted by Theodoret, De Fide, p. 15.

1762 ὅπερ δὴ παντελὴς τοῦ στοιχείου μείωσις λέγεται, “perfecta elementi diminutio;” ὅπερ referring to the dark “new” moon just described, which certainly is the consummation of the waning of the moon: though it is not itself a μείωσις.—This last consideration, and the use of δὴ, and the introduction of τοῦ στοιχείου, favour another meaning which might be given, i.e. by joining παντελὴς with τοῦ στοιχείου, and making ὅπερ refer to the whole passage of the moon from full to new, “which indeed is commonly (but erroneously) spoken of as a substantial diminution of the elementary body itself,” as if it were a true and real decrease of bulk.

But what, I asked, if, insisting on the great differences which, in spite of a certain quality of matter shared alike by all elements in their visible form, exist between each particular kind of matter (motion, for instance, is not the same in all, some moving up, some down; nor form, nor quality either), some one were to say that there was in the same manner incorporated in, and belonging to, these elements a certain force¹⁷⁶³

1763 εἴ τινα τούτων κατὰ τὸν αὐτὁν λόγον συνουσιωμένην τις εἶναι λέγοι δύναμιν, κ.τ.λ. The difficulty here is in τούτων, which Krabinger takes as a partitive genitive after εἶναι, and refers to the “elements”; and this is perhaps the best way of taking it. But still, as Schmidt points out, it is rather the human body than the elements themselves that ought here to be spoken of as the efficient cause of thought: and so he would either refer τούτων to τὸν αὐτὸν (“in the same way as these instances just given”), and compares Eurip. Helen., ὄνομα δὲ ταὐτὸν τῆς ἐμῆς ἔχουσά τις δάμαρτος ἄλλη (Matt. Gr. p. 706); or else would join τούτων with the preceding διάφορος (with Codd. Mon. D, E).

1764 Cod. Mon. D, ἀποτελούσης. This seems a better reading than that preferred by Krabinger, ἀποτέλεσμα εἶναι: for ἀποτέλεσμα must be pressed to mean, in order to preserve the sense, “mere result,” i.e. something secondary, and not itself a principle or cause: the following ἥ, besides, cannot without awkwardness be referred to ἐνέργειαν

1765 Reading οὐσιὰν οὐκ ἂν ἀποδεικνύοιτο ἦ τὸ μηδ᾽ ὅλως εἶναι;

Your instance, she replied, and your reasoning upon it, though belonging to the counter-argument, may both of them be made allies of our statement, and will contribute not a little to the confirmation of its truth.

Why, how can you say that?

Because, you see, so to understand, manipulate, and dispose the soulless matter, that the art which is stored away in such mechanisms becomes almost like a soul to this material, in all the various ways in which it mocks movement, and figure, and voice, and so on, may be turned into a proof of there being something in man whereby he shows an innate fitness to think out within himself, through the contemplative and inventive faculties, such thoughts, and having prepared such mechanisms in theory, to put them into practice by manual skill, and exhibit in matter the product of his mind. First, for instance, he saw, by dint of thinking, that to produce any sound there is need of some wind; and then, with a view to produce wind in the mechanism, he previously ascertained by a course of reasoning and close observation of the nature of elements, that there is no vacuum at all in the world, but that the lighter is to be considered a vacuum only by comparison with the heavier; seeing that the air itself, taken as a separate subsistence, is crowded quite full. It is by an abuse of language that a jar is said to be “empty”; for when it is empty of any liquid it is none the less, even in this state, full, in the eyes of the experienced. A proof of this is that a jar when put into a pool of water is not immediately filled, but at first floats on the surface, because the air it contains helps to buoy up its rounded sides; till at last the hand of the drawer of the water forces it down to the bottom, and, when there, it takes in water by its neck; during which process it is shown not to have been empty even before the water came; for there is the spectacle of a sort of combat going on in the neck between the two elements, the water being forced by its weight into the interior, and therefore streaming in; the imprisoned air on the other hand being straitened for room by the gush of the water along the neck, and so rushing in the contrary direction; thus the water is checked by the strong current of air, and gurgles and bubbles against it. Men observed this, and devised in accordance with this property of the two elements a way of introducing air to work their mechanism¹⁷⁶⁶

1766 According to an author quoted by Athenæus (iv. 75), the first organist (ὑδραύλης), or rather organ-builder, was Ctesibius of Alexandria, about b.c. 200.

That the thing perceived, I replied, is not the same as the thing not perceived, I grant; but I do not discover any answer to our question in such a statement; it is not yet clear to me what we are to think that thing not-perceived to be; all I have been shown by your argument is that it is not anything material; and I do not yet know the fitting name for it. I wanted especially to know what it is, not what it is not.

We do learn, she replied, much about many things by this very same method, inasmuch as, in the very act of saying a thing is “not so and so,” we by implication interpret the very nature of the thing in question¹⁷⁶⁷

1767 Remove comma after ζητουμένου, in Paris Editt.

1768 or vice versâ, i.e. the idea of badness by the negation of goodness. Krabinger appositely quotes a passage from Plotinus: “Who could picture to himself evil as a specific thing, appearing as it does only in the absence of each good?…it will be necessary for all who are to know what evil is to have a clear conception about good: since even in dealing with real species the better take precedence of the worse; and evil is not even a species, but rather a negation.” Cf. Origen, In Johan. p. 66 A, πᾶσα ἡ κακία οὐδέν ἐστιν, ἐπεὶ καὶ οὐκ ὂν τυγχάνει. See also Gregory’s Great Catechism, cap. v. and vii.

1769 supposing, that is. This only repeats what was said above: “granted that the inquirer has had his doubts set at rest as to the existence of the thing.” It is the reading of Krabinger (εἰ δή τι), and the best. Sifanus follows the less supported reading οἶδεν ὅτι, which is open to the further objection that it would be absurd to say, “when a man learns that A is not B he knows that it is something else.” The reading of the Paris. Editt. ἴδῃ is unintelligible.

Here I interrupted her discourse: If you leave all these out of the account I do not see how you can possibly avoid cancelling along with them the very thing which you are in search of. I cannot at present conceive to what, as apart from these, the perceptive activity is to cling. For on all occasions in investigating with the scrutinizing intellect the contents of the world, we must, so far as we put our hand¹⁷⁷⁰

1770 (καθ᾽) ὅσον τε…θιγγάνομεν

Shame on such absurdity! said she, indignantly interrupting. A fine conclusion this narrow-minded, grovelling view of the world brings us to! If all that is not cognizable by sense is to be wiped out of existence, the all-embracing Power that presides over things is admitted by this same assertion not to be; once a man has been told about the non-material and invisible nature of the Deity, he must perforce with such a premise reckon it as absolutely non-existent. If, on the other hand, the absence of such characteristics in His case does not constitute any limitation of His existence, how can the Mind of man be squeezed out of existence along with this withdrawal one by one of each property of matter?

Well, then, I retorted, we only exchange one paradox for another by arguing in this way; for our reason will be reduced to the conclusion that the Deity and the Mind of man are identical, if it be true that neither can be thought of, except by the withdrawal of all the data of sense.

Say not so, she replied; to talk so also is blasphemous. Rather, as the Scripture tells you, say that the one is like the other. For that which is “made in the image” of the Deity necessarily possesses a likeness to its prototype in every respect; it resembles it in being intellectual, immaterial, unconnected with any notion of weight¹⁷⁷¹

1771 weight(ὄγκου). This is a Platonic word: it means the weight, and then (morally) the burden, of the body: not necessarily connected with the idea of swelling, even in Empedocles, v. 220; its Latin equivalent is “onus” in both meanings. Cf. Heb. xii. 1; ὄγκον ἀποθέμενοι πάντα, “every weight,” or “all cumbrance.”

1772 Reading διαστηματικὴν. Cf. 239 A.

1773 ἀλλ᾽ ἐν οἷς…ἐκεῖνο…τοῦτο.

1774 pure(ἀκηράτῳ). perishable (ἐπίκηρον). The first word is a favourite one with the Platonists; such as Plotinus, and Synesius. Gregory uses it in his funeral speech over Flacilla, “she passes with a soul unstained to the pure and perfect life”; and both in his treatise De Mortuis, “that man’s grief is real, who becomes conscious of the blessings he has lost; and contrasts this perishing and soiled existence with the perfect blessedness above.”

1775 λόγῳ τινὶ κρείττονι τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης κατάνοήσεως. So just below ἀῤῥήτῳ τινὶ λόγω. The mode of the union of soul and body is beyond our comprehension. To refer these words to the Deity Himself (“incomprehensible cause”), as Oehler, would make of them, as Schmidt well remarks, a “mere showy phrase.”

1776 ἀναλυθέντων. Krabinger reads ἀναλυσάντων, i.e. “returning”; as frequently in this treatise, and in N.T. usage.

1777 i.e.as we have already seen (p. 433). The fact of the continuity of the soul was there deduced from its being incomposite. So that the γὰρ here does not give the ground for the statement immediately preceding. Gregory (p. 431) had suggested two alternatives:—1. That the soul dissolves with the body. This is answered by the soul’s “incompositeness.” 2. That the union of the immaterial soul with the still material atoms after death cannot be maintained. This is answered by the analogy given in the present section, of God’s presence in an uncongenial universe, and that of the soul in the still living body. The γὰρ therefore refers to the answer to 1, without which the question of the soul continuing in the atoms could not have been discussed at all.

That those atoms, I rejoined, should unite and again be separated, and that this constitutes the formation and dissolution of the body, no one would deny. But we have to consider this. There are great intervals between these atoms; they differ from each other, both in position, and also in qualitative distinctions and peculiarities. When, indeed, these atoms have all converged upon the given subject, it is reasonable that that intelligent and undimensional essence which we call the soul should cohere with that which is so united; but once these atoms are separated from each other, and have gone whither their nature impels them, what is to become of the soul when her vessel¹⁷⁷⁸

1778 her vessel. Of course this is not the “vehicle” of the soul (after death) which the later Platonists speak of, but the body itself. The word ὄχημα is used in connection with a ship, Soph. Trach. 656; and though in Plato (Timæus, p. 69), whose use of this word for the body was afterwards followed, it is not clear whether a car or a ship is most thought of, yet that the latter is Gregory’s meaning appears from his next words.

1779 at once. Reading (with Codd. A, B, C, and Uff.) κατὰ ταὐτόν.

But the intelligent and undimensional, she replied, is neither contracted nor diffused¹⁷⁸⁰

1780 οὔτε διαχεῖται. Oehler translates wrongly “noch dehnt es sich aus”; because the faculty of extension is ascribed to the intelligence (cf. ἐκτείνεσθαι, διατεινόμενον, παρεκτεινομένη, below), but diffusion is denied of it, both here, and in the words διασχίζεται (above and below), διάκρισις, and διασπᾶται, i.e. separation in space.

1781 κατακερματίζεται

Upon this I recurred to the definition which she had previously given of the soul, and I said that to my thinking her definition had not indicated¹⁷⁸²

1782 ἐνδεδεῖχθαι. Gregory constantly uses ἐνδείκνυσθαι (middle) transitively, e.g. 202 C, 203 A, C, 208 B, and above, 189 A, so that it is possible that we have here, in the passive form, a deponent (transitive) perfect; moreover the sense seems to require it. Gregory objects that in what has been said all the powers which analysis finds in the soul have not been set forth with sufficient fulness: an exhaustive account of them has not been given; and he immediately proceeds to name other δυνάμεις and ἐνέργειαι which have not been taken into consideration. That this view of the passage is correct is further shown by 202 C, where, the present objection having been treated at length, it is concluded that there is no real ground for quarrelling with the definition of soul ὡς ἐλλειπῶς ἐνδειξαμένῳ τὴν φύσιν. Krabinger therefore is right in dropping ἐννοουμένῳ, which two of his mss. exhibit, and which Sifanus translates as governing τὰς…δυνάμεις, as if the sense were, “When I consider all the powers of the soul, I do not think that your definition has been made good.”

1783 The syllogism implied in the following words is this:— The emotions are something intellectual (because incorporeal). Therefore the emotions are soul (or souls). This conclusion is obviously false; logically, by reason of the fallacy of “the undistributed middle”; ontologically, because it requires a false premise additional (i.e. “everything intellectual is soul”) to make it true. Macrina directly after this piece of bad logic deprecates the use of the syllogism. Is this accidental? It looks almost like an excuse for not going into technicalities and exposing this fallacy, which she has detected in her opponent’s statement. Macrina actually answers as if Gregory had urged his objection thus. “The emotions are not purely intellectual, but are conditioned by the bodily organism: but they do belong to the expression and the substance of the soul: the soul therefore is dependent on the organism and will perish along with it.”

You are quite justified, she replied, in raising this question, and it has ere this been discussed by many elsewhere; namely, what we are to think of the principle of desire and the principle of anger within us. Are they consubstantial with the soul, inherent in the soul’s very self from her first organization¹⁷⁸⁴

1784 παρὰ τὴν πρώτην (i.e. ὥραν understood). This is the reading of all the Codd. for the faulty παρὰ τὴν αὐτὴν of the Editions.

1785 προστιθέναι. Sifanus translates “illorum commentationi de animâ adjicere sermonem,” which Krabinger wonders at. The Greek could certainly bear this meaning: but perhaps the other reading is better, i.e. προτιθέναι, “to propose for consideration.”

1786 i.e.the syllogism.

1787 that the soul was mortal. Aristotle, guided only by probabilities as discoverable by the syllogism, does indeed define the soul, “the first entelechy of a physical, potentially living, and organic body.” Entelechy is more than mere potentiality: it is “developed force” (“dormant activity;” see W. Archer Butler’s Lectures, ii. p. 393), capable of manifestation. The human soul, uniting in itself all the faculties of the other orders of animate existence, is a Microcosm. The other parts of the soul are inseparable from the body, and are hence perishable (De Animâ, ii. 2); but the νοῦς exists before the body, into which it enters from without as something divine and immortal (De Gen. Animal. ii. 3). But he makes a distinction between the form-receiving, and the form-giving νοῦς: substantial eternal existence belongs only to the latter (De Animâ, iii. 5). The secret of the difference between him and Plato, with whom “all the soul is immortal” (Phædrus, p. 245 C), lies in this; that Plato regarded the soul as always in motion, while Aristotle denied it, in itself, any motion at all. “It is one of the things that are impossible that motion should exist in it” (De Animâ, i. 4). It cannot be moved at all; therefore it cannot move itself. Plotinus and Porphyry, as well as Nemesius the Platonizing Bishop of Emesa (whose treatise De Animâ is wrongly attributed to Gregory), attacked this teaching of an “entelechy.” Cf. also Justin Martyr (ad Græc. cohort, c. 6, p. 12); “Plato declares that all the soul is immortal; Aristotle calls her an ‘entelechy,’ and not immortal. The one says she is ever-moving, the other that she is never-moving, but prior to all motion.” Also Gregory Naz., Orat. xxvii. “Away with Aristotle’s calculating Providence, and his art of logic, and his dead reasonings about the soul, and purely human doctrine!”

1788 for the overthrow of the truth. So c. Eunom. iii. (ii. 500).

1789 εἰρμόν.

1790 most surely, ἦ. This is the common reading: but the Codd. have mostly καὶ.

1791 Aristotle, Ethic. i. 13, dwells upon these principles. Of the last he says, i.e. the common vegetative, the principle of nutrition and growth: “One would assume such a power of the soul in everything that grows, even in the embryo, and just this very same power in the perfect creatures; for this is more likely than that it should be a different one.” Sleep, in which this power almost alone is active, levels all.

What then, I asked the Teacher, are we to think about this? For I cannot yet see how we can fitly repudiate faculties which are actually within us.

You see, she replied, there is a battle of the reason with them and a struggle to rid the soul of them; and there are men in whom this struggle has ended in success; it was so with Moses, as we know; he was superior both to anger and to desire; the history testifying of him in both respects, that he was meek beyond all men (and by meekness it indicates the absence of all anger and a mind quite devoid of resentment), and that he desired none of those things about which we see the desiring faculty in the generality so active. This could not have been so, if these faculties were nature, and were referable to the contents of man’s essence¹⁷⁹²

1792 οὐσία.

1793 It is best to keep ἆρα: ἄρα is Krabinger’s correction from four Codd.: and he reads ὁ for εἰ above: but only one class of Codd. support these alterations.

1794 I mean the sensation of pleasure. This (νόημα) is Krabinger’s reading: but Oehler reads from his Codd. νόσημα: and H. Schmidt suggests κίνημα, comparing (205 A) below, “any other such-like emotion of the soul.”

1795 have some relation to the soul, and yet they are not the soul. Macrina does not mean that the Passions are altogether severed from the soul, as the following shows: and so Oehler cannot be right in reading and translating “Das Alles hat nichts mir der Seele zu schaffen.” The Greek περὶ τὴν ψυχὴν is to be parallelled by οἱ περὶ τὸν Περικλέα, “Pericles’ belongings,” or “party”; passing, in later Greek, almost into “Pericles himself.”

And yet, I rejoined to the virgin, we see no slight help afforded for improvement to the virtuous from all these conditions. Daniel’s desire was his glory; and Phineas’ anger pleased the Deity. We have been told, too, that fear is the beginning of wisdom, and learnt from Paul that salvation is the goal of the “sorrow after a godly sort.” The Gospel bids us have a contempt for danger; and the “not being afraid with any amazement” is nothing else but a describing of courage, and this last is numbered by Wisdom amongst the things that are good. In all this Scripture shows that such conditions are not to be considered weaknesses; weaknesses would not have been so employed for putting virtue into practice.

I think, replied the Teacher, that I am myself responsible for this confusion arising from different accounts of the matter; for I did not state it as distinctly as I might have, by introducing a certain order of consequences for our consideration. Now, however, some such order shall, as far as it is possible, be devised, so that our essay may advance in the way of logical sequence and so give no room for such contradictions. We declare, then, that the speculative, critical, and world-surveying faculty of the soul is its peculiar property by virtue of its very nature¹⁷⁹⁶

1796 Reading κατὰ φύσιν αὐτήν, καὶ τῆς θεοειδοῦς χάριτος, κ. τ. λ. with Sifanus.

1797 ὅσα δε τῆς ψυχῆς ἐν μεθορί& 251· κεῖται. Moller (Gregorii Nysseni doctrina de hominis naturâ) remarks rightly that Krabinger’s translation is here incorrect: “quæcunque autem in animæ confinio posita sunt”; and that τῆς ψυχῆς should on the contrary be joined closely to ὅσα. The opposition is not between elements which lie in, and on the confines of the soul, but between the divine and adventitious elements within the soul: μεθορί& 251· refers therefore to “good and bad,” below.

1798 This is no contradiction of the passage above about Moses: there it was stated that the Passions did not belong to the essence (ουσία) of man.

1799 ὅδε δὴ. The Teacher introduces this λόγος with some reserve. “We do not lay it down ex cathedrâ, we put it forward as open to challenge and discussion as we might do in the schools (ὡς ἐν γυμνασί& 251·).” It is best then to take διαφύγοι as a pure optative. Gregory appears in his answer to congratulate her on the success of this “exercise.” “To any one that reflects…your exposition…bears sufficiently upon it the stamp of correctness, and hits the truth.” But he immediately asks for Scripture authority. So that this λόγος, though it refers to Genesis, is not yet based upon Scripture. It is a “consecutive” and consistent account of human nature: but it is virtually identical with that advanced at the end of Book I. of Aristotle’s Ethics. It is a piece of secular theorizing. The sneers of cavillers may well be deprecated. Consistent, however, with this view of the λόγος here offered by Macrina, there is another possible meaning in ὡς ἐν γυμνασί& 251·, κ. τ. λ., i.e. “Let us put forward the following account with all possible care and circumspection, as if we were disputing in the schools; so that cavillers may have nothing to find fault with”: ὡς ἂν expressing purpose, not a wish. The cavillers will thus refer to sticklers for Greek method and metaphysics: and Gregory’s congratulation of his sister’s lucidity and grasp of the truth will be all the more significant.

1800 Following the order and stopping of Krabinger, ἄμικτόν ἐστι καὶ ἰδιάζον ἐπὶ ταύτης τῆς φύσεως, ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ, κ. τ. λ.

1801 Reading διὰ τοῦ ἑνὸς καὶ πρὸς τὰ συνημμένα τούτῳ (for τούτων), with Sifanus.

1802 Cf. De Hom. Opif. c. xviii. 5. “So, on the contrary, if reason instead assumes sway over such emotions, each of them is transmuted to a form of virtue: for anger produces courage; terror, caution; fear, obedience; hatred, aversion from vice; the power of love, the desire for what is truly beautiful, &c.” Just below, the allusion is to Plato’s charioteer, Phædrus, p. 253 C, and the old custom of having the reins round the driver’s waist is to be noticed.

1803 are implanted. All the Codd. have ἐγκειμένης here, instead of the ἐγκωμιαζομένης of the Paris Edition, which must be meant for ἐγκωμαζομένης (itself a vox nihili), “run riot in them.”

Much moved by these words, I said: To any one who reflects indeed, your exposition, advancing as it does in this consecutive manner, though plain and unvarnished, bears sufficiently upon it the stamp of correctness and hits the truth. And to those who are expert only in the technical methods of proof a mere demonstration suffices to convince; but as for ourselves, we were agreed¹⁸⁰⁴

1804 we were agreed. ὡμολογεῖτο: cf. 201 D, “If on the other hand any one will accept a discussion which is in a naked unsyllogistic form, we will speak upon these points by making our study of them as far as we can follow the chain of Scriptural tradition.”

And who, she replied, could deny that truth is to be found only in that upon which the seal of Scriptural testimony is set? So, if it is necessary that something from the Gospels should be adduced in support of our view, a study of the Parable of the Wheat and Tares will not be here out of place. The Householder there sowed good seed; (and we are plainly the “house”). But the “enemy,” having watched for the time when men slept, sowed that which was useless in that which was good for food, setting the tares in the very middle of the wheat. The two kinds of seed grew up together; for it was not possible that seed put into the very middle of the wheat should fail to grow up with it. But the Superintendent of the field forbids the servants to gather up the useless crop, on account of their growing at the very root of the contrary sort; so as not to root up¹⁸⁰⁵

1805 There is a variety of readings from the Codd. here; συνεγκαταλείη, συνεκτάλῃ, συνεκταλείη, συνεκταλαί& 219·, συγκαταλύ& 219·: in two (and on the margins of two others), συνεκτίλῃ, which Krabinger has adopted. The Paris Editt. have συνεκτίνει

1806 παρενεσπάρη, the idea of badness being contained in παρὰ, which in such cases is always the first compound. One Cod. has the curious inversion ἐνπαρεσπάρη

1807 ἐξανδραποδισθείη; this is adopted by Krabinger from the Haselman Cod. for the common ἐξ ὧν δραποδισθείη

She ceased after this statement and allowed the discussion a short interval, in which I reviewed mentally all that had been said; and reverting to that former course of proof in her discourse, that it was not impossible that the soul after the body’s dissolution should reside in its atoms, I again addressed her. Where is that much-talked-of and renowned Hades¹⁸⁰⁸

1808 ᾅδου ὄνομα.

Clearly, replied the Teacher, you have not quite attended to the argument. In speaking of the soul’s migration from the seen to the unseen, I thought I had omitted nothing as regards the question about Hades. It seems to me that, whether in the heathen or in the Divine writings, this word for a place in which souls are said to be means nothing else but a transition to that Unseen world of which we have no glimpse.

And how, then, I asked, is it that some think that by the underworld¹⁸⁰⁹

1809 τὸν ὑποχθόνιον

1810 κἀκεῖνον ἐν αὑτῷ, H. Schmidt’s reading, on the authority of 3 Codd. The reading of Krabinger is ἐν ἑαυτῷ τε κἀκεῖνον. But the underworld is the only habitation in question.—οὕτω λέγεσθαι, above, must mean, “is rightly so named.”

Well, replied the Teacher, our doctrine will be in no ways injured by such a supposition. For if it is true, what you say¹⁸¹¹

1811 εἰ γὰρ ἀληθὴς ὁ λόγος ὁ κατὰ σέ, καὶ τὸ συνεχῆ τε πρὸς, κ. τ. λ., Krabinger’s reading, following the majority of Codd.; ὁ κατὰ σέ being thus opposed to the next words, which others say. But Schmidt points out that the conclusion introduced below by ἀνάγκη πᾶσα does not follow at all from the first, but only from the second of these suppositions, and he would await the evidence of fresh Codd. Sifanus and Augentius would read εἰ καὶ…κατὰ σέ. Τῷ γὰρ, κ. τ. λ., which would certainly express the sense required.

1812 πάντων τῶν κυκλοφορουμένων, i.e. the heavenly bodies moving as one (according to the ancient astronomy) round the central earth.

But what, I asked, if your opponent should shield himself¹⁸¹³

1813 προβάλλοιτο. This is the proper meaning of the middle: “should object,” as Oehler translates (einwerfen wollte), would require the active.

1814 Philip. ii. 10.

We shall stand by our doctrine, answered the Teacher, even if we should hear them adducing these words. For the existence of the soul (after death) we have the assent of our opponent, and so we do not make an objection as to the place, as we have just said.

But if some were to ask the meaning of the Apostle in this utterance, what is one to say? Would you remove all signification of place from the passage?

I do not think, she replied, that the divine Apostle divided the intellectual world into localities, when he named part as in heaven, part as on earth, and part as under the earth. There are three states in which reasoning creatures can be: one from the very first received an immaterial life, and we call it the angelic: another is in union with the flesh, and we call it the human: a third is released by death from fleshly entanglements, and is to be found in souls pure and simple. Now I think that the divine Apostle in his deep wisdom looked to this, when he revealed the future concord of all these reasoning beings in the work of goodness; and that he puts the unembodied angel-world “in heaven,” and that still involved with a body “on earth,” and that released from a body “under the earth”; or, indeed, if there is any other world to be classed under that which is possessed of reason (it is not left out); and whether any one choose to call this last “demons” or “spirits,” or anything else of the kind, we shall not care. We certainly believe, both because of the prevailing opinion, and still more of Scripture teaching, that there exists another world of beings besides, divested of such bodies as ours are, who are opposed to that which is good and are capable of hurting the lives of men, having by an act of will lapsed from the nobler view¹⁸¹⁵

1815 lapsed from the nobler view (ὑπολήψεως). This is the common reading: but Krabinger prefers λήξεως, which is used by Gregory (De Hom. Opif. c. 17, “the sublime angelic lot”), and is a Platonic word. The other word, “lapsed,” is also Platonic.

1816 from those evil spirits. So Great Catechism, c. 26 (fin.). Here too Gregory follows Origen (c. Cels. vi. 44), who declares that the Powers of evil are for a purpose (in answer to Celsus’ objection that the Devil himself, instead of humanity, ought to have been punished). “Now it is a thing which can in no way cause surprise, that the Almighty, Who knows how to use wicked apostates for His own purposes, should assign to such a certain place in the universe, and should thus open an arena, as it were, of virtue, for those to contend in who wish to “strive lawfully” for her prize: those wicked ones were to try them, as the fire tries the gold, that, having done their utmost to prevent the admission of any alloy into their spiritual nature, and having proved themselves worthy to mount to heaven, they might be drawn by the bands of the Word to the highest blessedness and the summit of all Good.” These Powers, as reasoning beings, shall then themselves be “mastered by the Word.” See c. Cels. viii. 72.

When she had finished, I hesitated a moment, and then said: I am not yet satisfied about the thing which we have been inquiring into; after all that has been said my mind is still in doubt; and I beg that our discussion may be allowed to revert to the same line of reasoning as before¹⁸¹⁷

1817 The conclusion of which was drawn, 199 C. “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.” It is to the line of reasoning (ἀκολουθία) leading up to this conclusion that Gregory would revert, in order to question this conclusion. What both sides are agreed on is, the existence merely of the soul after death. All between this conclusion and the present break in the discussion has been a digression on the Passions and on Hades. Now Gregory asks, how can the soul possibly recognize the atoms that once belonged to her? Oehler therefore does not translate aright, “ich bitte nur den geführten Beweis…in derselben Folge zu wiederholen:” but Krabinger expresses the true sense, “ut rursus mihi ad eandem consequentiam reducatur oratio,” i.e. the discussion (not the proof), which is here again, almost in Platonic fashion, personified.

1818 has assumed, ἀναλαβόντων. The construction is accommodated to the sense, not the words; τῆς τῶν στοιχείων ἑνώσεως having preceded.

She waited a moment and then said: Give me leave to invent a fanciful simile in order to illustrate the matter before us: even though that which I suppose may be outside the range of possibility. Grant it possible, then, in the art of painting not only to mix opposite colours, as painters are always doing, to represent a particular tint¹⁸¹⁹

1819 tint, μορφῆς. Certainly in earlier Greek μορφὴ is strictly used of “form,” “shape” (or the beauty of it) only, and colours cannot be said to be mixed in imitation of form. It seems we have here a late use of μορφὴ as = “outward appearance”; so that we may even speak of the μορφὴ of a colour, or combinations of colours. So (214 A) the painter “works up (on his palette) a particular tint of colour” (μορφὴν). Here it is the particular hue, in person or picture, which it is desired to imitate. Akin to this question is that of the proper translation of πρὸς τὴν ὁμοιότητα τοῦ προκειμένου, which Sifanus and Krabinger translate “ad similitudinem argumenti,” and which may either mean (1) “to make the analogy to the subject matter of our question as perfect as possible,” i.e. as a parenthesis, or (2) “in imitation of the thing or colour (lying before the painter) to be copied.” The last seems preferable (“to form the given tint”).

1820 γραφικῆς τέχνης.

You seem, I interrupted, in this passing remark to have made an excellent defence of the faith in the Resurrection. By it, I think, the opponents of this doctrine might be gradually led to consider it not as a thing absolutely impossible that the atoms should again coalesce and form the same man as before.

That is very true, the Teacher replied. For we may hear these opponents urging the following difficulty. “The atoms are resolved, like to like, into the universe; by what device, then, does the warmth, for instance, residing in such and such a man, after joining the universal warmth, again dissociate itself from this connection with its kindred¹⁸²¹

1821 ἀμιγὲς τοῦ συγγενοῦς πάλιν ἀποκριθῆναι. Krabinger’s and Oehler’s reading. But Krabinger, more correctly than Oehler, opposes ἐν τῷδε to ἐν τῷ καθ᾽ ὅλου (quod est hic calidum, si fuerit in universo): though neither he, nor Oehler, nor Schmidt himself appears to have any suspicion that τῷδε maymean “so and so:” and yet it is quite in accordance with Gregory’s usage, and makes better sense, as contrasting the particular and universal heat more completely. ᾽Αμιγὲς is proleptic: the genitive may depend either on it or on the verb. Just below ἀναπλασσόμενον is read by 5 of Krabinger’s Codd. (including the Hasselmann). This is better than Migne’s ἀπαλλασσόμενον, which is hardly supported by 1 Cor. xv. 51.

Then to meet such an objection, I rejoined, the above opinion about the soul will, as I said, avail; namely, that she remains after dissolution in those very atoms in which she first grew up, and, like a guardian placed over private property, does not abandon them when they are mingled with their kindred atoms, and by the subtle ubiquity of her intelligence makes no mistake about them, with all their subtle minuteness, but diffuses herself along with those which belong to herself when they are being mingled with their kindred dust, and suffers no exhaustion in keeping up with the whole number of them when they stream back into the universe, but remains with them, no matter in what direction or in what fashion Nature may arrange them. But should the signal be given by the All-disposing Power for these scattered atoms to combine again, then, just as when every one of the various ropes that hang from one block answer at one and the same moment¹⁸²²

1822 same moment. κατὰ ταὐτὸν: on the authority of 2 Codd. Mon.

The following illustration also, the Teacher went on, might be very properly added to those already brought forward, to show that the soul has not need of much teaching in order to distinguish its own from the alien amongst the atoms. Imagine a potter with a supply of clay; and let the supply be a large one; and let part of it have been already moulded to form finished vessels, while the rest is still waiting to be moulded; and suppose the vessels themselves not to be all of similar shape, but one to be a jug, for instance, and another a wine-jar, another a plate, another a cup or any other useful vessel; and further, let not one owner possess them all, but let us fancy for each a special owner. Now as long as these vessels are unbroken they are of course recognizable by their owners, and none the less so, even should they be broken in pieces; for from those pieces each will know, for instance, that this belongs to a jar¹⁸²³

1823 Reading ὅτι τὸ μὲν τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πίθου, ποῖον δὲ τὸ ἐκ τοῦ ποτηρίου, κ. τ. λ.

1824 πρὸς τὸ ἀκατέργαστον τῆς τῶν στοιχείων ὕλης. There is the same sort of distinction above, 215 A, i.e. between the kindred dust first, and then the universe (τὸ πᾶν) into which the atoms may stream back.

I applauded this as well devised to bring out the natural features of the case before us; and I said: It is very well to speak like this and to believe that it is so; but suppose some one were to quote against it our Lord’s narrative about those who are in hell, as not harmonizing with the results of our inquiry, how are we to be prepared with an answer?

The Teacher answered: The expressions of that narrative of the Word are certainly material; but still many hints are interspersed in it to rouse the skilled inquirer to a more discriminating study of it. I mean that He Who parts the good from the bad by a great gulf, and makes the man in torment crave for a drop to be conveyed by a finger, and the man who has been ill-treated in this life rest on a patriarch’s bosom, and Who relates their previous death and consignment to the tomb, takes an intelligent searcher of His meaning far beyond a superficial interpretation. For what sort of eyes has the Rich Man to lift up in hell, when he has left his bodily eyes in that tomb? And how can a disembodied spirit feel any flame? And what sort of tongue can he crave to be cooled with the drop of water, when he has lost his tongue of flesh? What is the finger that is to convey to him this drop? What sort of place is the “bosom” of repose? The bodies of both of them are in the tomb, and their souls are disembodied, and do not consist of parts either; and so it is impossible to make the framework of the narrative correspond with the truth, if we understand it literally; we can do that only by translating each detail into an equivalent in the world of ideas. Thus we must think of the gulf as that which parts ideas which may not be confounded from running together, not as a chasm of the earth. Such a chasm, however vast it were, could be traversed with no difficulty by a disembodied intelligence; since intelligence can in no time¹⁸²⁵

1825 ἀχρόνως.

What then, I asked, are the fire and the gulf and the other features in the picture? Are they not that which they are said to be?

I think, she replied, that the Gospel signifies by means of each of them certain doctrines with regard to our question of the soul. For when the patriarch first says to the Rich Man, “Thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things,” and in the same way speaks of the Poor Man, that he, namely, has done his duty in bearing his share of life’s evil things, and then, after that, adds with regard to the gulf that it is a barrier between them, he evidently by such expressions intimates a very important truth; and, to my thinking, it is as follows. Once man’s life had but one character; and by that I mean that it was to be found only in the category of the good and had no contact with evil. The first of God’s commandments attests the truth of this; that, namely, which gave to man unstinted enjoyment of all the blessings of Paradise, forbidding only that which was a mixture of good and evil and so composed of contraries, but making death the penalty for transgressing in that particular. But man, acting freely by a voluntary impulse, deserted the lot that was unmixed with evil, and drew upon himself that which was a mixture of contraries. Yet Divine Providence did not leave that recklessness of ours without a corrective. Death indeed, as the fixed penalty for breaking the law, necessarily fell upon its transgressors; but God divided the life of man into two parts, namely, this present life, and that “out of the body” hereafter; and He placed on the first a limit of the briefest possible time, while He prolonged the other into eternity; and in His love for man He gave him his choice, to have the one or the other of those things, good or evil, I mean, in which of the two parts he liked: either in this short and transitory life, or in those endless ages, whose limit is infinity. Now these expressions “good” and “evil” are equivocal; they are used in two senses, one relating to mind and the other to sense; some classify as good whatever is pleasant to feeling: others are confident that only that which is perceptible by intelligence is good and deserves that name. Those, then, whose reasoning powers have never been exercised and who have never had a glimpse of the better way soon use up on gluttony in this fleshly life the dividend of good which their constitution can claim, and they reserve none of it for the after life; but those who by a discreet and sober-minded calculation economize the powers of living are afflicted by things painful to sense here, but they reserve their good for the succeeding life, and so their happier lot is lengthened out to last as long as that eternal life. This, in my opinion, is the “gulf”; which is not made by the parting of the earth, but by those decisions in this life which result in a separation into opposite characters. The man who has once chosen pleasure in this life, and has not cured his inconsiderateness by repentance, places the land of the good beyond his own reach; for he has dug against himself the yawning impassable abyss of a necessity that nothing can break through. This is the reason, I think, that the name of Abraham’s bosom is given to that good situation of the soul in which Scripture makes the athlete of endurance repose. For it is related of this patriarch first, of all up to that time born, that he exchanged the enjoyment of the present for the hope of the future; he was stripped of all the surroundings in which his life at first was passed, and resided amongst foreigners, and thus purchased by present annoyance future blessedness. As then figuratively¹⁸²⁶

1826 ἐκ καταχρήσεώς τινος: not as usually “by a misuse of words.”

1827 There is an anacoluthon here, for τῷ ἀγάθῳ κόλπῳ follows ᾧ above; designed no doubt to bring the things compared more closely together. Oehler, however, would join ἀγάθῳ with the relative, and translates as if τῷ = καί.

1828 τὸν δίκαιον. Most of Krabinger’s Codd. read τὸν πλούσιον.

What then, I asked, is the doctrine here?

Why, seeing that Lazarus’ soul is occupied¹⁸²⁹

1829 is occupied with his present blessings (ἄσχολος τοῖς παροῦσιν); surely not, with Oehler, “is not occupied with the present world”!

1830 κόλλης. The metaphor is Platonic. “The soul…absolutely bound and glued to the body” (Phædo, p. 82 E).

1831 her soaring. Plato first spoke (Phædrus, p. 248 C) of “that growth of wing, by which the soul is lifted.” Once these natural wings can get expanded, her flight upwards is a matter of course. This image is reproduced by Plotinus p. 769 A (end of Enneads); Libanius, Pro Socrate, p. 258; Synesius, De Providentiâ, p. 90 D, and Hymn i. III, where he speaks of the ἅλμα κοῦφον of the soul, and Hymn iii. 42. But there is mixed here with the idea of a flight upwards (i.e. ἀναδρομὴ), that of the running-ground as well (cf. Greg. De scopo Christian. III. p. 299, τοῖς τῆς ἀρετῆς δρόμοις), which, as sanctioned in the New Testament, Chrysostom so often uses.

1832 οὕτως answers to καθάπερ, not to ὡς above.

1833 shadowy phantoms of the departed are often seen. Cf. Origen c. Cels. ii. 60 (in answer to Celsus’ “Epicurean” opinion that ghosts are pure illusion): “He who does believe this (i.e. in ghosts) necessarily believes in the immortality, or at all events the long continuance of the soul: as Plato does in his treatise on the soul (i.e. the Phædo) when he says that the shadowy apparitions of the dead hover round their tombs. These apparitions, then, have some substance: it is the so-called ‘radiant’ frame in which the soul exists. But Celsus, not liking this, would have us believe that people have waking dreams and ‘imagine as true, in accordance with their wishes, a wild piece of unreality.’ In sleep we may well believe that this is the case: not so in waking hours, unless some one is quite out of his senses, or is melancholy mad.” But Origen here quotes Plato in connection with the reality of the Resurrection body of Christ: Gregory refers to ghosts only, with regard to the φιλοσώματοι, whose whole condition after death he represents very much in Plato’s words. See Phædo, p. 81 B.

Then, after a moment’s reflection on the meaning of these latter words, I said: I think that a contradiction now arises between what you have said and the result of our former examination of the passions. For if, on the one hand, the activity of such movements within us is to be held as arising from our kinship with the brutes, such movements I mean as were enumerated in our previous discussion¹⁸³⁴

1834 προλαβὼν; on the authority of five Codd., for προσλαβών

How so? she asked.

Why, when every unreasoning instinct is quenched within us after our purgation, this principle of desire will not exist any more than the other principles; and this being removed, it looks as if the striving after the better way would also cease, no other emotion remaining in the soul that can stir us up to the appetence of Good.

To that objection, she replied, we answer this. The speculative and critical faculty is the property of the soul’s godlike part; for it is by these that we grasp the Deity also. If, then whether by forethought here, or by purgation hereafter, our soul becomes free from any emotional connection with the brute creation, there will be nothing to impede its contemplation of the Beautiful; for this last is essentially capable of attracting in a certain way every being that looks towards it. If, then, the soul is purified of every vice, it will most certainly be in the sphere of Beauty. The Deity is in very substance Beautiful; and to the Deity the soul will in its state of purity have affinity, and will embrace It as like itself. Whenever this happens, then, there will be no longer need of the impulse of Desire to lead the way to the Beautiful. Whoever passes his time in darkness, he it is who will be under the influence of a desire for the light; but whenever he comes into the light, then enjoyment takes the place of desire, and the power to enjoy renders desire useless and out of date. It will therefore be no detriment to our participation in the Good, that the soul should be free from such emotions, and turning back upon herself should know herself accurately what her actual nature is, and should behold the Original Beauty reflected in the mirror and in the figure of her own beauty. For truly herein consists the real assimilation to the Divine; viz. in making our own life in some degree a copy of the Supreme Being. For a Nature like that, which transcends all thought and is far removed from all that we observe within ourselves, proceeds in its existence in a very different manner to what we do in this present life. Man, possessing a constitution whose law it is to be moving, is carried in that particular direction whither the impulse of his will directs: and so his soul is not affected in the same way towards what lies before it¹⁸³⁵

1835 κατὰ το ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῆς.

1836 any particular good, not as Oehler, “jenseits alles Guten.” The Divine Being is the complement, not the negation, of each single good.

1837 ἐν ἑαυτῇ βλέπουσα. But Augentius and Sifanus seem to have read ἑαυτὴν: and this is supported by three Codd.

1838 τὸ μόνον τῷ ὄντι ἀγαπητὸν καὶ ἐράσμιον.

1839 καταστολὴν. Cf. 1 Cor. xiii. 8–13.

1840 Schmidt well remarks that there lies in λέγων here not a causal but only a concessive force: and he puts a stop before εἰκότως. Oehler has not seen that ἀγάπῃ is governed by the preposition σὺν in the verb “by the side of love,” and quite mistranslates the passage.

1841 ἔρεισμα.

1842 ὑπόστασις Heb. xi. 1.

1843 reduced to quiescence, ἀτρεμούντων. This is the reading adopted by Krabinger, from four Codd., instead of the vox nihili of the editions, εὐτηρεμόντων. The contrast must be between “remaining in activity (ἐνεργεία),” and “becoming idle,” and he quotes a passage from Plotinus to show that ἀτρεμεῖν has exactly this latter sense. Cf. 1 Cor. xiii. 8; 10, καταργηθήσονται, καταργηθήσεται

1844 whereby alone, καθ᾽ ὃ δοκεῖ μόνον πως αὐτῆς, κ. τ. λ, the reading of Sifanus.

1845 the insolence of satiety cannot touch. Krabinger quotes from two of his Codd. a scholium to this effect: “Then this proves to be nonsense what Origen has imagined about the satiety of minds, and their consequent fall and recall, on which he bases his notorious teaching about the pre-existence and restoration of souls that are always revolving in endless motion, determined as he is, like a retailer of evil, to mingle the Grecian myths with the Church’s truth.” Gregory, more sober in his idealism, certainly does not follow on this point his great Master. The phrase ὑβριστὴς κόρος is used by Gregory Naz. also in his Poems (p. 32 A), and may have been suggested to both by some poet, now lost. “Familiarity breeds contempt” is the modern equivalent.

1846 But suppose, &c. Möller (Gregorii doctrina de hom. natur., p. 99) shows that the following view of Purgatory is not that taught by the Roman Church.

1847 by the nails of propension. This metaphor is frequently used by Gregory. Cf. De Virginit. c. 5: “How can the soul which is riveted (προσηλωθεῖσα) to the pleasures of the flesh, and busied with merely human longings, turn a disengaged eye upon its kindred intellectual light?” So De Beatitud. Or. viii. (I. p. 833), &c.

1848 purgatorial, καθαρσί& 251·. Five of Krabinger’s Codd. and the versions of Augentius and Sifanus approve this reading. That of the Editions is ἀκοιμήτῳ. [This last epithet is applied to God’s justice (δικὴ) by Isidore of Pelusium, Ep. 90: and to the “worm,” and, on the other hand, the Devil, by Cyril Alexand. Act. Ephes., p. 252. Cf. S. Math. iii. 12; S. Mark ix. 48.] It is the same with αἰωνί& 251· before πυρὶ just below. The Editions have it; the Codd. and Latin versions have not: Krabinger therefore has not hesitated to expunge it.

Then it seems, I said, that 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.

That, said the Teacher, is my meaning; and also that the agony will be measured by the amount of evil there is in each individual. For it would not be reasonable to think that the man who has remained so long as we have supposed in evil known to be forbidden, and the man who has fallen only into moderate sins, should be tortured to the same amount in the judgment upon their vicious habit; but according to the quantity of material will be the longer or shorter time that that agonizing flame will be burning; that is, as long as there is fuel to feed it. In the case of the man who has acquired a heavy weight of material, the consuming fire must necessarily be very searching; but where that which the fire has to feed upon¹⁸⁴⁹

1849 ἡ τοῦ πυρὸς δαπανή. These words can have no other meaning to suit the sense. Krabinger’s reproduction of Sifanus’ Latin, “ignis ille consumens,” makes the sentence a tautology.

But, said I, what help can one find in this devout hope, when one considers the greatness of the evil in undergoing torture even for a single year; and if that intolerable anguish be prolonged for the interval of an age, what grain of comfort is left from any subsequent expectation to him whose purgation is thus commensurate with an entire age?¹⁸⁵⁰

1850 πρὸς ὅλον αἰ& 242·να. But cf. Plato, Timæus, 37, 39 D.

Why¹⁸⁵¹

1851 Macrina’s answer must begin here, though the Paris Editt. take no notice of a break. Krabinger on the authority of one of his Codd. has inserted φησὶν ἡ διδάσκαλος after προνοητέον

1852 distinguishes between. The word here is οἶδεν, which is used of “teaching,” “telling,” after the fashion of the later Greek writers, in making a quotation.

1853 of a farthing. No mention is made of this in the Parable (S. Matt. xviii. 23; S. Luke vii. 41). The “uttermost farthing” of S. Matt. v. 26 does not apply here.

1854 διὰ τῆς βασάνου. Of course διὰ cannot go with ὀφειλὴν, though Krabinger translates “per tormenta debita.” He has however, with Oehler, pointed the Greek right, so as to take ὄφλημα as in opposition to ὀφειλὴν

1855 a state which owns no master and is self-regulating, &c. He repeats this, De Hom. Opif. c. 4: “For the soul immediately shows its royal and exalted character, far removed from the lowliness of private station, in that it owns no master, and is self-governed, swayed autocratically by its own will,—for to whom else does this belong than to a king?” and c. 16: “Thus, there is in us the principle of all excellence, all virtue, and every higher thing that we conceive: but pre-eminent among all is the fact that we are free from necessity, and not in bondage to any natural force, but have decision in our power as we please: for virtue is a voluntary thing, subject to no dominion:” and Orat. Catech. c. 5: “Was it not, then, most right that that which is in every detail made like the Divine should possess in its nature a self-ruling and independent principle, such as to enable the participation of the good to be the reward of its virtue?” It would be possible to quote similar language from the Neoplatonists (e.g. Plotinus vi. 83–6): but Gregory learnt the whole bearing and meaning of moral liberty from none but Origen, whose so-called “heresies” all flowed from his constant insistence on its reality.

1856 This (1 Cor. xv. 28) is a text much handled by the earlier Greek Fathers. Origen especially has made it one of the Scripture foundations upon which he has built up theology. This passage in Gregory should be compared with the following in Origen, c. Cels. iv. 69, where he has been speaking of evil and its origin, and its disappearance: “God checks the wider spread of evil, and banishes it altogether in a way that is conducive to the good of the whole. Whether or not there is reason to believe that after the banishment of evil it will again appear is a separate question. By later corrections, then, God does put right some defects: for although in the creation of the whole all the work was fair and strong, nevertheless a certain healing process is needed for those whom evil has infected, and for the world itself which it has as it were tainted; and God is never negligent in interfering on certain occasions in a way suitable to a changeful and alterable world,” &c. “He is like a husbandman performing different work at different times upon the land, for a final harvest.” Also viii. 72: “This subject requires much study and demonstration: still a few things must and shall be said at once tending to show that it is not only possible, but an actual truth, that every being that reasons ‘shall agree in one law’ (quoting Celsus’ words). Now while the Stoics hold that when the strongest of the elements has by its nature prevailed over the rest, there shall be the Conflagration, when all things will fall into the fire, we hold that the Word shall some day master the whole of ‘reasoning nature,’ and shall transfigure it to its own perfection, when each with pure spontaneity shall will what it wishes, and act what it wills. We hold that there is no analogy to be drawn from the case of bodily diseases, and wounds, where some things are beyond the power of any art of healing. We do not hold that there are any of the results of sin which the universal Word, and the universal God, cannot heal. The healing power of the Word is greater than any of the maladies of the soul, and, according to the will, He does draw it to Himself: and so the aim of things is that evil should be annihilated: whether with no possibility whatever of the soul ever turning to it again, is foreign to the present discussion. It is sufficient now to quote Zephaniah” (iii. 7–13, LXX.).

1857 But, when A. Jahn, as quoted by Krabinger asserts that Gregory and Origen derived their denial of the eternity of punishment from a source “merely extraneous,” i.e. the Platonists, we must not forget that Plato himself in the Phædo, 113 F (cf. also Gorgias, 525 C, and Republic, x. 615), expressly teaches the eternity of punishment hereafter, for he uses there not the word αἰ& 240·ν or αἰωνίος, but οὔποτε. They were influenced rather by the late Platonists.

What then, I asked, are we to say to those whose hearts fail at these calamities¹⁸⁵⁸

1858 Reading συμφοραῖς, i.e. death especially.

We will say to them, replied the Teacher, this. “It is foolish, good people, for you to fret and complain of the chain of this fixed sequence of life’s realities; you do not know the goal towards which each single dispensation of the universe is moving. You do not know that all things have to be assimilated to the Divine Nature in accordance with the artistic plan of their author, in a certain regularity and order. Indeed, it was for this that intelligent beings came into existence; namely, that the riches of the Divine blessings should not lie idle. The All-creating Wisdom fashioned these souls, these receptacles with free wills, as vessels as it were, for this very purpose, that there should be some capacities able to receive His blessings and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream. Such are the wonders¹⁸⁵⁹

1859 Such are the wonders. There is here, Denys (De la Philosophie d’Origène, p. 484) remarks, a great difference between Gregory and Origen. Both speak of an “eternal sabbath,” which will end the circle of our destinies. But Origen, after all the progress and peregrinations of the soul, which he loves to describe, establishes “the reasoning nature” at last in an unchangeable quiet and repose; while Gregory sets before the soul an endless career of perfections and ever increasing happiness. This is owing to their different conceptions of the Deity. Origen cannot understand how He can know Himself or be accessible to our thought, if He is Infinite: Gregory on the contrary conceives Him as Infinite, as beyond all real or imaginable boundaries, πασῆς περιγραφῆς ἐκτός (Orat. Cat. viii. 65); this is the modern, rather than the Greek view. In the following description of the life eternal Gregory hardly merits the censure of Ritter that he “introduces absurdity” into it.

1860 such a magnitude as. Reading, ἐφ᾽ ὃ, with Schmidt. The “limit” is the present body, which must be laid aside in order to cease to be a hindrance to such a growth. Krabinger reads ἐφ ὧν on the authority of six Codd., and translates “ii in quibus nullus terminus interrumpit incrementum.” But τοσοῦτον can answer to nothing before, and manifestly refers to the relative clause.

1861 Macrina may be here alluding to Gregory’s brotherly affection for her.

1862 But on high A record lives of thine identity! Thou shalt not lose one charm of lip or eye; The hues and liquid lights shall wait for thee, And the fair tissues, whereso’er they be! Daughter of heaven! our grieving hearts repose On the dear thought that we once more shall see Thy beauty—like Himself our Master rose. C. Tennyson Turner.—Anastasis.

But it somehow seems to me now, I said, that the doctrine of the Resurrection necessarily comes on for our discussion; a doctrine which I think is even at first sight true as well as credible¹⁸⁶³

1863 ἰδεῖν…ἵνα μὴ ἀμφιβάλλη. This is the reading of the Paris Editt.: ἰδεῖν seems to go closely with ἀληθὲς: so that Krabinger’s δεῖν is not absolutely necessary.

As for the thinkers, the Teacher went on, outside our own system of thought, they have, with all their diverse ways of looking at things, one in one point, another in another, approached and touched the doctrine of the Resurrection: while they none of them exactly coincide with us, they have in no case wholly abandoned such an expectation. Some indeed make human nature vile in their comprehensiveness, maintaining that a soul becomes alternately that of a man and of something irrational; that it transmigrates into various bodies, changing at pleasure from the man into fowl, fish, or beast, and then returning to human kind. While some extend this absurdity even to trees¹⁸⁶⁴

1864 some extend this absurdity even to trees: Empedocles for instance. Cf. Philosophumena (of Hippolytus, falsely attributed to Origen), p. 50, where two lines of his are quoted. Chrysostom’s words (I. iv. p. 196), “There are those amongst them who carry souls into plants, into shrubs, and into dogs,” are taken by Matthæus to refer to Empedocles. Cf. Celsus also (quoted in Origen, c. Cels. viii. 53), “Seeing then men are born bound to a body—no matter whether the economy of the world required this, or that they are paying the penalty for some sin, or that the soul is weighted with certain emotions till it is purified from them at the end of its destined cycle, three myriad hours, according to Empedocles, being the necessary period of its wanderings far away from the Blessed Ones, during which it passes successively into every perishable shape—we must believe any way that there exist certain guardians of this prison-house.” See De Hom. Opif. c. 28. Empedocles can be no other, then, than “the philosopher who asserts that the same thing may be born in anything:” below (p. 232 D). Anaxagoras, however, seems to have indulged in the same dictum (πᾶν ἐν παντὶ), but with a difference; as Nicetas explains in his commentary on Gregory Naz., Orations: “That everything is contained in everything Empedocles asserted, and Anaxagoras asserted also: but not with the same meaning. Empedocles said it of the four elements, namely, that they are not only divided and self-centred, but are also mingled with each other. This is clear from the fact that every animal is engendered by all four. But Anaxagoras, finding an old proverb that nothing can be produced out of nothing, did away with creation, and introduced ‘differentiation’ instead, &c.” See also Greg. Naz., Poems, p. 170.

1865 συνδρομῆς

1866 εἰρμῷ, i.e. as links in a chain which cannot be altered. Sifanus’ “carcere et claustro” is due to εἱργμῷ against all the mss. Krabinger’s six have διατειχιζόμενα for διαστοιχιζόμενα of the Editt.

1867 οὐδε…τὸν βότρυν. The intensitive need not surprise us, though a grape-bunch does seem a more fitting body for a human soul than a stalk of hemlock: it is explained by the sentence in apposition, “produced…for the purpose of sustaining life,” i.e. it is eaten, and so a soul might be eaten; which increases the horror.

1868 καὶ γὰρ καὶ αὐτὸς τῶν φυομένων ἐστίν, i.e. the fruit, and not the tree only, belongs to the kingdom of plants: φυτὰ in the next sentence is exactly equivalent to τὰ φυόμενα, i.e. plants. The probability that this is the meaning is strengthened by Krabinger’s reading οὗτος, from five of his Codd. But still if αὐτὸς be retained, it might have been taken to refer to the man who must needs look suspiciously at a bunch of grapes; “for what, according to this theory, is he himself, but a vegetable!” since all things are mixed, πάντα ὁμοῦ.

1869 Two Codd. Mon. (D, E) omit φυτὸν ἢ ζῶον, which is repeated below.

1870 i.e.Pythagoreans and later Platonists. Cf. Origen, c. Cels. iii. 80. For the losing of the wings, cf. c. Cels iii. 40: “The coats of skins also, which God made for those sinners, the man and the woman cast forth from the garden, have a mystical meaning far deeper than Plato’s fancy about the soul shedding its wings, and moving downward till it meets some spot upon the solid earth.”

1871 ἀποκτηνοῦσθαι

1872 τῆς φυσικῆς ταύτης. This is the common reading: but φύσις and φυσικὸς have a rather higher meaning than our equivalent for them: cf. just below, “that inherently (τῇ φύσει) fine and buoyant thing”: and Krabinger is probably right in reading φυτικῆς from four Codd.

1873 With the γὰρ here (unlike the three preceding) begins the second “incoherency” of this view. The first is,—“It confuses the ideas of good and evil.” The second,—“it is inconsistent with a view already adopted by these teachers.” The third (beginning with καὶ οὐ μέχρι τούτων, κ.τ.λ.),—it contradicts the truth which it assumes, i.e. that there is no change in heaven.”

1874 See just above: “For I have heard persons who hold these opinions saying that whole nations of souls are hidden away somewhere in a realm of their own,” &c., and see next note.

1875 that undeviating revolution along with the stars, τὴν ἀπλανῆ περιφοράν. Cf. Origen, De Princip. ii. 3–6 (Rufinus’ translation), “Sed et ipsum supereminentem, quem dicunt ἀπλανῆ, globum proprie nihilominus mundum appellari volunt:” Cicero, De Repub. vi. 17: “Novem tibi orbibus ver potius globis connexa sunt omnia: quorum unus est cœlestis, extimus, qui reliquos omnes complectitur; in quo infixi sunt illi, qui volvuntur, stellarum cursus sempiterni,” i.e. they roll, not on their axes, but only as turning round with the general revolution. They are literally fixed in that heaven (cf. Virg.: “tacito volvuntur sidera lapsu”): and the spiritual beings in it are as fixed and changeless: in fact, with Plato it is the abode only of Divine intelligences, not of the δαίμονες: but the theorists, whom Gregory is refuting, confuse this distinction which their own master drew.

1876 ὑπόνοια.

1877 Such theories are developed in the Phædo of Plato; and constitute ὁ ἕτερος τῶν λόγων, criticized more fully below.

1878 Reading δοκεῖ, ἢ τὸ ἔμπαλιν, instead of the corrupt δοκείη τὸ ἔμπαλιν.

1879 ὁ πρότερος (λόγος). The second is mentioned below. “The same absurdity exists in the other of the two theories as well.” Obviously these two theories are those alluded to at the beginning of this last speech of Macrina, where, speaking of the heathen transmigration, she says, “While some of them extend this absurdity even to trees and shrubs, so that they consider their wooden life as corresponding and akin to humanity (i.e. ὁ προτέρος λόγος), others of them opine only thus much, that the soul exchanges one man for another man,” &c. (i.e. ὁ ἕτερος). In either case the soul is supposed to return from the dead body to heaven, and then by a fresh fall into sin there, to sink down again. The absurdity and the godlessness is just as glaring, Macrina says, in the last case (the Platonic soul-rotation) as in the first (Transmigration pure and simple). But the one point in both in contact with the Christian Resurrection is this, that the soul of the departed does assume another body.

1880 ἡ κατ᾽ αὐτὸν (i.e. βίον) διέξοδος. The Editions have κατ᾽ αὐτῶν. Krabinger well translates by “percursatio.” Cf. Phædrus, p. 247 A.

Nay, even the forecasting by our calculations will be quite useless; virtue will lose its value; and to turn from evil will not be worth the while. Everything will be entirely under the control of the driver, Chance; and our lives will differ not at all from vessels devoid of ballast, and will drift on waves of unaccountable circumstances, now to this, now to that incident of good or of evil. The treasures of virtue will never be found in those who owe their constitution to causes quite contrary to virtue. If God really superintends our life, then, confessedly, evil cannot begin it. But if we do owe our birth to evil, then we must go on living in complete uniformity with it. Thereby it will be shown that it is folly to talk about the “houses of correction” which await us after this life is ended, and the “just recompenses,” and all the other things there asserted, and believed in too, that tend to the suppression of vice: for how can a man, owing, as he does, his birth to evil, be outside its pale? How can he, whose very nature has its rise in a vice, as they assert, possess any deliberate impulse towards a life of virtue? Take any single one of the brute creation; it does not attempt to speak like a human being, but in using the natural kind of utterance sucked in, as it were, with its mother’s milk¹⁸⁸¹

1881 συντρόφῳ

1882 ἀλλὰ μὴν introduces a fact into the argument (cf. καὶ μὴν); Lat. “verum enimvero.”

1883 τὸν ὀφθαλμὸν βλαπτομένην

1884 λόγῳ.

1885 Heb. xi. 3.

1886 that it is an object of his faith, &c. In the Greek the μὲν contrasts the Apostle’s declaration on this point with his silence as to the “how.”

1887 militates against, &c. ᾽Αλλ᾽ οὐχ ὁμολογεῖται (reading then, ὅτι τὸ ἑτερογενὲς ἔχει πρὸς ἐκείνην τὰ ὄντα). Cf. Plato, Tim. 29 C, αὐτοὶ αὑτοῖς οὐχ ὁμολογούμενοι λόγοι, “theories that contradict each other.” This world cannot come out of the Supreme Being: its alien nature contradicts that. Krabinger’s translation is therefore wrong, “sed non constat:” and Oehler’s, “Aber das ist nicht angemacht.”

1888 ὁ λόγος.

1889 Reading ἴση δὴ.

1890 ἡ φύσις.

1891 The long Greek sentence, which begins here with a genitive absolute (τῆς δὲ σωματικῆς κτίσεως, κ.τ.λ.), leading up to nothing but the anacoluthon περὶ ὧν τοσοῦτον κ.τ.λ., has been broken up in translating. Doubtless this anacoluthon can be explained by the sentences linked on to the last words (τῷ λόγῳ) of the genitive clause, which are so long as to throw that clause quite into the background. There is no need therefore to take the words where this anacoluthon begins, down to σῶμα γίνεται, as a parenthesis, with Krabinger and Oehler; especially as the words that follow γίνεται are a direct recapitulation of what immediately precedes.

1892 Reading, as Dr. H. Schmidt conjectures, καὶ τούτου πάλιν, cf. 205 C.

1893 Origen, Gregory’s master in most of his theology, did teach this very thing, the pre-existence of the soul: nor did he attempt to deny that some degree of transmigration was a necessary accompaniment of such teaching; only he would adjust the moral meaning of it. Cf. c. Celsum, Lib. iii. 75. “And even if we should treat (i e. medically) those who have caught the folly of the transmigration of souls from doctors who push down a reasoning nature into any of the unreasoning natures, or even into that which is insensate, how can any say that we shall not work improvement in their souls by teaching them that the bad do not have allotted to them by way of punishment that insensate or unreasoning state, but that what is inflicted by God upon the bad, be it pain or affliction, is only in the way of a very efficacious cure for them? This is the teaching of the wise Christian: he attempts to teach the simpler of his flock as fathers do the merest infants.” Not the theory itself, but the exaggeration of it, is here combated.

1894 ἐκ τρεφομένου τρεφόμενον

1895 κατὰ λόγον.

1896 This seems like a prelude to the Realism of the Middle Ages.

1897 Each individual soul represents, to Gregory’s view, a “thought” of God, which becomes visible by the soul being born. There will come a time when all these “thoughts,” which complete, and do not destroy, each other, will have completed the πλήρωμα (Humanity) which the Deity contemplates. This immediate apparition of a soul, as a “thought” of God, is very unlike the teaching of his master Origen: and yet more sober, and more scriptural.

Whenever, then, humanity shall have reached the plenitude that belongs to it, this on-streaming movement of production will altogether cease; it will have touched its destined bourn, and a new order of things quite distinct from the present precession of births and deaths will carry on the life of humanity. If there is no birth, it follows necessarily that there will be nothing to die. Composition must precede dissolution (and by composition I mean the coming into this world by being born); necessarily, therefore, if this synthesis does not precede, no dissolution will follow. Therefore, if we are to go upon probabilities, the life after this is shown to us beforehand as something that is fixed and imperishable, with no birth and no decay to change it.

The Teacher finished her exposition; and to the many persons sitting by her bedside the whole discussion seemed now to have arrived at a fitting conclusion. Nevertheless, fearing that if the Teacher’s illness took a fatal turn (such as did actually happen), we should have no one amongst us to answer the objections of the unbelievers to the Resurrection¹⁸⁹⁸

1898 The situation here is, as Dr. H. Schmidt points out, just like that in the Phædo of Plato, where all are satisfied with Socrates’ discourse, except Kebes and Simmias, who seize the precious moments still left, to bring forward an objection which none but their great Teacher could remove.

The argument has not yet touched the most vital of all the questions relating to our Faith. I mean, that the inspired Writings, both in the New and in the Old Testament, declare most emphatically not only that, when our race has completed the ordered chain of its existence as the ages lapse through their complete circle¹⁸⁹⁹

1899 περιοδικὴν: a better reading than παροδικὴν, which most Codd. have.

1900 receiving the same term (συνονομαζομένης) as the raising up of that which is actually prostate on the ground (τοῦ γεώδους), i.e. the term ἀνάστασις is extended by analogy to embrace the entire movement of the atoms. Though there is here of course an allusion to the elevation of the nature from the “earthly” to the “heavenly,” and perhaps to the raising of the body from the tomb, yet the primary meaning is that the term ἀνάστασις is derived from its special use of raising from the ground one who lies prostrate (as a suppliant). Some of the elements of the body are supposed to be γεώδη, i.e. mingled with their kindred earth. But though strictly the word ἀνάστασις should apply to them alone, it does not do so, but denotes more generally the movement of all the atoms to reform the body.

But, said she, which of these points has been left unnoticed in what has been said?

Why, the actual doctrine of the Resurrection, I replied.

And yet, she answered, much in our long and detailed discussion pointed to that.

Then are you not aware, I insisted, of all the objections, a very swarm of them, which our antagonists bring against us in connection with that hope of yours?

And I at once tried to repeat all the devices hit upon by their captious champions to upset the doctrine of the Resurrection.

She, however, replied, First, I think, we must briefly run over the scattered proclamations of this doctrine in Holy Scripture; they shall give the finishing touch to our discourse. Observe, then, that I can hear David, in the midst of his praises in the Divine Songs, saying at the end of the hymnody of the hundred and third (104th) Psalm, where he has taken for his theme God’s administration of the world, “Thou shalt take away their breath, and they shall die, and return to their dust: Thou shalt send forth Thy Spirit, and they shall be created: and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.” He says that a power of the Spirit which works in all vivifies the beings into whom it enters, and deprives those whom He abandons of their life. Seeing, then, that the dying is declared to occur at the Spirit’s departure, and the renewal of these dead ones at His appearance, and seeing moreover that in the order of the statement the death of those who are to be thus renewed comes first, we hold that in these words that mystery of the Resurrection is proclaimed to the Church, and that David in the spirit of prophecy expressed this very gift which you are asking about. You will find this same prophet in another place¹⁹⁰¹

1901 Gregory quotes as usual the LXX. for this Psalm (cxviii. 27): Θεὸς κύριος, και ἐπέφανεν ἡμῖν· συστήσασθε τὴν ἐορτὴν ἐν τοῖς πυκάζουσιν ἕως τῶν κεράτων τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου. [Krabinger has replaced συστήσασθε from one of his Codd. for the common συστήσασθαι; but if this is retained ὥστε must be understood. Cf. Matt., Gr. Gr. §532.] The LXX. is rendered by the Psalterium Romanum “constitute diem in confrequentationibus.” So also Eusebius, Theodoret, and Chrysostom interpret. But the Psalterium Gallicanum reproduces the LXX. otherwise, i.e. in condensis, as Apollinaris and Jerome (in frondosis) also understand it. “Adorn the feast with green boughs, even to the horns of the altar”: Luther. “It is true that during the time of the second temple the altar of burnt offering was planted round about at the Feast of Tabernacles with large branches of osiers, which leaned over the edge of that altar”: Delitzsch (who however says that this is, linguistically, untenable). Gregory’s rendering differs from this only in making πυκάζουσιν masculine.

1902 Reading τοῖς ἔξωθεν περιβολῆς

1903 Reading δηλόνοτι

1904 Ezek. xxxvii. 1–10.

1905 Gregory, as often, seems to quote from memory (ὑπαμειφθήσεσθαι, but 1 Cor. xv. 52 ἀλλαγησόμεθα; and St. Paul says ἡμεῖς δὲ, i.e. “we shall be changed,” in distinction from the dead generally, who “shall be raised incorruptible”). But the doctrine of a general resurrection, with or without change, is quite in harmony with the end of this treatise. Cf. p. 468.

But that, said I, was not the point in question. Most of your hearers will assent to the fact that there will some day be a Resurrection, and that man will be brought before the incorruptible tribunal¹⁹⁰⁶

1906 the incorruptible tribunal. The Judgment comes after the Resurrection (cf. 250 A, 254 A, 258 D), and after the purifying and chastising detailed above. The latter is represented by Gregory as a necessary process of nature: but not till the Judgment will the moral value of each life be revealed. There is no contradiction, such as Möller tries to find, between this Dialogue and Gregory’s Oratio Catechetica. There too he is speaking of chastisement after the Resurrection and before the Judgment. “For not everything that is granted in the resurrection a return to existence will return to the same kind of life. There is a wide interval between those who have been purified (i.e. by baptism) and those who still need purification.”…“But as for those whose weaknesses have become inveterate, and to whom no purgation of their defilement has been applied, no mystic water, no invocation of the Divine power, no amendment by repentance, it is absolutely necessary that they should be submitted to something proper to their case,” i.e. to compensate for Baptism, which they have never received (c. 35).

1907 φήσιν should probably be struck out (as the insertion of a copyist encouraged by εἶπον below): five of Krabinger’s Codd. omit it.

1908 εἶπον. Cf. 243 C: καὶ ἅμα λεγειν ἐπεχείρουν ὅσα πρὸς ἀνατροπὴν τῆς ἀναστάσεως παρὰ τῶν ἐριστικῶν ἐφευρίσκεται. So that this is not the first occasion on which objections to the Resurrection have been started by Gregory, and there is no occasion to adopt the conjecture of Augentius and Sifanus, ἂν εἴποιμι, “dixerim”, especially as εἶπον is found in all Codd. without exception.

1909 Reading καταῤ& 191·ικνωθέντα

1910 ἱερᾷ νόσῳ. That these words can mean leprosy, as well as epilepsy, seems clear from Eusebius.

1911 to touch twice the very same flame. Albert Jahn (quoted by Krabinger) here remarks that Gregory’s comparison rivals that of Heraclitus: and that there is a deliberate intention of improving on the expression of the latter, “you cannot step twice into the same stream.” Above (p. 459), Gregory has used directly Heraclitus’ image, “so that Nature’s stream may not flow on for ever, pouring forward in her successive births,” &c. See also De Hom. Opif. c. 13 (beginning).

1912 not the same even as he was yesterday. Cf. Gregory’s Oratio de Mortuis, t. III. p. 633 A. “It is not exaggeration to say that death is woven into our life. Practically such an idea will be found by any one to be based on a reality: for experiment would confirm this belief that the man of yesterday is not the same as the man of today in material substance, but that something of him must be alway becoming dead, or be growing, or being destroyed, or ejected:…Wherefore, according to the expression of the mighty Paul, ‘we die daily’: we are not always the same people remaining in the same homes of the body, but each moment we change from what we were by reception and ejectment, altering continually into a fresh body.”

1913 A fresh objection is here started. It is answered (254 A, B).

1914 Which succeeds (and is bound up with) the Resurrection. The argument is, “the flesh has behaved differently in different persons here; how then can it be treated alike in all by being allowed to rise again? Even before the judgment an injustice has been done by all rising in the same way to a new life.”—In what follows, ἢ τοῦ αὐτοῦ νῦν μὲν, κ.τ.λ., the difficulty of different dispositions in the same person is considered.

Or take the case of one and the same man first sinning and then cleansing himself by repentance, and then, it might so happen, relapsing into his sin; in such a case both the defiled and the undefiled body alike undergoes a change, as his nature changes, and neither of them continue to the end the same; which body, then, is the profligate to be tortured in? In that which is stiffened with old age and is near to death? But this is not the same as that which did the sin. In that, then, which defiled itself by giving way to passion? But where is the old man, in that case? This last, in fact, will not rise again, and the Resurrection will not do a complete work; or else he will rise, while the criminal will escape. Let me say something else also from amongst the objections made by unbelievers to this doctrine. No part, they urge, of the body is made by nature without a function. Some parts, for instance, are the efficient causes within us of our being alive; without them our life in the flesh could not possibly be carried on; such are the heart, liver, brain, lungs, stomach, and the other vitals; others are assigned to the activities of sensation; others to those of handing and walking¹⁹¹⁵

1915 παρεκτικῆς καὶ μεταβατικῆς ἐνεργείας. To the latter expression, which simply means walking, belong the words below, καὶ πρὸς τὸν δρομον οι πόδες (p. 464). Schmidt well remarks that a simpler form than μεταβατικός does not exist, because in all walking the notion of putting one foot in the place of the other (μετά) is implied; and shows that Krabinger’s translation “transeundi officium” makes too much of the word.

1916 Reading ὡς ἄν ἀνάγκην εἶναι, εἰ μὴ εἴη περὶ τὸ σῶμα τὰ πρὸς οὐδὲν, κ.τ.λ. The ἂν seems required by the protasis εἰ μὴ εἴη, and two Codd. supply it. The interrogative sentence ends with ἔσται.—Below (ὥστε παθεῖν ἂν), ἂν is found with the same force with the infinitive; “so that those…might possibly be affected.”

1917 Reading ἐν ἄλλοις ἄρ᾽ ἡ ζωή, as Schmidt suggests, and as the sense seems to require, although there is no ms. authority except for γὰρ.

1918 saved to the last. The word here is διασώζειν; lit. to “preserve through danger,” but it is used by later writers mostly of dialectic battles, and Plato himself uses it so (e.g. Timæus, p. 56, 68, Polit. p. 395) always of “probability.” It is used by Gregory, literally, in his letter to Flavian, “we at last arrived alive in our own district,” and, with a slight difference, On Pilgrimages, “it is impossible for a woman to accomplish so long a journey without a conductor, on account of her natural weakness.” Hence the late word διασώστης, dux itineris.

When I had finished, the Teacher thus replied, You have attacked the doctrines connected with the Resurrection with some spirit, in the way of rhetoric as it is called; you have coursed round and round the truth with plausibly subversive arguments; so much so, that those who have not very carefully considered this mysterious truth might possibly be affected in their view of it by the likelihood of those arguments, and might think that the difficulty started against what has been advanced was not altogether beside the point. But, she proceeded, the truth does not lie in these arguments, even though we may find it impossible to give a rhetorical answer to them, couched in equally strong language. The true explanation of all these questions is still stored up in the hidden treasure-rooms of Wisdom, and will not come to the light until that moment when we shall be taught the mystery of the Resurrection by the reality of it; and then there will be no more need of phrases to explain the things which we now hope for. Just as many questions might be started for debate amongst 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. But since it is our duty not to leave the arguments brought against us in any way unexamined, we will expound the truth as to these points as follows. First let us get a clear notion as to the scope of this doctrine; in other words, what is the end that Holy Scripture has in view in promulgating it and creating the belief in it. 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 form¹⁹¹⁹

1919 The actual language of this definition is Platonic (cf. Sympos. p. 193 D), but it is Gregory’s constant formula for the Christian Resurrection; see De Hom. Opif. c. 17; In Ecclesiast. I. p. 385 A; Funeral Oration for Pulcheria, III. p. 523 C; Orat. de Mortuis, III. p. 632 C; De Virginitate, c. xii. p. 358.

1920 ἐγεννηθη. S. John xvi. 21

1921 τὸν γὰρ τοῦ ζῆν ἀρξάμενον, ζῆσαι χρὴ πάντως. The present infinitive here expresses only a new state of existence, the aorist a continued act. The aorist may have this force, if (as a whole) it is viewed as a single event in past time. Cf. Appian. Bell. Civ. ii. 91, ἦλθον, εἶδον, ἐνίκησα.

As to the how and the when of his dissolution, what do they matter to the Resurrection? Consideration of such points belongs to another line of inquiry altogether. For instance, a man may have lived in bodily comfort, or in affliction, virtuously or viciously, renowned or disgraced; he may have passed his days miserably, or happily. These and such-like results must be obtained from the length of his life and the manner of his living; and to be able to pass a judgment on the things done in his life, it will be necessary for the judge to scrutinize his indulgences, as the case may be, or his losses, or his disease, or his old age, or his prime, or his youth, or his wealth, or his poverty: how well or ill a man, placed in either of these, concluded his destined career; whether he was the recipient of many blessings, or of many ills in a length of life; or tasted neither of them at all, but ceased to live before his mental powers were formed. But whenever the time come that God shall have brought our nature back to the primal state of man, it will be useless to talk of such things then, and to imagine that objections based upon such things can prove God’s power to be impeded in arriving at His end. His end is one, and one only; it is this: when the complete whole of our race shall have been perfected from the first man to the last,—some having at once in this life been cleansed from evil, others having afterwards in the necessary periods been healed by the Fire, others having in their life here been unconscious equally of good and of evil,—to offer to every one of us participation in the blessings which are in Him, which, the Scripture tells us, “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard,” nor thought ever reached. But this is nothing else, as I at least understand it, but to be in God Himself; for the Good which is above hearing and eye and heart must be that Good which transcends the universe. But the difference between the virtuous and the vicious life led at the present time¹⁹²²

1922 Reading with Krabinger, ἐν τῷ νῦν καιρῷ instead of ἐν τῷ μετὰ ταῦτα, which cannot possibly refer to what immediately precedes, i.e. the union with God, by means of the Resurrection. If μετὰ ταῦτα is retained, it must = μετὰ τοῦτον τὸν βίον. Gregory here implies that the Resurrection is not a single contemporaneous act, but differs in time, as individuals differ; carrying out the Scriptural distinction of a first and second Resurrection.

1923 Dr. H. Schmidt has an admirable note here, pointing out the great and important difference between S. Paul’s use of this analogy of the grain of wheat, and that of our Saviour in S. John xii. 23, whence S. Paul took it. In the words, “The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (A.V.), the fact and the similitude exactly correspond. To the corn with its life-engendering shoot, answers the man with his vivifying soul. The shoot, when the necessary conditions are fulfilled, breaks through the corn, and mounts up into an ear, exquisitely developed: so the soul, when the due time is come, bursts from the body into a nobler form. Again, through the death of the integument a number of new corns are produced: so through the death of the body that encases a perfect soul (i.e. that of Jesus), an abundance of blessings is produced for mankind. Everything here exactly corresponds; the principle of life, on the one hand in the corn, on the other hand in the human body, breaks, by dying, into a more beautiful existence. But this comparison in S. Paul becomes a similitude rather than an analogy. With him the lifeless body is set over against the life-containing corn; he does not compare the lifeless body with the lifeless corn: because out of the latter no stalk and ear would ever grow. The comparison, therefore, is not exact: it is not pretended that the rising to life of the dead human body is not a process transcendently above the natural process of the rising of the ear of wheat. But the similitude serves to illustrate the form and the quality of the risen body, which has been in question since v. 35 (1 Cor. xv.), “with what body do they come?” and the salient point is that the risen body will be as little like the buried body, as the ear of wheat is like its corn. The possibility of the Resurrection has been already proved by S. Paul in this chapter by Christ’s own Resurrection, which he states from the very commencement as a fact: it is not proved by this similitude.

“It is sown,” he says, “in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The grain of wheat, after its dissolution in the soil, leaves behind the slightness of its bulk and the peculiar quality of its shape, and yet it has not left and lost itself, but, still self-centred, grows into the ear, though in many points it has made an advance upon itself, viz. in size, in splendour, in complexity, in form. 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 corn 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. Further, it seems to me that the words of the Apostle in every respect harmonize with our own conception of what the Resurrection is. They indicate the very same thing that we have embodied in our own definition of it, wherein we said that the Resurrection is no other thing than “the re-constitution of our nature in its original form.” For, whereas we learn from Scripture in the account of the first Creation¹⁹²⁴

1924 The Resurrection being the second. The ἐπειδὴ here does not give the reason for what precedes: that is given in the words, φησὶ δὴ τοῦτο ὁ ἀπόστολος, to which the leading γὰρ therefore belongs: the colon should be replaced (after ἀνέδραμεν) by a comma.

1925 Reading οὐ μόνον δὲ τοῦτο, κ.τ.λ. The δὲ is not found in two Codd.

1926 i.e.of grain, adopted by the Apostle.

1927 στάχυς here might be the nom. plur. Any way it is a “nominativus pendens.”

1928 This “naked grain” is suggested by the words of S. Paul, not so much 1 Cor. xv. 37, as 2 Cor. v. 4: “For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon.” Tertullian’s words (de resurr. carnis c. 52) deserve to be quoted, “Seritur granum sine folliculi veste, sine fundamento spicæ, sine munimento aristæ, sine superbiâ culmi. Exsurgit copiâ feneratum, compagine ædificatum, ordine structum, cultu munitum, et usquequaque vestitum.” In allusion to this passage (2 Cor. v. 4), Origen says, “Our theory of the Resurrection teaches that the relations of a seed attach to that which the Scriptures call the ‘tabernacle of the soul,’ in which the righteous ‘do groan being burdened,’ not wishing to put it off, but ‘to be clothed upon’ (with something else). We do not, as Celsus thinks, mean by the resurrection anything like the transmigration of souls. The soul, in its essence unbodied and invisible, when it comes into material space, requires a body fitted to the conditions of that particular space: which body it wears, having either put off a former body, or else having put it on over its former body…For instance, when it comes to the actual birth into this world it lays aside the environment (χωρίον) which was needed as long as it is in the womb of her that is with child: and it clothes itself with that which is necessary for one destined to pass through life. Then there is a ‘tabernacle,’ and ‘an earthly house,’ as well: and the Scriptures tell us that this ‘earthly house’ of the tabernacle is to be dissolved, but that the tabernacle itself is to surround itself with another house not made with hands. The men of God declare that the corruptible must put on incorruption (which is a different thing from the incorruptible), and the mortal must put on immortality (which is different from the immortal: just as the relative quality of wisdom is different from that which is absolutely wise). Observe, then, where this system leads us. It says that the souls put on incorruption and immortality like garments which keep their wearer from corruption, and their inmate (τὸν περικείμενον αὐτὰ) from death” (c. Cels. vii. 32). We see at once this is another explanation of the Resurrection, by the σπερματικὸς λόγος of the soul, and not Gregory’s; with him the soul recollects its scattered atoms, and he thus saves the true scriptural view.

1929 This connection of “evil” and “multitude” is essentially Platonic. Cf. also Plotinus, vi. 6. 1: “Multitude, then, is a revolt from unity, and infinity a more complete revolt by being infinite multitude: and so infinity is bad, and we are bad, when we are a multitude” (cf. “Legion” in the parable).

1930 as happens to the grain, i.e. to become bare, as compared with the beautiful envelopments of the entire ear.

1931 “hornstruck” seeds, i.e. those which have been struck by, or have struck, the horns of the oxen, in the process of sowing: according to the rustic superstition, which Gregory Nazianz. in some very excellent hexameters alludes to (Opp. t. II. pp. 66–163): “There is,” he says, “a dry unsoakable seed, which never sinks into the ground, or fattens with the rain; it is harder than horn; its horn has struck the horn of the ox, what time the ploughman’s hand is scattering the grain over his land.” Ruhnken (ad Timæum, p. 155) has collected the ancient authorities on this point. The word is used by Plato of a “hard,” “intractable” person. The “bare grain” of the wicked is here compared to these hard seeds, which even though they may sink into the earth and rise again, yet have a poor and stunted blade, which may never grow.

1932 Reading ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς, instead of τὴν γῆν: for a fall “on to the earth,” instead of “on the earth,” agrees neither with what Gregory (speaking by Macrina) has urged against the heathen doctrine of Transmigration, nor with the words of Scripture which he follows. The “earthly fall” is compared with the heavenly rising: κατάπτωσις, in the sense of a “moral fall,” is used in 3 Maccab. ii. 14 (quoted by Schmidt).

1933 Between the Resurrection and the Αποκατάστασις

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