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| To Eustathia, Ambrosia, and Basilissa.
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Letter
XVII.—To Eustathia, Ambrosia, and
Basilissa2242
| 2242 This
Letter was published, Paris 1606, by R. Stephens (not the great
lexicographer), who also translated On Pilgrimages into French
for Du Moulin (see p. 382): and this edition was reprinted a year after
at Hanover, with notes by Isaac Casaubon, “viro docto, sed quod
dolendum, in castris Calvinianis militanti” (Gretser). Heyns
places it in 382, and Rupp also. | . To the most
discreet and devout Sisters, Eustathia and Ambrosia, and to the most
discreet and noble Daughter, Basilissa, Gregory sends greeting in the
Lord.
The meeting with the good and the beloved, and the memorials of the
immense love of the Lord for us men, which are shown in your
localities, have been the source to me of the most intense joy and
gladness. Doubly indeed have these shone upon divinely festal days;
both in beholding the saving tokens2243
| 2243 σωτήρια
σύμβολα.
Casaubon remarks “hoc est τοῦ
σωτῆρος,
Salvatoris, non autem σωτηρίας
ποιητικὰ.” This is itself doubtful; and he also makes the astounding
statement that both Jerome, Augustine, and the whole primitive Church
felt that visits to the Sacred Places contributed nothing to the
alteration of character. But see especially Jerome, De
Peregrinat., and Epistle to Marcella. Fronto Ducæus
adds, “At, velis nolis, σωτήρια sunt illa loca: tum quia aspectu sui corda ad pœnitentiam et
salutares lacrymas non raro commovent, ut patet de Mariâ
Ægyptiacâ; tum quia…” | of the God who
gave us life, and in meeting with souls in whom the tokens of the
Lord’s grace are to be discerned spiritually in such clearness,
that one can believe that Bethlehem and Golgotha, and Olivet, and the
scene of the Resurrection are really in the God-containing heart. For
when through a good conscience Christ has been formed in any, when any
has by dint of godly fear nailed down the promptings of the flesh and
become crucified to Christ, when any has rolled away from himself the
heavy stone of this world’s illusions, and coming forth from the
grave of the body has begun to walk as it were in a newness of life,
abandoning this low-lying valley of human life, and mounting with a
soaring desire to that heavenly country2244
| 2244 ἐπουράνιον
πολίτειαν. Even Casaubon (against Du Moulin here) allows this to mean
the ascetic or monastic Life; “sublimius propositum.” Cf.
Macarius. Hom. v. p. 85. ἐνάρετος
πολιτεία: Isidore of Pelusium, lib. 1, c. xiv, πνευματικὴ
πολιτεία. |
with all its elevated thoughts, where Christ is, no longer feeling the
body’s burden, but lifting it by chastity, so that the flesh with
cloud-like lightness accompanies the ascending soul—such an one,
in my opinion, is to be counted in the number of those famous ones in
whom the memorials of the Lord’s love for us men are to be seen.
When, then, I not only saw with the sense of sight those Sacred Places,
but I saw the tokens of places like them, plain in yourselves as well,
I was filled with joy so great that the description of its blessing is
beyond the power of utterance. But because it is a difficult, not to
say an impossible thing for a human being to enjoy unmixed with evil
any blessing, therefore something of bitterness was mingled with the
sweets I tasted: and by this, after the enjoyment of those blessings, I
was saddened in my journey back to my native land, estimating now the
truth of the Lord’s words, that “the whole world lieth in
wickedness2245
,” so that no single part of the
inhabited earth is without its share of degeneracy. For if the spot
itself that has received the footprints of the very Life is not clear
of the wicked thorns, what are we to think of other places where
communion with the Blessing has been inculcated by hearing and
preaching alone2246
| 2246 ψιλῆς: this word
expresses the absence of something, without implying any contempt:
cf. ψιλὸς
ἄνθρωπος,
ψιλὸς λόγος
(prose). | . With what view I
say this, need not be explained more fully in words; facts themselves
proclaim more loudly than any speech, however intelligible, the
melancholy truth.
The Lawgiver of our life has
enjoined upon us one single hatred. I mean, that of the Serpent: for no
other purpose has He bidden us exercise this faculty of hatred, but as
a resource against wickedness. “I will put enmity,” He
says, “between thee and him.” Since wickedness is a
complicated and multifarious thing, the Word allegorizes it by the
Serpent, the dense array of whose scales is symbolic of this
multiformity of evil. And we by working the will of our Adversary make
an alliance with this serpent, and so turn this hatred against one
another2247
, and perhaps not against ourselves
alone, but against Him Who gave the commandment; for He says,
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy,”
commanding us to hold the foe to our humanity as our only enemy, and
declaring that all who share that humanity are the neighbours of each
one of us. But this gross-hearted age has disunited us from our
neighbour, and has made us welcome the serpent, and revel in his
spotted scales2248
| 2248 τοῖς τῶν
φολίδων
στίγμασιν. For στίγμα with
this meaning and connexion, see Hesiod, Scutum. 166. | . I affirm, then,
that it is a lawful thing to hate God’s enemies, and that this
kind of hatred is pleasing to our Lord: and by God’s enemies I
mean those who deny the glory of our Lord, be they Jews, or downright
idolaters, or those who through Arius’ teaching idolize the
creature, and so adopt the error of the Jews. Now when the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost, are with orthodox devotion being glorified and
adored by those who believe that in a distinct and unconfused Trinity
there is One Substance, Glory, Kingship, Power, and Universal Rule, in
such a case as this what good excuse for fighting can there be? At the
time, certainly, when the heretical views prevailed, to try issues with the
authorities, by whom the adversaries’ cause was seen to be
strengthened, was well; there was fear then lest our saving Doctrine
should be over-ruled by human rulers. But now, when over the whole
world from one end of heaven to the other the orthodox Faith is being
preached, the man who fights with them who preach it, fights not with
them, but with Him Who is thus preached. What other aim, indeed, ought
that man’s to be, who has the zeal for God, than in every
possible way to announce the glory of God? As long, then, as the
Only-begotten is adored with all the heart and soul and mind, believed
to be in everything that which the Father is, and in like manner the
Holy Ghost is glorified with an equal amount of adoration, what
plausible excuse for fighting is left these over-refined disputants,
who are rending the seamless robe, and parting the Lord’s name
between Paul and Cephas, and undisguisedly abhorring contact with those
who worship Christ, all but exclaiming in so many words, “Away
from me, I am holy”?
Granting that the knowledge
which they believe themselves to have acquired is somewhat greater than
that of others: yet can they possess more than the belief that the Son
of the Very God is Very God, seeing that in that article of the Very
God every idea that is orthodox, every idea that is our salvation, is
included? It includes the idea of His Goodness, His Justice, His
Omnipotence: that He admits of no variableness nor alteration, but is
always the same; incapable of changing to worse or changing to better,
because the first is not His nature, the second He does not admit of;
for what can be higher than the Highest, what can be better than the
Best? In fact, He is thus associated with all perfection, and, as to
every form of alteration, is unalterable; He did not on occasions
display this attribute, but was always so, both before the Dispensation
that made Him man, and during it, and after it; and in all His
activities in our behalf He never lowered any part of that changeless
and unvarying character to that which was out of keeping with it. What
is essentially imperishable and changeless is always such; it does not
follow the variation of a lower order of things, when it comes by
dispensation to be there; just as the sun, for example, when he plunges
his beam into the gloom, does not dim the brightness of that beam; but
instead, the dark is changed by the beam into light; thus also the True
Light, shining in our gloom, was not itself overshadowed with that
shade, but enlightened it by means of itself. Well, seeing that our
humanity was in darkness, as it is written, “They know not,
neither will they understand, they walk on in darkness2249
,” the Illuminator of this darkened
world darted the beam of His Divinity through the whole compound of our
nature, through soul, I say, and body too, and so appropriated humanity
entire by means of His own light, and took it up and made it just that
thing which He is Himself. And as this Divinity was not made
perishable, though it inhabited a perishable body, so neither did it
alter in the direction of any change, though it healed the changeful in
our soul: in medicine, too, the physician of the body, when he takes
hold of his patient, so far from himself contracting the disease,
thereby perfects the cure of the suffering part. Let no one, either,
putting a wrong interpretation on the words of the Gospel, suppose that
our human nature in Christ was transformed to something more divine by
any gradations and advance: for the increasing in stature and in wisdom
and in favour, is recorded in Holy Writ only to prove that Christ
really was present in the human compound, and so to leave no room for
their surmise, who propound that a phantom, or form in human outline,
and not a real Divine Manifestation, was there. It is for this reason
that Holy Writ records unabashed with regard to Him all the accidents
of our nature, even eating, drinking, sleeping, weariness, nurture,
increase in bodily stature, growing up—everything that marks
humanity, except the tendency to sin. Sin, indeed, is a miscarriage,
not a quality of human nature: just as disease and deformity are not
congenital to it in the first instance, but are its unnatural
accretions, so activity in the direction of sin is to be thought of as
a mere mutilation of the goodness innate in us; it is not found to be
itself a real thing, but we see it only in the absence of that
goodness. Therefore He Who transformed the elements of our nature into
His divine abilities, rendered it secure from mutilation and disease,
because He admitted not in Himself the deformity which sin works in the
will. “He did no sin,” it says, “neither was guile
found in his mouth2250
.” And this in
Him is not to be regarded in connection with any interval of time: for
at once the man in Mary (where Wisdom built her house), though
naturally part of our sensuous compound, along with the coming upon her
of the Holy Ghost, and her overshadowing with the power of the Highest,
became that which that overshadowing power in essence was: for, without
controversy, it is the Less that is blest by the Greater. Seeing, then,
that the power of the Godhead is an immense and immeasurable thing,
while man is a weak atom, at the moment when the Holy Ghost came upon
the Virgin, and the power of the Highest overshadowed her, the tabernacle
formed by such an impulse was not clothed with anything of human
corruption; but, just as it was first constituted, so it remained, even
though it was man, Spirit nevertheless, and Grace, and Power; and the
special attributes of our humanity derived lustre from this abundance
of Divine Power2251
| 2251 Compare Gregory against Apollinaris (Ad Theophil. iii.
265): “The first-fruits of humanity assumed by omnipotent Deity
were, like a drop of vinegar merged in a boundless ocean, found still
in that Deity, but not in their own distinctive properties: otherwise
we should be obliged to think of a duality of Sons.” In Orat.
Cat. c. 10, he says that the Divine nature is to be conceived as
having been so united with the human, as flame is with its fuel, the
former extending beyond the latter, as our souls also overstep the
limits of our bodies. The first of these passages appeared to Hooker
(V. liii. 2) to be “so plain and direct for Eutyches,” that
he doubted whether the words were Gregory’s. But at the Council
of Ephesus, S. Cyril (of Alexandria), in his contest with the
Nestorians, had showed that these expressions were capable of a
Catholic interpretation, and pardonable in discussing the difficult and
mysterious question of the union of the Two Natures. | .
There are indeed two limits of
human life: the one we start from, and the one we end in: and so it was
necessary that the Physician of our being should enfold us at both
these extremities, and grasp not only the end, but the beginning too,
in order to secure in both the raising of the sufferer. That, then,
which we find to have happened on the side of the finish we conclude
also as to the beginning. As at the end He caused by virtue of the
Incarnation that, though the body was disunited from the soul, yet the
indivisible Godhead which had been blended once for all with the
subject (who possessed them) was not stripped from that body any more
than it was from that soul, but while it was in Paradise along with the
soul, and paved an entrance there in the person of the Thief for all
humanity, it remained by means of the body in the heart of the earth,
and therein destroyed him that had the power of Death (wherefore His
body too is called “the Lord2252
” on account of that inherent
Godhead)—so also, at the beginning, we conclude that the power of
the Highest, coalescing with our entire nature by that coming upon (the
Virgin) of the Holy Ghost, both resides in our soul, so far as reason
sees it possible that it should reside there, and is blended with our
body, so that our salvation throughout every element may be perfect,
that heavenly passionlessness which is peculiar to the Deity being
nevertheless preserved both in the beginning and in the end of this
life as Man2253
| 2253 “Here is the true vicariousness of the Atonement, which
consisted not in the substitution of His punishment for ours, but in
His offering the sacrifice which man had neither the purity nor the
power to offer. From out of the very heart or centre of human
nature…there is raised the sinless sacrifice of perfect humanity
by the God Man.…It is a representative sacrifice, for it consists
of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolic ceremony, but of
just those universal incidents of suffering, which, though he must have
felt them with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human.”
Lux Mundi, p. 218. | . Thus the beginning was not as our
beginning, nor the end as our end. Both in the one and in the other He
evinced His Divine independence; the beginning had no stain of pleasure
upon it, the end was not the end in dissolution.
Now if we loudly preach all
this, and testify to all this, namely that Christ is the power of God
and the wisdom of God, always changeless, always imperishable, though
He comes in the changeable and the perishable; never stained Himself,
but making clean that which is stained; what is the crime that we
commit, and wherefore are we hated? And what means this opposing
array2254
of new Altars? Do we announce another Jesus?
Do we hint at another? Do we produce other scriptures? Have any of
ourselves dared to say “Mother of Man” of the Holy Virgin,
the Mother of God2255
| 2255 As
early as 250, Dionysius of Alexandria, in his letter to Paul of
Samosata, frequently speaks of ἡ θεοτόκος
Μαρία. Later, in the
Council of Ephesus (430), it was decreed that “the immaculate and
ever-Virgin mother of our Lord should be called properly (κυρίως) and really θεοτόκος,” against the Nestorian title χριστοτόκος. Cf. Theodoret. Anath. I. tom. iv. p. 709,
“We call Mary not Mother of Man, but Mother of God;” and
Greg. Naz. Or. li. p. 738. “If any one call not Mary
Mother of God he is outside ‘divinity.’” | : which is what we
hear that some of them say without restraint? Do we romance about three
Resurrections2256
| 2256 μὴ τρεῖς
ἀναστάσεις
μυθοποιοῦμεν; For the first Resurrection (of the Soul in Baptism) and
the second (of the Body), see Rev. xx. 5, with Bishop
Wordsworth’s note. | ? Do we promise the
gluttony of the Millennium? Do we declare that the Jewish
animal-sacrifices shall be restored? Do we lower men’s hopes
again to the Jerusalem below, imagining its rebuilding with stones of a
more brilliant material? What charge like these can be brought against
us, that our company should be reckoned a thing to be avoided, and that
in some places another altar should be erected in opposition to us, as
if we should defile their sanctuaries? My heart was in a state of
burning indignation about this: and now that I have set foot in the
City2257
| 2257 i.e.Cæsarea in
Cappadocia. | again, I am eager to unburden my soul of its
bitterness, by appealing, in a letter, to your love. Do ye,
whithersoever the Holy Spirit shall lead you, there remain; walk with
God before you; confer not with flesh and blood; lend no occasion to
any of them for glorying, that they may not glory in you, enlarging
their ambition by anything in your lives. Remember the Holy Fathers,
into whose hands ye were commended by your Father now in bliss2258
| 2258 Basil, probably: who after Cyril’s exile had been called in
to heal the heresy of Apollinaris, which was spreading in the convents
at Jerusalem. The factious purism, however, which Gregory deplores
here, and which led to rival altars, seems to have evinced itself
amongst the orthodox themselves, “quo majorem apud omnes
opinionem de suâ præstantiâ belli isti cathari
excitarent” (Casaubon). Cyril, it is true, had returned this
year, 382; and spent the last years of his life in his see; but with
more than twenty years interval of Arian rule (Herennius, Heraclius,
and Hilarius, according to Sozomen) the communities of the Catholics
must have suffered from want of a constant control: and unity was
always difficult to maintain in a city frequented by all the
ecclesiastics of the world. Gregory must have “succeeded”
to this charge in his visit to Jerusalem after the Council of Antioch
in 379, to which he refers in his letter On Pilgrimages: but it
is possible that he had paid even an earlier visit: see Letter XIV. p.
539, note 5. | , and to whom we by God’s grace were
deemed worthy to succeed and remove not the boundaries which our
Fathers have laid down, nor put aside in any way the plainness of our
simpler proclamation in favour of their subtler school. Walk by the
primitive rule of the Faith: and the God of peace shall be with you,
and ye shall be strong in mind and body. May God keep you uncorrupted,
is our prayer.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
