5. Progress In Sanctity
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Thus the ecstatic nature of Eros in Gregory becomes clear.
Once again, the doctrine touches the very summit of the spiritual life, where the soul, in discovering more and more of God, more fully realizes His transcendence. But this dis covery, far from making the soul despair, is actually an ex perience of God's fuller presence. It becomes a yearning which fills the soul more fully than any actual possession, in the same way that darkness was a truer knowledge than light.
It is, again, the expression of a lively faith which the love of God excites in the soul, bringing about the indwelling of the Trinity with the experience of God's infinite beauty. We should add, however, that it removes any pretensions the soul may have to a union with God wherein God would be subordinate; rather it displaces the soul and forces it to center itself on God in an act of total dispossession. It is here that we touch at the heart of Gregory's mystical theology in the doctrine of ecstatic love. And it is this that distinguishes his doctrine from the more intellectualistic approach of those great contemplative writers, Origen and Evagrius. In Greg ory, "knowledge becomes love."128
5. PROGRESS IN SANCTITY
In our discussion of the last text we left out a most im portant concept, to which we must now at last return: the soul's perpetual progress in sanctity. Ecstasy, which is ulti mately the experience of God's presence, is not, for Gregory, a phenomenon which recurs in the same way each time; rather, it involves a process of infinite growth. Though God never ceases to remain the Darkness, the soul advances farther and farther into this Darkness. Nothing indeed could show
INTRODUCTION 47
more clearly the positive character of this experience. In any case, we have here what is Gregory's most characteristic doc trine: perfection considered as perpetual progress. We find it developed especially in his Life of Moses.
Gregory's notion of perfection implies a positive idea of the process of change which is a most important contribution to the Christian theology of man. For the Platonist, change is a defect; and the intelligible world is superior to the world of the senses insofar as it is immutable. Even the Christian
Platonism of Origen cannot avoid this difficulty. Change is always thought of as a degeneration from a state of initial perfection; and the transformation wrought by Christ has for its sole purpose to destroy change and restore immutability.
But change, after all, is essential to man's nature; it is that which distinguishes him from God. The logical consequence of this point of view is clear, and Gregory shrewdly saw it.
If change is essential to the human condition, and change is essentially degeneration, then it follows that the possibility of degeneration must be essential to man, and that good can never be secure. In this case the activity of God would be a continual restoration of man to his primitive immortality, and man would constantly tend to fall from it. Such a move ment would be a continual back-and-forth, a continual falling and rising and beginning over again. "The soul," he writes,
"is always unstable, wherever it is; and there is as it were a cycle in which the same things tend to recur."129
Now to overcome this difficulty Gregory had to destroy the equation: good = immutability, and evil = change. And con sequently he had to show the possibility of a type of change which would not merely be a return to immobility—that is, to the mere negation of change. Here then is the revolution
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in thought which Gregory accomplished. He begins by agree ing with Origen that change is essential to created being:
Our nature is essentially changeable. For whatever has received its internal principle by the process of change must necessarily be mutable. Now the pas sage from non-being to being is indeed a type of change, wherein the insubstantial is transformed into substance by the power of God.130
And again:
Everyone is aware that all beings that are subject to change never remain identical with themselves, but are constantly moving from one state to an other by a perpetual change which is either for good or for ill... . Now to be subject to change is, in a sense, constantly to be born again.131
But Gregory's contribution consists of the idea that this change can take place in one of two directions, and that the two sorts of motions are different.
As for the inferior sort of change, it is cyclic, repetitious, a kind of marking time. It is characteristic of the biological world, and, so far as mere movement is concerned, reduces us to the animal level. This is the sort of change we find in nature:
The sea is the receptacle for the waters which flow into it from all sides, and though the inflow never stops, the sea grows no larger. What is the purpose of this passage of water constantly filling what is
INTRODUCTION
already filled? Why does the sea continue to re ceive this stream of water without being increased by the addition? . . . Rising up in the northern part of the earth, the sun proceeds to the south, and then going underneath, it moves in the opposite direction until it comes up again under the northern side of the earth; revolving about con stantly in this way it rolls through the same course, and after its revolution it comes back again. It turns in its circuit, says Ecclesiastes.132
So too it is with the cycle of human generation. It is, indeed, the life cycle as such.
Now the man who is immersed in the life of the body is aware only of this cyclic motion:
The pleasure of drinking ceases when one's thirst is quenched; and similarly in eating, satiety ex tinguishes our appetite. So every desire ceases with the possession of its object, and if it comes again, it also goes away again.133
A man who is addicted to the satisfaction of his desires is like the Hebrews who, while they were prisoners of the Egyptians
(a figure of the devil), were forced into brick-making:
Those who yearn after these pleasures of clay, and keep filling themselves, can never keep the re ceptacle for these pleasures full; though it is always being filled it always keeps emptying again before the next pouring. Thus it is just like the brick mason who throws more and more clay into his
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mould as it keeps constantly emptying. Now I think that you will easily understand this symbol if you consider the appetitive power of the soul. For as soon as a man satisfies his desire by obtaining what he wants, he starts to desire something else and finds himself empty again; and if he satisfies his desire with this, he becomes empty once again and ready for another. And this never stops until we depart from this material world.134
Again, man is locked in the prison of a perpetual cycle, and Gregory compares him with the beasts who turn a mill-stone:
Like the animals who labor and sweat in a mill with their eyes blindfolded, we go about the mill of life always going through the same motions and always coming back to the same place again. I mean that round of hunger, satiety, going to bed, getting up, emptying ourselves and filling ourselves
—one thing constantly follows the other, and we never stop going round in circles until we get out of the mill.135
We may note that Gregory uses the same words for the cycle of desire as he does for the periodic motion of the sea ever filling and emptying. Man is captive within the prison of the cosmos.
A final characteristic of this movement is its insubstantial, illusory quality. It is motion without progress; and for this
Gregory uses the image of sand:
All men's interests in the things of this life are like castles children build in sand. The enjoyment is
INTRODUCTION
5i limited merely to the effort one puts into building them. And as soon as you stop, the sand collapses and leaves not a trace of the work you put in.136
Still more clearly in another passage:
It is like men who try to climb through sand. It does not matter whether they take big strides or not; they waste their effort. For their feet con stantly slip to the bottom with the sand, and so, despite all their energy, they make no progress whatsoever.137
We thus arrive at the paradox that what the Platonists call motion is, in reality, immobility; for the energy expended leaves the object exactly as it was and involves no spiritual change.
Now the second, and higher, type of movement is sum marized by Gregory in a most unusual passage:
For man does not merely have an inclination to evil; were this so, it would be impossible for him to grow in good, if his nature possessed only an inclination towards the contrary. But in truth the finest aspect of our mutability is the possibility of growth in good; and this capacity for improvement transforms the soul, as it changes, more and more into the divine. And so . . . what appears so terri fying (I mean the mutability of our nature) can really be a pinion in our flight towards higher things, and indeed it would be a hardship if we were not susceptible of the sort of change which is towards the better. One ought not then to be dis-
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tressed when one considers this tendency in our nature; rather let us change in such a way that we may constantly evolve towards what is better, being transformed from glory to glory, and thus always improving and ever becoming more perfect by daily growth, and never arriving at any limit of perfection. For that perfection consists in our never stopping in our growth in good, never circumscrib ing our perfection by any limitation.138
We should note some of the expressions used in this text.
First of all there is man's anxiety and distress in the face of change. It may be said that this is characteristic of every nat ural religion: it is an anxiety that is associated with a purely negative concept of change, change that can only be for evil.
But as Gregory so often reminds us, there is a higher type of motion, a "good change," a "change for the better";139 and it is this sort of movement that St. Paul means when he speaks of our transformation from glory to glory (2 Cor.
3.18); it is the perpetual growth in good. It is thus a mistake to imagine perfection as a state of complete immobility in restored innocence. Perfection is progress itself: the perfect man is the one who continually makes progress. And this cannot have a limit. The "pinion" or wing refers to the trans formation into Spirit (pneuma), into the Dove; and the wing becomes a new principle of activity and not merely a negative thing, not merely the cessation of all evil change. In other words, and here is the solution to our problem, once the good has been won and the soul has been transformed into the Dove, it is no longer a question of protecting this possession against the threat of a change or a fall; rather, the good once
INTRODUCTION
acquired is merely the beginning of a new acquisition. In this way, the notion of change, which is essential to the human condition, can take on a wholly positive aspect.
By a reversal of values, the constant change of the physical world was seen as a real immobility; so too here, permanence in good becomes, paradoxically, the principle of authentic change. He says:
Here we have a very great paradox: motion and stability are the same. For usually speaking, one who is rising is not standing still, and the man who is standing still is not rising. But here he arises precisely because he is stationary. This means that a man advances farther on the path of perfection precisely insofar as he remains fixed and immov able in good. ... It is like men who try to climb through sand. It does not matter whether they take big strides or not; they waste their effort. For their feet constantly slip to the bottom with the sand, and so despite all their energy, they make no progress whatsoever. But if, in the words of the Psalmist, a man drags his feet from the mire of the pit and sets them firmly upon the rock, . . . the more steadfast and unshakable he becomes in good, so much the more quickly will he accomplish his course. His very stability becomes as a wing in his flight towards heaven; his heart becomes winged because of his stability in good.140
We have thus reached the most important intuition of all of Gregory's mystical theology. The wings of the Dove refer to the participation in the divine life; they are the entire posi-
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tive aspect of all the forces that have transformed the soul. But these wings only help it to rise ever higher and higher, be cause the heavens to which it soars are an infinite abyss. God becomes ever more intimate and ever more distant: more intimate as the Dove, more distant as the Darkness, known by the smallest child and yet unknown to the greatest mystic.
For the soul possesses God and yet still seeks Him: it is at once changeable and unchanging:
Now here is a very strange paradox. All wells hold still water; only in the bride is there said to be running water. She has the depth of a well to gether with the constant flow of a river.141
Indeed, this dual aspect is essential to the human condition.
It is man that is to be transformed into Spirit, and it is essen tial to man that this transformation be a constant becoming.
This, then, is the meaning of the image of God in man, which indicates at once the process of divinization as well as the distinction that exists between God and man. Thus it can be shown that man must necessarily be changeable insofar as he is but an imitation of the divine nature. For an imitation would be identical with its model if it did not exist in a different way.
So here the precise difference between the image and its archetype is that the archetype is immutable and the image is not, but is essentially changeable, as we have said. Now change is motion which con stantly progresses from one state to another. But there are two kinds of motion: the one, which is always towards the good, never ceases in its prog-
INTRODUCTION
ress, because there is no limit to its possible trans formation.142
And this is a direct consequence of the divine transcendence.
However much the soul may be transformed into the Dove and participate in God, God remains ever beyond, and the soul must constantly move forward:
The divine nature ... is utterly immune to any participation in evil and thus possesses the good without limit. . . . When therefore it draws human nature to participate in its perfection, because of the divine transcendence it must always be superior to our nature in the same degree. The soul grows by its constant participation in that which transcends it; and yet the perfection in which the soul shares remains ever the same, and is always discovered by the soul to be transcendent to the same degree.143
We can see then why it was that Moses, though he had seen God face to face, asked God to show Himself still more:
Indeed He would not have shown Himself to His servant if the vision would have been such as to terminate Moses' desire; for the true vision of God consists rather in this, that the soul that looks up to God never ceases to desire Him. ... The man who thinks that God can be known does not really have life; for he has been falsely diverted from true
Being to something devised by his own imagina tion. For true Being is true Life, and cannot be known by us. If then this life-giving nature tran scends knowledge, what our minds attain in this