5. The Longing for Heaven (On the Beatitudes, sermon 3,: Pg 44.1225C-1229A)6
GREGORY OF NYSSA
ing 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 still another. And this never stops until we depart from this material world.
Now as for the reeds, and the straw made from them, which those who are under the tyrant's orders must mix with the bricks (Exod. 5.7, 16-18), this is clearly explained by the holy Gospel and the profound message of the Apostle: both interpret the reeds and the straw as material destined for burning.5
5. The Longing for Heaven (On the Beatitudes, sermon 3,
PG 44.1225C-1229A)6
The more we believe that the Good of its very nature lies far beyond the limits of knowledge, the more we experience a feeling of sorrow that we must be separated from so great and desirable a Good and cannot even encompass it with our minds. And yet we mortals once had a share in this Good which now surpasses all our power to comprehend it. And such was this Good that surpasses all thought and which we possessed that human nature seemed to be another good of the same sort, fashioned in the most exact likeness in the image of its prototype. For man then possessed all those gifts about which we now speculate: incorruptibility, happiness, independence and self-determination, a life without toil or sorrow, absorption in divine things, a vision of the Good with a mind unclouded and pure of any interference. This is what the account of Creation suggests in a few words, where it tells us that man was formed in God's image,7 and that he lived
FROM GLORY TO GLORY 89
in Paradise enjoying the things that grew there. And the fruit of those trees was life and knowledge and the like.
If then we once possessed these gifts, how can we not lament our misery when we compare our former happiness with our present wretchedness ? The lofty has been brought low; what was made in the image of heaven has been reduced to earth; he who was ordained to rule has been enslaved; what was created for immortality has been destroyed by death; he who lived in the delights of Paradise has migrated to this place of toil and sickness; he who was familiar with impassibility has been transformed into a life of passion and death; he who was once independent and self-determining is now ruled by so many tremendous evils that it is hard for us even to count our masters.
For each of our impulses, when it takes control, becomes the master and we the slave. Like a tyrant it seizes the citadel of the soul, and by means of its underlings plays havoc with its subjects, using our own thoughts as the servants of its good pleasure. There they are: anger, fear, cowardice, arrogance, pleasure, grief, hatred, spite, heartless cruelty, jealousy, flat tery, bearing grudges and resentment, and all the other hostile drives within us—there is your array of the masters and ty rants that try to enslave the soul, their prisoner of war, and bring it under their control.
And our tears would flow even more if we reckoned up all those sufferings of the body that are inextricably part of our human condition (I mean all the different kinds of dis eases), when we reflect that man was in the beginning free of all this, and when we contrast the joys we once had with our present misery, setting our sorrow alongside of that better life.