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 upon848 has spread less far, there the penetrating fierceness of the punishment is mitigated, so far as the subject itself, in the amount of its evil, is diminished. In any and every case evil must be removed out of existence, so that, as we said above, the absolutely non-existent should cease to be at all. Since it is not in its nature that evil should exist outside the will, does it not follow that when it shall be that every will rests in God, evil will be reduced to complete annihilation, owing to no receptacle being left for it?
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?!84?
Why?®> © either we must plan to keep the soul absolutely untouched and free from any stain of evil; or, if our passionate nature makes that quite impossible, then we must plan that our failures in excellence consist only in mild and easily-curable derelictions. For the 1851 4 debtor of ten thousand talents and a Gospel in its teaching distinguishes between debtor of five hundred pence, and of fifty pence and ofa farthing’*°*, which is “the uttermost” of coins; it proclaims that God’s just judgment reaches to all, and enhances the payment necessary as the weight of the debt increases, and on the other hand does not overlook the very smallest debts. But the Gospel tells us that this payment of debts was not effected by the refunding of money, but that the indebted man was delivered to the tormentors until he should pay the whole debt; and that means nothing else than paying in the coin of torment the inevitable recompense, the recompense, I mean, that consists in taking the 1848 1 tod mUpdc Samtavr}. 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.
1849 mpdc GAov ai& 242'va. But cf. Plato, Timeeus, 37, 39 D.
1850 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 protv 1 diddoKados after tpovontéov 1851 distinguishes between. The word here is oidev, which is used of “teaching,” “telling,” after the fashion of the later Greek writers, in making a quotation.
1852 ofa 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.
1853 81d tig Paokvov. Of course 514 cannot go with dpetAny, though Krabinger translates “per tormenta debita.” He has however, with Oehler, pointed the Greek right, so as to take 6~Anua as in opposition to dge1Anv On the Soul and the Resurrection.
share of pain incurred during his lifetime, when he inconsiderately chose mere pleasure, undiluted with its opposite; so that having put off from him all that foreign growth which sin is, and discarded the shame of any debts, he might stand in liberty and fearlessness. Now liberty is the coming up to a state which owns no master and is self-regulating'®° * it is that with which we were gifted by God at the beginning, but which has been obscured by the feeling of shame arising from indebtedness. Liberty too is in all cases one and the same essentially; it has a natural attraction to itself. It follows, then, that as everything that is free will be united with its like, and as virtue is a thing that has no master, that is, is free, everything that is free will be united with virtue. But, further, the Divine Being is the fountain of all virtue. Therefore, those who have parted with evil will be united with Him; and so, as the Apostle says, God will be “all in all'8°>”; for this utterance seems to me plainly to confirm 1854 astate 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.
1855 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 On the Soul and the Resurrection.
the opinion we have already arrived at, for it means that God will be instead of all other things, and in all. For while our present life is active amongst a variety of multiform conditions, and the things we have relations with are numerous, for instance, time, air, locality, food and drink, clothing, sunlight, lamplight, and other necessities of life, none of which, many though they be, are God,—that blessed state which we hope for is in need of none of these things, but the Divine Being will become all, and instead of all, to us, distributing Himself proportionately to every need of that existence. It is plain, too, from the Holy Scripture that God becomes, to those who deserve it, locality, and home, and clothing, and food, and drink, and light, and riches, and dominion, and everything thinkable and nameable that goes to make our life happy. But He that becomes “all” things will be “in all” things too; and herein it appears to me that Scripture teaches the complete annihilation of evil??°. If that is, God will be “in all” existing things, evil; plainly, will not then be amongst them; for if any one was to assume that it did exist then, how will the belief that God will be “in all” be kept intact? The excepting of that one thing, evil, mars the comprehensiveness of the term “all.” But He that will be “in all” will never be in that which does not exist. What then, I asked, are we to say to those whose hearts fail at these calamities!8°7?
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 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.
1856 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 Phedo, 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 ai& 240'v or aiwvioc, but obmote. They were influenced rather by the late Platonists.
1857 Reading ovu@opais, i.e. death especially.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream. Such are the wonders! ®°8 that the participation in the Divine blessings works: it makes him into whom they come larger and more capacious; from his capacity to receive it gets for the receiver an actual increase in bulk as well, and he never stops enlarging. The fountain of blessings wells up unceasingly, and the partaker’s nature, finding nothing superfluous and without a use in that which it receives, makes the whole influx an enlargement of its own proportions, and becomes at once more wishful to imbibe the nobler nourishment and more capable of containing it; each grows along with each, both the capacity which is nursed in such abundance of blessings and so grows greater, and the nurturing supply which comes on in a flood answering to the growth of those increasing powers. It is likely, therefore, that this bulk will mount to such a magnitude as'8°?
a magnitude as'8°?
there is no limit to check, so that we should not grow into it. With such a prospect before us, are you angry that our nature is advancing to its goal along the path appointed for us? Why, our career cannot be run thither-ward, except that which weighs us down, I mean this encumbering load of earthiness, be shaken off the soul; nor can we be domiciled in Purity with the corresponding part of our nature, unless we have cleansed ourselves by a better training from the habit of affection which we have contracted in life towards this earthiness. But if there be in you any clinging to this body'8 , and the being unlocked from this darling thing give you pain, let not this, either, make you despair. You will behold this bodily envelopment, which is now dissolved in death, woven again out of the same atoms, not indeed into this organization with its gross and heavy texture, but with its threads worked up into something more subtle and ethereal, so that you will not only 1858 Such are the wonders. There is here, Denys (De la Philosophie d’Origéne, 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, naot\s meplypagris Extdc (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.
1859 such a magnitude as. Reading, €q’ 6, 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 é¢ @v on the authority of six Codd., and translates “ii in quibus nullus terminus interrumpit incrementum.” But tooodtov can answer to nothing before, and manifestly refers to the relative clause.
1860 Macrina may be here alluding to Gregory’s brotherly affection for her.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
have near you that which you love, but it will be restored to you with a brighter and more entrancing beauty!®*!.”
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 credible8®, as it is told us in Scripture; so that that will not come in question between us: but since the weakness of the human understanding is strengthened still farther by any arguments that are intelligible to us, it would be well not to leave this part of the subject, either, without philosophical examination. Let us consider, then, what ought to be said about it.
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 trees!86 and shrubs, so that they consider their wooden life as corresponding and akin to humanity, others of them hold only thus much—that the soul exchanges one man for another man, so that the life of humanity is 1861 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.
1862 ideiv...tva pn appiBaAAn. This is the reading of the Paris Editt.: ideiv seems to go closely with aAnQéc: so that Krabinger’s deiv is not absolutely necessary.
1863 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 Matthzeus 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 (név €v navti), 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 On the Soul and the Resurrection.
continued always by means of the same souls, which, being exactly the same in number, are being born perpetually first in one generation, then in another. As for ourselves, we take our stand upon the tenets of the Church, and assert that it will be well to accept only so much of these speculations as is sufficient to show that those who indulge in them are to a certain extent in accord with the doctrine of the Resurrection. Their statement, for instance, that the soul after its release from this body insinuates itself into certain other bodies is not absolutely out of harmony with the revival which we hope for. For our view, which maintains that the body, both now, and again in the future, is composed of the atoms of the universe, is held equally by these heathens. In fact, you cannot imagine any constitution of the body independent ofa concourse!®4 of these atoms. But the divergence lies in this: we assert that the same body again as before, composed of the same atoms, is compacted around the soul; they suppose that the soul alights on other bodies, not only rational, but irrational and even insensate; and while all are agreed that these bodies which the soul resumes derive their substance from the atoms of the universe, they part company from us in thinking that they are not made out of identically the same atoms as those which in this mortal life grew around the soul. Let then, this external testimony stand for the fact that it is not contrary to probability that the soul should again inhabit a body; after that however, it is incumbent upon us to make a survey of the inconsistencies of their position, and it will be easy thus, by means of the consequences that arise as we follow out the consistent view, to bring the truth to light. What, then, is to be said about these theories? This that those who would have it that the soul migrates into natures divergent from each other seem to me to obliterate all natural distinctions; to blend and confuse together, in every possible respect, the rational, the irrational, the sentient, and the insensate; if, that is, all these are to pass into each other, with no distinct natural order!*®° secluding them from mutual transition. To say that one and the same soul, on account ofa particular environment of body, is at one time a rational and intellectual soul, and that then it is caverned along with the reptiles, or herds with the birds, or is a beast of burden, or a carnivorous one, or swims in the deep; or even drops down to an insensate thing, so as to strike out roots or become a complete tree, producing buds on branches, and from those buds a flower, or a thorn, or a fruit edible or noxious—to say this, is nothing short of making all things the same and believing that one single nature runs 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, 1864 ovvdpopric 1865 eipyd), i.e. as links in a chain which cannot be altered. Sifanus’ “carcere et claustro” is due to eipyu@ against all the mss. Krabinger’s six have diatetyi(oueva for dractoiyiGopeva of the Editt.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
through all beings; that there is a connexion between them which blends and confuses hopelessly all the marks by which one could be distinguished from another. The philosopher who asserts that the same thing may be born in anything intends no less than that all things are to be one; when the observed differences in things are for him no obstacle to mixing together things which are utterly incongruous. He makes it necessary that, even when one sees one of the creatures that are venom-darting or carnivorous, one should regard it, in spite of appearances, as of the same tribe, nay even of the same family, as oneself. With such beliefs a man will look even upon hemlock as not alien to his own nature, detecting, as he does, humanity in the plant. The grape-bunch itself"”””, produced though it be by cultivation for the purpose of sustaining life, he will not regard without suspicion; for it too comes from a plant!®°’; and we find even the fruit of the ears of corn upon which we live are plants; how, then, can one put in the sickle to cut them down; and how can one squeeze the bunch, or pull up the thistle from the field, or gather flowers, or hunt birds, or set fire to the logs of the funeral pyre: it being all the while uncertain whether we are not laying violent hands on kinsmen, or ancestors, or fellow-country-men, and whether it is not through the medium of some body of theirs that the fire is being kindled, and the cup mixed, and the food prepared? To think that in the case of any single one of these things a soul of a man has become a plant or animal!®8, while no marks are stamped upon them to indicate what sort of plant or animal it is that has been a man, and what sort has sprung from other beginnings,—such a conception as this will dispose him who has entertained it to feel an equal amount of interest in everything: he must perforce either harden himself against actual human beings who are in the land of the living, or, if his nature inclines him to love his kindred, he will feel alike towards every kind of life, whether he meet it in reptiles or in wild beasts. Why, if the holder of such an opinion go into a thicket of trees, even then he will regard the trees as a crowd of men. What sort of life will his be, when he has to be tender towards everything on the ground of kinship, or else hardened towards mankind on account of his seeing no difference between them and the other creatures? From what has been already said, then, we must reject this theory: and there are many other considerations as well which on the grounds of mere 1866 ode...cov Botpvv. 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.
1867 Kal yap Kai adTOS THV PUOLEVWV EoTiv, i.e. the fruit, and not the tree only, belongs to the kingdom of plants: puta in the next sentence is exactly equivalent to ta pudpeva, i.e. plants. The probability that this is the meaning is strengthened by Krabinger’s reading obtoc, from five of his Codd. But still if abtdc 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, m&vta Oyod.
1868 Two Codd. Mon. (D, E) omit putov f GHov, which is repeated below.
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
consistency lead us away from it. For I have heard persons who hold these opinions!8°?
saying that whole nations of souls are hidden away somewhere in a realm of their own, living a life analogous to that of the embodied soul; but such is the fineness and buoyancy of their substance that they themselves’ roll round along with the revolution of the universe; and that these souls, having individually lost their wings through some gravitation towards evil, become embodied; first this takes place in men; and after that, passing from a human life, owing to brutish affinities of their passions, they are reduced!®” to the level of brutes; and, leaving that, drop down to this insensate life of pure nature’”’” which you have been hearing so much of; so that that inherently fine and buoyant thing that the soul is first becomes weighted and downward tending in consequence of some vice, and so migrates to a human body; then its reasoning powers are extinguished, and it goes on living in some brute; and then even this gift of sensation is withdrawn, and it changes into the insensate plant life; but after that mounts up again by the same gradations until it is restored to its place in heaven. Now this doctrine will at once be found, even after a very cursory survey, to have no coherency with itself. For, first, seeing that the soul is to be dragged down from its life in heaven, on account of evil there, to the condition of a tree, and is then from this point, on account of virtue exhibited there, to return to heaven, their theory will be unable to decide which is to have the preference, the life in heaven, or the life in the tree. A circle, in fact, of the same sequences will be perpetually traversed, where the soul, at whatever point it may be, has no resting-place. If it thus lapses from the disembodied state to the embodied, and thence to the insensate, and then springs back to the disembodied, an inextricable confusion of good and evil must result in the minds of those who thus teach. For the life in heaven will no more preserve its blessedness (since evil can touch heaven’s denizens), than the life in trees will be devoid of virtue (since it is from this, they say, that the rebound of the soul towards the good begins, while from there it begins the evil life again). Secondly '”’“, seeing 1869 _ 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.”
1870 dnoxtnvotdobar 1871 tig PuotKijg tavTIC. This is the common reading: but @vois and @uotkds have a rather higher meaning than our equivalent for them: cf. just below, “that inherently (tf @Uoet) fine and buoyant thing”: and Krabinger is probably right in reading putixiic from four Codd.
1872 With the yap 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 kai ov uéxpt TOUTWV, K.T.A.),—it contradicts the truth which it assumes, i.e. that there is no change in heaven.”
On the Soul and the Resurrection.
that the soul as it moves round in heaven is there entangled with evil and is in consequence dragged down to live in mere matter, from whence, however, it is lifted again into its residence on high, it follows that those philosophers establish the very contrary ~*~ of their own views; they establish, namely, that the life in matter is the purgation of evil, while that undeviating revolution along with the stars!°74 is the foundation and cause of evil in every soul: if it is here that the soul by means of virtue grows its wing and then soars upwards, and there that those wings by reason of evil fall off, so that it descends and clings to this lower world and is commingled with the grossness of material nature. But the untenableness of this view does not stop even in this, namely, that it contains assertions diametrically opposed to each other. Beyond this, their fundamental conception!8”>