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Translated by W. Moore and H. A. Wilson
St Gregory of Nyssa Resources Online and in Print
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54 Pages
Page 45
Chapter XXXV.
But the descent into the water, and the trine immersion of the person in it, involves another mystery. For since the method of our salvation was made effectual not so much by His precepts in the way of teaching [2026] as by the deeds of Him Who has realized an actual fellowship with man, and has effected life as a living fact, so that by means of the flesh which He has assumed, and at the same time deified [2027] , everything kindred and related may be saved along with it, it was necessary that some means should be devised by which there might be, in the baptismal process, a kind of affinity and likeness between him who follows and Him Who leads the way. Needful, therefore, is it to see what features are to be observed in the Author of our life, in order that the imitation on the part of those that follow may be regulated, as the Apostle says, after the pattern of the Captain of our salvation [2028] . For, as it is they who are actually drilled into measured and orderly movements in arms by skilled drill-masters, who are advanced to dexterity in handling their weapons by what they see with their eyes, whereas he who does not practise what is shown him remains devoid of such dexterity, in the same way it is imperative on all those who have an equally earnest desire for the Good as He has, to be followers by the path of an exact imitation of Him Who leads the way to salvation, and to carry into action what He has shown them. It is, in fact, impossible for persons to reach the same goal unless they travel by the same ways. For as persons who are at a loss how to thread the turns of mazes, when they happen to fall in with some one who has experience of them, get to the end of those various misleading turnings in the chambers by following him behind, which they could not do, did they not follow him their leader step by step, so too, I pray you mark, the labyrinth of this our life cannot be threaded by the faculties of human nature unless a man pursues that same path as He did Who, though once in it, yet got beyond the difficulties which hemmed Him in. I apply this figure of a labyrinth to that prison of death, which is without an egress [2029] and environs the wretched race of mankind. What, then, have we beheld in the case of the Captain of our salvation? A three days' state of death and then life again. Now some sort of resemblance in us to such things has to be planned. What, then, is the plan by which in us too a resemblance to that which took place in Him is completed? Everything that is affected by death has its proper and natural place, and that is the earth in which it is laid and hidden. Now earth and water have much mutual affinity. Alone of the elements they have weight and gravitate downwards; they mutually abide in each other; they are mutually confined. Seeing, then, the death of the Author of our life subjected Him to burial in earth and was in accord with our common nature, the imitation which we enact of that death is expressed in the neighbouring element. And as He, that Man from above [2030] , having taken deadness on Himself, after His being deposited in the earth, returned back to life the third day, so every one who is knitted to Him by virtue of his bodily form, looking forward to the same successful issue, I mean this arriving at life by having, instead of earth, water poured on him [2031] , and so submitting to that element, has represented for him in the three movements the three-days-delayed grace of the resurrection.
[2026] ek tes kata didachen huphegeseos. This is what Krabinger finds in three Codd., and Morell and Hervetus have rendered in the Latin. But the editions have diadochen Uphegesis does not refer to any "preceding" ("praeeunte," Hervetus) teaching; but to "instruction" of any kind, whether "in the way of teaching," or of example, as below.
[2027] the flesh which He has assumed, and at the same time deified. "Un terme cher aux Pères du IV^e siècle, de nous déifier" (Denis, Philosophie d'Origène, p. 458). This theopoiesis or theosis is more than a metaphor even from the first; "vere fideles vocantur theoi, non naturâ quidem, sed te homoiosei, ait Athanasius;" Casaubon, In Epist. ad Eustath. "We become gods' by grasping the Divine power and substance;" Clement, Stromata, iv. That the Platonists had thus used the word of to pros meizona doxan anupsothen is clear. Synesius in one of his Hymns says to his soul:-- "Soon commingled with the Father Thou shalt dance a god' with God." Just as elsewhere (in Dione, p. 50) he says, "it is not sufficient not to be bad; each must be even a god.'" Cf. also Gregory Thaum. Panegyr Origenis, §142. When we come to the Fathers of the 4th century and later, these words are used more especially of the work of the Holy Spirit upon man. Cf. Cyrill. Alex.: "If to be able to deify' is a greater thing than a creature can do, and if the Spirit does deify,' how can he be created or anything but God, seeing that he deifies'?" "If the Spirit is not God," says Gregory Naz., "let him first be deified, and then let him deify me his equal;" where two things are implied, 1. that the recognized work of the Holy Spirit is to deify,' 2. that this "deification" is not Godhead. It is "the comparative god-making" of Dionysius Areopag. whereby we are "partakers of the Divine nature" (2 Pet. i. 4). On the word as applied to the human nature of our Saviour Himself, Huet (Origeniana, ii. 3, c. 17), in discussing the statement of Origen, in his Commentary on S. Matthew (Tract 27), that "Christ after His resurrection deified' the human nature which He had taken," remarks, "If we take this word so as to make Origen mean that the Word was changed into the human nature, and that the flesh itself was changed into God and made of the same substance as the Word, he will clearly be guilty of that deadly error which Apollinaris brought into the Church (i.e. that the Saviour's soul is not reasonable,' nor His flesh human); or rather of the heresy perpetrated by some sects of the Eutychians, who asserted that the human nature was changed into the Divine after the Resurrection. But if we take him to mean that Christ's human nature, after being divested of weakness after death, assumed a certain Divine quality, we shall be doing Him no wrong." He then quotes a line from Gregory's Iambics:-- "The thing deifying,' and the thing deified,' are one God:" and this is said even of Christ's Incarnation; how much more then can it be said of His Resurrection state, as in this passage of the Great Catechism? Huet adds one of Origen's answers to Celsus: "His mortal body and the human soul in Him, by virtue of their junction or rather union and blending with that (deity), assumed, we assert, qualities of the very greatest kind....What incredibility is there in the quality of mortality in the body of Jesus changing, when God so planned and willed it, into an ethereal and Divine" (i.e. the matter, as the receptacle of these qualities, remaining the same)? It is in this sense that Chrysostom can say that "Christ came to us, and took upon Him our nature and deified it;" and Augustine, "your humanity received the name of that deity" (contr. Arian.).
[2028] Heb. ii. 10; xii. 2.
[2029] adiexodon...phrouran. Krabinger's excellent reading. Cf. Plato, Phaed. p. 62 B, "We men are in a sort of prison."
[2030] S. John iii. 31: 1 Cor. xv. 47 (anothen = ex ouranou).
[2031] epicheomenos. This may be pressed to imply that immersion was not absolutely necessary. So below to hudor tris epicheamenoi
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/nyssa/great-catechism.asp?pg=45
