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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 5
Prologue.
The presiding ministers of the "mystery of godliness" [1935] have need of a system in their instructions, in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved [1936] , through the teaching of the word of Faith being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers. Not that the same method of instruction will be suitable in the case of all who approach the word. The catechism must be adapted to the diversities of their religious worship; with an eye, indeed, to the one aim and end of the system, but not using the same method of preparation in each individual case. The Judaizer has been preoccupied with one set of notions, one conversant with Hellenism, with others; while the Anomoean, and the Manichee, with the followers of Marcion [1937] , Valentinus, and Basilides [1938] , and the rest on the list of those who have wandered into heresy, each of them being prepossessed with their peculiar notions, necessitate a special controversy with their several. opinions. The method of recovery must be adapted to the form of the disease. You will not by the same means cure the polytheism of the Greek, and the unbelief of the Jew as to the Only-begotten God: nor as regards those who have wandered into heresy will you, by the same arguments in each case, upset their misleading romances as to the tenets of the Faith. No one could set Sabellius [1939] right by the same instruction as would benefit the Anomoean [1940] . The controversy with the Manichee is profitless against the Jew [1941] .
[1935] 1 Tim. iii. 16.
[1936] Acts ii. 47.
[1937] Marcion, a disciple of Cerdo, added a third Principle to the two which his master taught. The first is an unnamed, invisible, and good God, but no creator; the second is a visible and creative God, i.e. the Demiurge; the third intermediate between the invisible and visible God, i.e. the Devil. The Demiurge is the God and Judge of the Jews. Marcion affirmed the Resurrection of the soul alone. He rejected the Law and the Prophets as proceeding from the Demiurge; only Christ came down from the unnamed and invisible Father to save the soul, and to confute this God of the Jews. The only Gospel he acknowledged was S. Luke's, omitting the beginning which details our Lord's Conception and Incarnation. Other portions also both in the middle and the end he curtailed. Besides this broken Gospel of S. Luke he retained ten of the Apostolic letters, but garbled even them. Gregory says elsewhere that the followers of Eunomius got their "duality of Gods" from Marcion, but went beyond him in denying essential goodness to the Only-begotten, the "God of the Gospel."
[1938] Of the Gnostics Valentinus and Basilides the truest and best account is given in H. L. Mansel's Gnostics, and in the articles upon them in the Dictionary of Christian Biography. It is there shown how all their visions of celestial Hierarchies, and the romances connected with them, were born of the attempt to solve the insoluble problem, i.e. how that which in modern philosophy would be called the Infinite is to pass into the Finite. They fell into the fatalism of the Emanationist view of the Deity, but still the attempt was an honest one.
[1939] Sabellius. The Sabellian heresy was rife in the century preceding: i.e. that Personality is attributed to the Deity only from the exigency of human language, that consequently He is sometimes characterized as the Father, when operations and works more appropriate to the paternal relation are spoken of; and so in like manner of the Son, and the Holy Ghost; as when Redemption is the subject, or Sanctification. In making the Son the Father, it is the opposite pole to Arianism.
[1940] "We see also the rise (i.e. a.d. 350) of a new and more defiant Arian school, more in earnest than the older generation, impatient of their shuffling diplomacy, and less pliant to court influences. Aetius....came to rest in a clear and simple form of Arianism. Christianity without mystery seems to have been his aim. The Anomoean leaders took their stand on the doctrine of Arius himself and dwelt with emphasis on its most offensive aspects. Arius had long ago laid down the absolute unlikeness of the Son to the Father, but for years past the Arianizers had prudently softened it down. Now, however, unlike' became the watchword of Aetius and Eunomius": Gwatkin's Arians. For the way in which this school treated the Trinity see Against Eunomius, p. 50.
[1941] I.e.an argument against Dualism would only confirm the Jew in his stern monotheism. Manes had taught also that "those souls who believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God renounce the worship of the God of the Jews, who is the Prince of Darkness," and that "the Old Testament was the work of this Prince, who was substituted by the Jews in the place of the true God."
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/nyssa/great-catechism.asp?pg=5
