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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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14 Pages
Page 11
So that if these despisers and impugners of their very own life conceive of the gift as a little one, and decree accordingly to slight the Being who imparts the gift, let them be made aware that they cannot limit to one Person only their ingratitude, but must extend its profanity beyond the Holy Spirit to the Holy Trinity Itself. For like as the grace flows down in an unbroken stream from the Father, through the Son and the Spirit, upon the persons worthy of it, so does this profanity return backward, and is transmitted from the Son to the God of all the world, passing from one to the other. If, when a man is slighted, He Who sent him is slighted (yet what a distance there was between the man and the Sender!), what criminality [1259] is thereby implied in those who thus defy the Holy Spirit! Perhaps this is the blasphemy against our Law-giver [1260] for which the judgment without remission has been decreed; since in Him the [1261] entire Being, Blessed and Divine, is insulted also. As the devout worshipper of the Spirit sees in Him the glory of the Only-begotten, and in that sight beholds the image of the Infinite God, and by means of that image makes an outline, upon his own cognition [1262] , of the Original, so most plainly does this contemner [1263] (of the Spirit), whenever he advances any of his bold statements against the glory of the Spirit, extend, by virtue of the same reasoning, his profanity to the Son, and beyond Him to the Father. Therefore, those who reflect must have fear lest they perpetrate an audacity the result of which will be the complete blotting out of the perpetrator of it; and while they exalt the Spirit in the naming, they will even before the naming exalt Him in their thought, it being impossible that words can mount along with thought; still when one shall have reached the highest limit of human faculties, the utmost height and magnificence of idea to which the mind can ever attain, even then one must believe it is far below the glory that belongs to [1264] Him, according to the words in the Psalms, that "after exalting the Lord our God, even then ye scarcely worship the footstool beneath His feet": and the cause of this dignity being so incomprehensible is nothing else than that He is holy.
[1259] katakrisin
[1260] kata tou nomothetou is Mai's reading. But kata ton nomotheten, i.e. according to S. Mark iii. 29, S. Luke xii. 10, would be preferable. Migne reads para in this sense.
[1261] to has probably dropped out.
[1262] te gnosei heautou.
[1263] Something has dropped out here.
[1264] epiballouses. Cf. Ps. xcix. 5; 2 Chron. xxviii. 2.
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/nyssa/holy-spirit.asp?pg=11
