Gregory of Nyssa: Uncovering the Buried Beauty of the Soul Saturday, Dec 15 2012

Continued from here…

There is no such thing in the world as evil irrespective of a will, and discoverable in a substance apart from that.

Every creature of God is good, and nothing of His “to be rejected”; all that God made was “very good.”

But the habit of sinning entered as we have described, and with fatal quickness, into the life of man; and from that small beginning spread into this infinitude of evil.

Then that godly beauty of the soul which was an imitation of the Archetypal Beauty, like fine steel blackened with the vicious rust, preserved no longer the glory of its familiar essence, but was disfigured with the ugliness of sin.

This thing so great and precious, as the Scripture calls him, this being man, has fallen from his proud birthright.

As those who have slipped and fallen heavily into mud, and have all their features so besmeared with it, that their nearest friends do not recognize them, so this creature has fallen into the mire of sin and lost the blessing of being an image of the imperishable Deity.

He has clothed himself instead with a perishable and foul resemblance to something else; and this Reason counsels him to put away again by washing it off in the cleansing water of this calling.

The earthly envelopment once removed, the soul’s beauty will again appear. Now the putting off of a strange accretion is equivalent to the return to that which is familiar and natural.

Yet such a return cannot be but by again becoming that which in the beginning we were created. In fact this likeness to the divine is not our work at all; it is not the achievement of any faculty of man.

It is the great gift of God bestowed upon our nature at the very moment of our birth; human efforts can only go so far as to clear away the filth of sin, and so cause the buried beauty of the soul to shine forth again.

This truth is, I think, taught in the Gospel, when our Lord says, to those who can hear what Wisdom speaks beneath a mystery, that “the Kingdom of God is within you.”

That word points out the fact that the Divine good is not something apart from our nature, and is not removed far away from those who have the will to seek it.

It is in fact within each of us, ignored indeed, and unnoticed while it is stifled beneath the cares and pleasures of life, but found again whenever we can turn our power of conscious thinking towards it.

Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): On Virginity, 12.

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Benedict XVI: St John Damascene – “The Great Sea of Love that God Bears Towards Man” Tuesday, Dec 4 2012

John Damascene was able serenely to deduce: “God, who is good…created him [man] envisaging him and creating him as a being capable of thought, enriched with the word, and orientated towards the spirit”.

And to clarify this thought further, he adds: “We must allow ourselves to be filled with wonder at all the works of Providence, to accept and praise them all, overcoming any temptation to identify in them aspects which to many may seem unjust or iniquitous, and admitting instead that the project of God goes beyond man’s capacity to know or to understand, while on the contrary only he may know our thoughts, our actions, and even our future”.

Plato had in fact already said that all philosophy begins with wonder. Our faith, too, begins with wonder at the very fact of the Creation, and at the beauty of God who makes himself visible.

The optimism of the contemplation of nature, of seeing in the visible creation the good, the beautiful, the true, this Christian optimism, is not ingenuous: it takes account of the wound inflicted on human nature by the freedom of choice desired by God and misused by man, with all the consequences of widespread discord which have derived from it.

From this derives the need, clearly perceived by John Damascene, that nature, in which the goodness and beauty of God are reflected, wounded by our fault, “should be strengthened and renewed” by the descent of the Son of God in the flesh, after God had tried in many ways and on many occasions, to show that he had created man so that he might exist not only in “being”, but also in “well-being”.

With passionate eagerness John explains: “It was necessary for nature to be strengthened and renewed, and for the path of virtue to be indicated and effectively taught, the path that leads away from corruption and towards eternal life…. So there appeared on the horizon of history the great sea of love that God bears towards man (philanthropias pelagos)”….

It is a fine expression. We see on one side the beauty of Creation, and on the other the destruction wrought by the fault of man. But we see in the Son of God, who descends to renew nature, the sea of love that God has for man.

John Damascene continues: “he himself, the Creator and the Lord, fought for his Creation, transmitting to it his teaching by example…. And so the Son of God, while still remaining in the form of God, lowered the skies and descended… to his servants… achieving the newest thing of all, the only thing really new under the sun, through which he manifested the infinite power of God”.

Benedict XVI (b. 1927): On St John Damascene [c.675-749] (General Audience, 6 May 2009).

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Gregory of Nyssa: Archetypal Beauty, the Image of God, Freedom of the Will, and the Sin of Adam Sunday, Nov 18 2012

This reasoning and intelligent creature, man, was at once the work and the likeness of the Divine and Imperishable Mind.

For so, in the story of the Creation, it is written of him that “God made man in His image”.

This creature, I say, did not in the course of his first production have united to the very essence of his nature the liability to passion and to death.

Indeed, the truth about the image could never have been maintained if the beauty reflected in that image had been in the slightest degree opposed to the Archetypal Beauty.

Passion was introduced afterwards, subsequent to man’s first organization; and it happened in this way.

Being the image and the likeness, as has been said, of the Power which rules all things, man kept also in the matter of a Free-Will this likeness to Him whose Will is over all.

He was enslaved to no outward necessity whatever; his feeling towards that which pleased him depended only on his own private judgment.

He was free to choose whatever he liked; and so he was a free agent, though circumvented with cunning, when he drew upon himself that disaster which now overwhelms humanity.

He became himself the discoverer of evil, but he did not therein discover what God had made.

For God did not make death.

Man became, in fact, himself the fabricator, to a certain extent, and the craftsman of evil.

All who have the faculty of sight may enjoy equally the sunlight; and any one can if he likes put this enjoyment from him by shutting his eyes.

In that case it is not that the sun retires and produces that darkness, but the man himself puts a barrier between his eye and the sunshine.

The faculty of vision cannot indeed, even in the closing of the eyes, remain inactive, and so this operative sight necessarily becomes an operative darkness rising up in the man from his own free act in ceasing to see.

Again, a man in building a house for himself may omit to make in it any way of entrance for the light.

He will necessarily be in darkness, though he cuts himself off from the light voluntarily.

So the first man on the earth, or rather he who generated evil in man, had for choice the Good and the Beautiful lying all around him in the very nature of things.

Yet he wilfully cut out a new way for himself against this nature, and in the act of turning away from virtue, which was his own free act, he created the usage of evil.

Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): On Virginity, 12.

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Jordan of Saxony: Their Hearts Catch Fire in Their Prayers and Meditations Thursday, Nov 8 2012

I urge you to think of those “ancient paths” by which our predecessors hastened to their rest with all the intensity of their spirit, and now reign with the Lord, forever comforted in bliss and repose; all the days of pain with which God humbled them have now been turned to joy.

When they lived on earth, it was for spiritual gifts that they were jealous; they thought little of themselves and scorned the world. It was the kingdom they longed for, and so they were strong to endure hardship, enthusiastic for poverty, on fire with love.

Surely our father Dominic, of holy memory, was one of these. When he was living with us in the flesh, he walked by the Spirit, not only not fulfilling the desires of the flesh, but actually quenching them at the source.

He displayed a true spirit of poverty in his clothing, his food and his behaviour. He prayed constantly, was outstandingly compassionate, used to intercede for his sons with abundant tears because of the fervour of his zeal for souls.

Difficulties did not daunt him, obstacles did not worry him. We could see from the works he accomplished, from his virtues and miracles, what a great man he was on earth. Now that he is with God, his greatness has been made known to us in these last days, when we were moving his holy body from its previous burial place to a more noble tomb.

Praise to our Redeemer! Praise to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for choosing such a man as this to be his servant and for setting such a man over us as our father, to form us by his religious training and inspire us by the example of his resplendent holiness.

[...] There are some among you, by the mercy of God, for me to rejoice over and thank God for. There are some whose aim is beauty, who do cultivate their consciences, who do seek perfection and who do work hard at their preaching, who are zealous in study, whose hearts catch fire in their prayers and meditations, who keep the Lord always before them, looking to him as the one who will reward and judge their souls.

Rejoice, if you are such as these, and seek to abound still more. But if you are not yet like this, work at it, devote energy and attention to it, so that you may grow towards salvation in him who called you to this state of grace in which you find yourself, not to make you lukewarm, but to make you perfect.

Jordan of Saxony (c.1190-1237): Encyclical Letter, from the Supplement to the Liturgy of the Hours for the Order of Preachers, Feast of All Saints of the Order of Preachers (November 7^th).

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Gregory Palamas: A Universal Mixing Bowl of All Divine, Angelic and Human Things Good and Beautiful Tuesday, Aug 14 2012

The Mother of God…“stands at the right of the King of all clothed in a vesture wrought with gold and arrayed with divers colors” (cf. Ps. 44:9).

By “vesture wrought with gold” understand her divinely radiant body arrayed with divers colors of every virtue.

She alone in her body, glorified by God, now enjoys the celestial realm together with her Son.

For, earth and grave and death did not hold forever her life-originating and God-receiving body – the dwelling more favored than Heaven and the Heaven of heavens.

If, therefore, her soul, which was an abode of God’s grace, ascended into Heaven when bereaved of things here below, a thing which is abundantly evident, how could it be that the body which not only received in itself the pre-eternal and only-begotten Son of God, the ever-flowing Wellspring of grace, but also manifested His Body by way of birth, should not have also been taken up into Heaven?

[...] The body which gave birth is glorified together with what was born of it with God-befitting glory, and the “ark of holiness” (Ps. 131:8) is resurrected, after the prophetic ode, together with Christ Who formerly arose from the dead on the third day.

[...] There was no necessity for her body to delay yet a little while in the earth, as was the case with her Son and God, and so it was taken up straightway from the tomb to a super-celestial realm, from whence she flashes forth most brilliant and divine illuminations and graces, irradiating earth’s region; thus she is worshipped and marvelled at and hymned by all the faithful .

Willing to set up an image of all goodness and beauty and to make clearly manifest His own therein to both angels and men, God fashioned a being supremely good and beautiful, uniting in her all good, seen and unseen, which when He made the world He distributed to each thing and thereby adorned all.

Or rather one might say, He showed her forth as a universal mixing bowl of all divine, angelic and human things good and beautiful and the supreme beauty which embellished both worlds.

By her ascension now from the tomb, she is taken from the earth and attains to Heaven and this also she surpasses, uniting those on high with those below, and encompassing all with the wondrous deed wrought in her.

In this manner she was in the beginning “a little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:6), as it is said, referring to her mortality, yet this only served to magnify her pre-eminence as regards all creatures. Thus all things today fittingly gather and commune for the festival.

Gregory Palamas (1296-1359): extracted from A Homily on the Dormition of Our Supremely Pure Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary from the translation at Internet History Sourcebook Project.

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Maximus the Confessor: The Festal Assembly of Earthly and Heavenly Powers Monday, Jun 25 2012

The Logos [Greek for the Word of God; the Son of God] bestows adoption on us when He grants us that birth and deification which, transcending nature, comes by grace from above through the Spirit.

The guarding and preservation of this in God depends on the resolve of those thus born: on their sincere acceptance of the grace bestowed on them and, through the practice of the commandments, on their cultivation of the beauty given to them by grace.

Moreover, by emptying themselves of the passions they lay hold of the divine to the same degree as that to which, deliberately emptying Himself of His own sublime glory, the Logos of God truly became man.

The Logos…‘made peace through the blood of His Cross…between things on earth and things in heaven” (Col. 1:20), and reduced to impotence the hostile powers that fill the intermediary region between heaven and earth.

He thereby made the festal assembly of earthly and heavenly powers a single gathering for His distribution of divine gifts, with humankind joining joyfully with the powers on high unanimous praise of God’s glory.

Also, after fulfilling the divine purpose undertaken on our behalf, when He was taken up with the body which He had assumed, He united heaven and earth in Himself.

He joined what is sensible with what is intelligible, and revealed creation as a single whole whose extremes are bound together through virtue and through knowledge of their first Cause.

He shows, I think, through what He has accomplished mystically, that the Logos unites what is separated and that alienation from the Logos divides what is united.

[...] The Logos enables us to participate in divine life by making Himself our food, in a manner understood by Himself and by those who have received from Him a ‘noetic’ [i.e. in the mind,; in the heart] perception of this kind.

It is by tasting this food that they become truly aware that the Lord is full of virtue (cf Ps. 34:8).

For He transmutes with divinity those who eat it, bringing about their deification, since He is the bread of life and of power in both name and reality.

He restores human nature to itself. First, He became man and kept His will dispassionate and free from rebellion against nature, so that it did not waver in the slightest from its own natural movement even with regard to those who crucified Him.

On the contrary, it chose death for their sake instead of life, thereby demonstrating the voluntary character of His passion, rooted as it is in His love for humankind.

Maximus the Confessor (580-662): On the Lord’s Prayer, Text (slightly adapted) from G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (trans. and eds.) The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2 (Faber & Faber, London & Boston: 1979).

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Ambrose of Milan: Blessed the Soul that Enters the Inner Chambers. Friday, Jun 1 2012

The king brought me to his inner apartment.

Blessed the soul that enters the inner chambers.

For, rising up from the body, she becomes more distant from all, and she searches and seeks within herself, if in any way she can pursue the divine.

And when she can obtain it, having passed beyond intelligible things, she is strengthened in it and fed by it.

Such was Paul, who knew that he had been caught up into paradise but did not know whether he had been caught up in the body or out of the body.

For his soul had risen up from the body, had withdrawn from the bonds of the flesh, and had lifted herself up.

And he was made alien to himself and held within his very self the secret words which he heard and could not reveal, because, as he remarked, it was not permitted a man to speak such thoughts.

And so the good soul scorns visible and material things and does not linger over them or delay or tarry or despise them.

Rather, she rises to things eternal and immaterial and filled with wonders, for she rises with pure thought from a pious mind.

Intent on perfection, she strives only for the good that is God’s and considers none other necessary, because she possesses that which is supreme.

And so a man of this kind, in whom there is beauty of soul, has more than enough for himself, though he is alone, for he is himself sufficient for himself.

And yet the man is never alone who has the Lord with him as his protector.

[...] Therefore know yourself and the beauty of your nature, and go forth as if your foot had been freed of bonds and were visible in its bare step, so that you may not feel the fleshly coverings, that the bonds of the body may not entangle the footstep of your mind, that your foot may appear beautiful.

For such are they who are chosen by the Lord to announce the kingdom of heaven, and of them it was said, How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Gospel of peace!

Such was Moses, to whom it is said, Remove the sandals from your feet, so that when he was about to call the people to the kingdom of God he might first put aside the garments of the flesh and might walk with his spirit and the footstep of the mind naked.

Ambrose of Milan (c. 337-397): On Isaac, or the Soul 4.11-12, 16; FoC 65 (1972) tr. McHugh; from the Monastic Office of Vigils, Friday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time Year 2.

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Bernard of Clairvaux: Christ Could be Touched, but by the Heart, not by the Hand Sunday, Apr 22 2012

Jesus saith to her [Mary Magdalen]: “Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17).  

She is impelled, therefore, to seek the surer knowledge of faith, which discerns truths unknown to the senses, beyond the range of experience.

When he said: “Do not touch me,” he meant: depend no longer on this fallible sense; put your trust in the word, get used to faith.

Faith cannot be deceived. With the power to understand invisible truths, faith does not know the poverty of the senses; it transcends even the limits of human reason, the capacity of nature, the bounds of experience.

Why do you ask the eye to do what it is not equipped to do? And why does the hand endeavor to examine things beyond its reach?

What you may learn from these senses is of limited value. But faith will tell you of me without detracting from my greatness.

Learn to receive with greater confidence, to follow with greater security, whatever faith commends to you.

“Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father.” As if after he had ascended he wished to be or could be touched by her!

And yet he could be touched, but by the heart, not by the hand; by desire, not by the eye; by faith, not by the senses.

Why do you want to touch me now, he says; would you measure the glory of the resurrection by a physical touch?

Do you not remember that, while I was still mortal, the eyes of the disciples could not endure for a short space the glory of my transfigured body that was destined to die?

I still accommodate myself to your senses by bearing this form of a servant which you are accustomed to seeing.

But this glory of mine is too wonderful for you, so high that you cannot reach it.

Defer your judgment therefore, refrain from expressing an opinion, do not entrust the defining of so great a matter to the senses; it is for faith to pronounce on it.

With its fuller comprehension, faith will define it more worthily and more surely. In its deep and mystical breast it can grasp what is the length and breath and height and depth.

‘What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived,’ is borne within itself by faith, as if wrapped in a covering and kept under seal.

She therefore will touch me worthily who will accept me as seated with the Father, no longer in lowly guise, but in my own flesh transformed with heaven’s beauty.

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153): Sermons on the Song of Songs, 28, 9-10.

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Gregory of Nyssa: The Word Unites Humanity to God Methodically, Step by Step Thursday, Dec 29 2011

How should we interpret the words, Behold he comes, leaping over the mountains (Song of Songs 2:8)?

Perhaps they foresee the divine plan, spoken of in the Gospel and foretold by the prophets, whereby the Word of God became visible to us by his coming in the flesh.

See, there he stands, looking through the windows, peeping through the lattices (2:9).

The Word unites humanity to God methodically, step by step.

First he enlightens us through the prophets and the precepts of the law; for we take the prophets to be the windows admitting the light and the network of the law’s commands to be the lattice.

Through both of these steals the brilliance of the true light.

Afterward comes the full illumination when by union with our nature the true light shines upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

First the light of the ideas contained in the prophets and the law shines upon the soul through windows and lattices apprehended by our minds, filling it with a desire to see the sun in the open air. Then the desire is fulfilled.

Rise up my companion, my fair one, my dove, and come (2:10). How much the Word teaches us in these few words!

We watch him leading the bride to the heights along the ascending path of virtue, as though up a flight of steps.

First he sends her a ray of light through the windows which are the prophets and the lattice which is the precepts of the law, calling her to approach the light and to become beautiful as she takes on in the light the form of a dove.

Then when she has taken on as much of the divine beauty as she can, as though she had not yet received any part in it, he draws her once again from the beginning toward the supreme Beauty in which she is to share.

As a result her desire becomes more intense the further she advances toward what is continually being revealed to her.

Moreover, because of the surpassing greatness of the blessings she is always receiving by his grace who surpasses all, she seems to be making the journey for the first time.

And so, after she has risen the Word again says ‘Rise’ and after she has come he says ‘Come’.

One who has thus risen never lacks the opportunity to rise further and one who is running toward the Lord never reaches the end of the space available for the divine race.

We should always be rising and those whom the race is bringing close to the goal should never stop.

Each time the Word says ‘Rise’ and ‘Come’ he gives the power to ascend to still loftier heights.

Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): Homily 5 on the Song of Songs (Jaeger 6, 140-159); from the Monastic Office of Vigils for December 31st, Year 2

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Elizabeth of the Trinity: The Virgin Remained the Adorer of the Gifts of God Saturday, Jul 2 2011

“If you knew the gift of God,” Christ said one evening to the Samaritan woman.

[...] There is one who knew this gift of God, one who did not lose one particle of it, one who was so pure, so luminous that she seemed to be the Light itself: Speculum justitiae.

One whose life was so simple, so lost in God that there is hardly anything we can say about it:  Virgo fidelis, that is, “Faithful virgin, “who kept all these things in her heart.”

She remained so little, so recollected in God’s presence, in the seclusion of the temple, that she drew down upon herself the delight of the Holy Trinity: “Because He has looked upon the lowliness of His servant, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!”

The Father bending down to this beautiful creature, who was so unaware of her own beauty, willed that she be the Mother in time of Him whose Father he is in eternity.

Then the Spirit of love who presides over all of God’s works came upon her: the Virgin said her fiat: “behold the servant of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word,” and the greatest of mystery was accomplished.

By the descent of the Word in her, Mary became forever God’s prey.

It seems to me that the attitude of the Virgin during the months that elapsed between the Annunciation and the Nativity is the model for interior souls, those whom God has chosen to live within, in the depths of the bottomless abyss.

In what peace, in what recollection Mary lent herself to everything she did!  How even the most trivial things were divinized by her!

For through it all the Virgin remained the adorer of the gifts of God!

This did not prevent her from spending herself outwardly when it was a matter of charity; the Gospel tells us that Mary went in haste to the mountains of Judea to visit her cousin Elizabeth.

Never did the ineffable vision that she contemplated within herself in any way diminish her outward charity.

For, a pious author says, if contemplation “continues towards praise and towards the eternity of its Lord, it possesses unity and will not lose it.

“If an order from heaven arrives, contemplation turns towards men, sympathizes with their needs, is inclined towards all their miseries; it must cry and be fruitful.

“It illuminates like fire, and like it, it burns, it absorbs and devours, lifting up to heaven what it has devoured.

“And when it has finished its work here below, it rises, burning with its fire, and takes up again the road on high.”

Elizabeth of the Trinity (1880-1906); Heaven In Faith, 38-40, from Complete Works,  Volume I, ICS Publications, quoted on Praise of Glory.

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