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by Eric J. Scheske
St. Gregory of Nyssa’s is not an exciting life. Nothing in his biography makes the heart pump or the mind race. He wasn’t an important public man, like St. Thomas More. He didn’t found a charitable organization, like St. John of God. He didn’t live a life of mendicant asceticism, like St. Francis, or odd asceticism, like St. Simeon Stylites. He didn’t have a conversion story to tell, like St. Augustine. His life isn’t even as exciting as St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose “Little Way” of anonymity is downright fascinating when the details are explored.
But it’s equally difficult to find a saint to match Gregory’s spiritual contributions to the Church. There may have been smarter saints (St. Thomas Aquinas) or more spiritual saints (St. John of the Cross), but there may have never been a saint whose combination of spirituality and intellectual acumen combined to produce such a unique—and influential—contribution to the Church’s holy life, specifically to its holy life as found in the field of mysticism.
Life
The details of his life are easily laid out. He was born at Caesarea in 335, the little brother of St. Basil the Great and a member of a particularly holy and devout family. He spent his teen years and early adult life living off his father’s wealth.1
He didn’t really seem to have any particular aspirations, holy or otherwise. A sketch of him in his early adult years reads like a description of those disaffected young men of modern times who graduate from college and despair because they have no purpose in life: “Married, with a small patrimony, possessed of a desultory education, a talent for speaking and a desire to write, full of self-doubt, with no great desire for traveling abroad, he remained in Caesarea with his books and disquieting thoughts. Once he wrote to Gregory Nazianzus that he felt like a piece of driftwood floating down a stream.”2
He eventually joined Basil at his monastery where his sense of devotion quickened. He probably would have liked to continue the secluded life of contemplation, but Basil had become the Bishop of Caesarea and, in order to protect his jurisdiction against the Arian Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople, he appointed Gregory as bishop of the insignificant town of Nyssa. Gregory reluctantly accepted the position, but was fairly incompetent at administering the diocese and its financial affairs. After three years, Arians accused him of embezzling Church funds and deposed him. He wandered around, for about two years, until the Arian Emperor (Valens) died and Theodosius came to throne. Gregory then regained his role as bishop of Nyssa.
When Basil died in 379, Gregory’s ecclesiastical role increased dramatically, almost as though he felt compelled to take up the torch of orthodoxy that Basil had tirelessly carried. Although he would have preferred to lead a quiet life, he took an active role in opposing heresies, played an important role in the Council of Constantinople in 381, and became one of the Emperor’s favorite clerics. His importance in ecclesiastical affairs continued for about five years, then his role started to shrink (partly due to the increasing favor St. John Chrysostom was finding at the imperial court in Constantinople). Because his administrative duties in his small diocese were limited, he had ample time to pray, contemplate and write, which were his primary occupations until his death in 394.3
Theological Contributions
That is about all there is to report from Gregory’s life. It was an important life, but primarily spent, on the surface, in administering his diocese and handling miscellaneous ecclesiastical issues.
But he also contributed to the Church’s theology. Like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory helped beat back Arianism, especially the exaggerated form of Arianism known as Eunomianism (which taught that the Son is unlike the Father in will as well as in substance). He also helped refute the heresies of astrology and Apollinarianism and the heretics known as the Pneumatomachi (contenders against the spirit). He wrote about the Trinity, Mary, creation, the Bible, prayer, the soul, asceticism, death, and resurrection. He also wrote one of the earliest catechisms, a remarkable compendium of Christian doctrine based on metaphysics that is still widely circulated in the Eastern Church today.
Although his theological contributions were important, Gregory’s true mark—the mark that makes him one of the most important saints of the Church—rests in his spiritual insights.
The Father of Mysticism
Gregory’s spiritual insights have contributed greatly to the mystical tradition of the Church, so much so that he is known as “The Father of Mysticism.”
Gregory emphasized that each person possesses the image of God. Because each person possesses this image, each person can come to know God (“like is known by like”).4 But in order to know God, each person must undertake a spiritual journey.
Many spiritual writers have described this spiritual journey as a three-fold trip, though the stages are not exclusive of one another (all three stages are present in each part of the journey). In the West, the stages are often referred to as purification, illumination, and union. In the East, the stages are usually called praktiki (repentance, practice of the virtues), physiki (contemplation of nature), and theologia (the contemplation of God). Gregory simply called the stages light, cloud, and darkness.
The light stage consists of the soul’s decision to turn to God and the first steps toward God. These first steps require a person to leave behind earthly things, like sensual passion and interest in earthly pursuits:
- Those who pass through the mystical water in Baptism must put to death in the water the whole phalanx of evil—such as covetousness, unbridled desire, rapacious thinking, the passion of conceit and arrogance, wild impulse, wrath, anger, malice, envy, and all such things. Since the passions naturally pursue our nature, we must put to death in the water both the base movements of the mind and the acts which issue from them.
He who would approach the knowledge of things sublime must first purify his manner of life from all sensual and irrational emotion. He must wash from his understanding every opinion derived from his customary intercourse with his own companion, that is, with his sense perceptions, which are, as it were, wedded to our nature as its companion.
- But the mind also remains on:
When all of [the senses] have been lulled into inactivity by a kind of sleep, the heart’s functioning becomes pure, the reason looks up to heaven, unshaken and unperturbed by the motion of the senses. . . Thus the soul, enjoying alone the contemplation of Being, will not awake for anything that arouses sensual pleasure. After lulling to sleep every bodily motion, it receives the vision of God in a divine wakefulness with pure and naked intuition.
This understanding of watchful sleep is found in much of the Christian mystical tradition, but it is analogous to Christianity’s “non-mystical” tradition as well, which many people have come across in C.S. Lewis’ reiteration of Jesus’ paradox that only he who loses his life will save it (Matthew 10.39). Only the person who forgets himself, who despises his opinions and reputation, is ready for God. Gregory and subsequent mystics apply this fundamental truth to their spiritual quest: By killing their sensual selves, including their mental wanderings, they become prepared for God.
After the soul has made progress in purification, the soul enters the second stage, the cloud, and begins to obtain knowledge of God as He works within the person:
- Next comes a closer awareness of hidden things, and by this the soul is guided through sense phenomena to the world of the invisible. And this awareness is a kind of cloud, which overshadows all appearances, and slowly guides and accustoms the soul to look towards what is hidden.
Eventually, the spiritual traveler reaches stage three, darkness. In describing this phenomenon, Gregory refers to Moses’ entrance into God’s thick darkness at the summit of Mount Sinai:
- What now is meant by Moses entering the darkness and so seeing God within it?
The text of Scripture is here teaching us that, as the intellect makes progress and by a greater and more perfect attention comes to understand what the knowledge of reality is, the more it approaches to contemplation, the more it sees that the divine nature cannot be contemplated. For, leaving behind every external appearance, not only those that can be grasped by the senses but also those that the reason believes itself to see, it advances continually towards that which lies further within, until by the activity of the mind it penetrates into that which cannot be contemplated or comprehended; and it is there that it sees God. The true knowledge and the true vision of what we seek consist precisely in this—in not seeing: for what we seek transcends all knowledge, and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility.
And continuing penetration into the darkness will repeatedly bring the spiritual traveler to new levels. Gregory points out that every person must continually change, but though change is usually a sign of imperfection, spiritual change is good because it takes the traveler to higher levels. The ascent never stops because God always transcends, but the traveler will not despair because the ascent constantly brings the traveler to new levels of happiness and perfection as he goes “from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3.18):
- The soul that looks up towards God, and conceives that good desire for His eternal beauty, constantly experiences an ever new yearning for that which lies ahead, and her desire is never given its full satisfaction. Hence she never ceases to stretch herself forth to those things that are before, ever passing from her present stage to enter more deeply into the interior, into the stage which lies ahead. And so at each point she judges each great marvelous grace to be inferior to what is yet to come, because each newly won grace always seems to be more beautiful than those she has previously enjoyed.
End notes
- He was also married and living with his wife (a woman named Theosobeia) at about this time. Little is known about her, but it seems that she and Gregory lived together a little while, then went their separate ways to pursue holiness. Gregory’s friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, praised her holiness when she died twenty years later.
- Robert Payne, The Holy Fire (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 139.
- In this latter period he produced his classic of spirituality, The Life of Moses.
- This analysis (and its quotes) borrows heavily from From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979). It especially uses the introduction by Jean Danielou, S.J.
Eric J. Scheske is an attorney in Sturgis, Michigan, where the small town practice of law leaves time for reading and writing.
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