Restoring God's Image
by St Gregory of Nyssa
Feast of St Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople
Anno Domini 2020, July 3
Man is a creature endowed with reason and intelligence, and he has been made in the likeness of the undefiled nature of God. Thus is it said of him in the book of the creation of the world: “to the image of God He created him” (Gen. 1:27). This creature man, then, did not possess as a property of his nature at the beginning any inclination to passion and mortality. For the pattern of the image could not have been preserved if in its imitation it had in any respect contradicted its archetype.
But the element of passion was introduced later on, after he was created, and in the following way. Man was, as we have said, the “image and likeness” of the power that rules all creation; and this likeness to the ruler of all things also extended to man’s power of self-determination: man could choose whatever pleased him and was not enslaved to any external necessity. But man was led astray by deception and deliberately drew upon himself that catastrophe which all mortals now share. Man himself invented evil: he did not find it in God. Nor did God make death; it was man himself who, as it were, was the creator of all that is evil.
All who have eyes can enjoy the sunshine, and anyone, if he likes, may deny himself this pleasure simply by closing his eyes. In such a case it is not the sun that withdraws or produces the darkness; rather, man himself puts an obstacle between himself and the sun by closing his eyes. And yet, even when the eyes are closed, they cannot cease to function; hence it is the activity of the eyes which bring about the appearance of darkness in man because he deliberately cut himself off from the light.
So too the first man who arose from the earth—he, indeed, who begot all the evil that is in man—had it in his power to choose all the good and beautiful things in nature that lay around him. And yet he deliberately instituted by himself things that were against nature; in rejecting virtue by his own free choice he fashioned the temptation to evil. For sin does not exist in nature apart from free will; it is not a substance in its own right. All of God’s creatures are good, and nothing He has made may be despised: He made all things “very good” (Gen. 1:31). But in the way I have described, the whole procession of sin entered into man’s life for his undoing, and from a tiny source poured out upon mankind an infinite sea of evil. The soul’s divine beauty, that had been an imitation of its archetype, was, like a blade, darkened with the rust of sin; it no longer kept the beauty of the image it once possessed by nature, and was transformed into the ugliness of evil.
Thus man, who was so “great and precious,” as the Scriptures call him, fell from the value he had by nature. It is like people who slip and fall in the mud and get their faces so smeared that even their relatives cannot recognize them. So man fell into the mud of sin, and lost his likeness to the eternal Godhead. And in its stead he has, by his sin, clothed himself in an image that is of clay and mortal; and this is the image we earnestly counsel him to remove and wash away in the purifying waters of the Christian life. Once this earthly covering is removed, the soul’s beauty will once again shine forth.
Now the removal of what is foreign is a return to what is connatural and fitting; and this we can only achieve by becoming what we once were in the beginning when we were created. Yet to achieve this likeness to God is not within our power nor within any human capacity. It is a gift of God’s bounty, for He directly bestowed this divine likeness on our human nature at its creation. By our human efforts we can merely clear away the accumulated filth of sin and thus allow the hidden beauty of the soul to shine forth.
This lesson is taught, I think, in the Gospel, where our Lord speaks to those who have ears for the mysteries that Wisdom teaches us: “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Lk. 17:21). I think that the text here points out that the gift of God is not separated from our nature nor is it far from those who choose to look for it. It dwells within every one of us, ignored and forgotten, “choked with the cares and pleasures of life” (Lk. 8:14), but is rediscovered when we turn our minds to it.
But if we must confirm this doctrine in other ways, the same lesson is, I think, taught by our Lord in the search for the lost drachma (Lk. 15:8-9). All the other virtues, which the text calls drachmas, are worthless if the widow, that is, the soul, is lacking one, even though all the others are present. And so we are first commanded to “light a candle,” and this doubtless refers to the mind, which throws light on what is hidden. Next we are to look for the lost drachma in our home, that is, in ourselves. And surely the hidden meaning of the coin is the image of our King, which has not yet been completely lost, but is simply hidden under dirt. By the dirt I think we must understand the uncleanness of the flesh; for, when we cleanse and sweep this away by a fervent life, what we are looking for will be made manifest. And then the soul that finds the coin rightly rejoices and calls in her neighbors to share in her joy. The soul’s associates are, of course, the various faculties of the soul, which the text here calls neighbors. For when the great image of the King is discovered and shines forth again, just as it was stamped on our drachma in the beginning by the Creator, stamped on the hearts of everyone, then do all our faculties unite in that divine joy and gladness as they gaze upon the ineffable beauty of what they have found. For she says: “Rejoice with me because I have found the groat which I had lost” (Lk. 15:9). The neighbors, that is, the connatural faculties of the soul that rejoice at the discovery of the divine drachma, are the reason, the appetite, the tendencies towards grief and anger, and all the other powers that are believed to exist in the soul. And rightly are they called her friends, and rightly do they then rejoice in the Lord: for all of them now look toward the beautiful and the good; they act in all things for God’s glory and never again become the tools of sin.
Such then is the lesson we are taught in the finding of the lost drachma: we are to restore to its pristine state the image of God that is now concealed under the dirt of the flesh. And hence we are to become what the first man was at the dawn of human existence. And what was he? He was naked of the covering of dead skins (Gen. 3:21) and looked on the face of God without fear; he did not judge the good by sight or taste, and he took his pleasure in God alone. It was for this alone that he used the helpmeet which God gave him; so the Scriptures suggest when they tell us that Adam did not know her till after they were expelled from Paradise (Gen. 4:1), and then she was condemned to the pains of childbirth for the sin she was deceived into committing.
Such then was the sequence of events by which we were exiled from Paradise with our first parent; but now we are permitted to return to that primitive state of happiness by the very same path. And what was the path in their case? Deception led to pleasure and pleasure brought about the Fall. Next the passion of pleasure was followed by shame and fear, and they lacked the courage to appear before their Creator, and had to hide themselves in the shadows behind leaves. Next, they clothed themselves with dead skins, and thus they were sent into exile into this place of sickness and toil, wherein marriage is thought to be the only comfort against mortality.
If then we are “to be dissolved and to be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), then we must start out again from the last stage which they reached in their discussion. It is just like those who live separated from their near and dear ones: if they want to return to their place of origin, they begin by leaving the spot at which they last arrived.
Now marriage was the last stage in the process of separation from the life of Eden. Hence the Word teaches us that marriage should be the first thing we should leave; it is, as it were, the last resting place for those who are going to be dissolved to be with Christ. In the next stage we must withdraw from the distressing labor of the world, in which man was established after his sin. Then we must remove the coverings of the flesh, these “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21), by putting off the “wisdom of the flesh” and by renouncing all secret acts of shame. Next, we must no longer live in the shadow of the fig-tree of this bitter life, but we must cast away the coverings which are the transient leaves of life and come into the presence of our Creator. We must reject all deception of taste and sight, and no longer follow the counsel of the venomous serpent, but hold fast only to God’s commandment. And that commandment ordered us to touch only what was good, and to reject the taste of evil. For this was the beginning of the entire sequence of sin, the unwillingness to be ignorant of evil.
Our first parents were consequently forbidden to come to know evil along with the good; they were to restrain themselves from “the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9); they were to enjoy the good in its purity, unmixed and unmitigated by any evil. And this, I think, is surely to remain always with God alone; it is to enjoy the good without mingling with it anything which would separate them from it.
It would seem then, if one might be so bold as to express it, that this is the path by which man can be snatched up out of this world and restored to Paradise, to that place where Paul saw those secret and invisible things which are given man to utter.
*From On Virginity, selected with an introduction by Jean Daniélou, translated by Herbert Musurillo in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 112-117. Daniélou’s introduction is one of the best on St Gregory of Nyssa. The book is available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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