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On the Lord’s Prayer

St Gregory of Nyssa, tr. Graef, 1954

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Gregory of Nyssa has long been neglected by Patristic scholars, as is evident from the lack both of an adequate critical edition and of translations of his works. Only recently has he begun to attract attention; we need but mention the names of Professor Werner Jaeger of Harvard and of Père Daniélou. This long obscurity is not altogether inexplicable. Gregory of Nyssa was neither a great bishop and monastic legislator like his brother, St. Basil the Great, nor an attractive preacher and poet like his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, the third of the three great Cappadocians, as they are generally called. He was a speculative theologian and a mystic, …, so that he was never admitted to the select circle of the great doctors such as St. Athanasius, St. Basil himself, St. Chrysostom, or St. John of Damascus.

Of his life we know comparatively little. He was born about the year 335, and, as he himself tells us in a letter,¹ was educated chiefly by his elder brother Basil, with whom he was united by a lifelong friendship. Like him he wanted to become a priest. He had already been made a lector, when he abandoned this plan in order to embrace the career of rhetor. He seems almost certainly to have been married; for in his treatise on virginity² there occurs a passage in which he regrets that he himself is prevented from attaining to the glory of this virtue. Moreover, in a letter of his friend and namesake of Nazianzus³ the death of a certain Theosebia is mentioned in terms which strongly suggest that she was Gregory’s wife, though the Maurist editors of Gregory of Nazianzus’ works would make her out to have been a deaconess.

However this may be, his brother and his friends succeeded in weaning him from his worldly ambitions. Having given up his career as a rhetor, he probably first went to a monastic foundation his brother had made in Pontus, where he practised the ascetic life and studied theology. In 371 Basil appointed him bishop of Nyssa, a small town in Basil’s own metropolitan district of Caesarea in Cappadocia. Though his episcopal duties in this tiny diocese cannot have been very strenuous, his lack of firmness with people and of prudence especially in financial matters drew upon him the reproaches of his brother.⁴ His determined adherence to the Nicene faith, moreover, made him suspect to the pro-Arian government. In 376 a synod, attended chiefly by Arian bishops and court prelates, met at Nyssa and deposed him in his absence. Gregory had to flee his diocese, but after the death of the Arian Emperor Valens (378) he returned to his see and was given a triumphal reception.

In the meantime his theological writings had earned him a high reputation. He attended the Synod of Antioch in 379, and, much against his will, was elected archbishop of Sebaste (380), which he administered for a few months. He was one of the foremost theologians who defended the orthodox faith at the Council of Constantinople in 381. He was evidently also highly esteemed at the court of that city; for he was chosen to preach the funeral orations both for the princess Pulcheria, in 385 or 386, and for her mother, the empress Flaccilla, who died soon afterwards. He himself died about the year 394.

Gregory of Nyssa took an active part in combating the great heresies of his time. His treatise Contra Eunomium, now happily available in the critical edition of Professor Jaeger, is a brilliant refutation of Eunomius, a most violent protagonist of the Arian heresy. It was written in defence of his brother Basil, who had himself published a treatise against Eunomius and had been viciously attacked by him. In the Contra Apollinarem he vigorously refutes the two Apollinarian theses that the flesh of Christ had descended from Heaven, and that in Him the Word took the place of the human mind (νοῦς). Besides these he devoted a number of minor writings to the refutation of the heresiarchs.

His most important dogmatic work is the Oratio catechetica. It is an exposition of the principal doctrines of the Catholic faith—the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. His ideas on the origin of man, the destiny of the soul, and the resurrection of the body are developed especially in De hominis opificio and De anima et resurrectione. The latter, in the form of a dialogue dedicated to the memory of his sister Macrina the Younger, is modelled on Plato’s Phaido. But the fulness of the Christian faith in the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body gave the work of the later author, despite its inferior literary quality, a far greater depth and beauty than the pagan philosopher could achieve. … Though Gregory never admitted the great Alexandrian’s speculations on the preexistence and migration of souls, he shared his doctrine of ἀποκατάστασις, which denies the eternity of hell and believes in an ultimate restoration of all, including the devil, to the vision of God.

It is only in recent times that Gregory of Nyssa has been rediscovered as an ascetical and mystical writer of the highest importance; witness the brilliant study which Père Daniélou devoted to this side of his work, entitled Platonisme et contemplation mystique.

The spiritual doctrine of the great Cappadocian is embodied chiefly in his De virginitate, which elaborates the thesis that virginity makes the soul the bride of Christ, and in a series of exegetical works. In these the influence of Origen, who so often sacrificed the literal sense of a passage to his allegorical-mystical speculations, is paramount. In the De vita Moysis Gregory interprets the life of the Israelite lawgiver in terms of the ascent of the soul to union with God. In the two books on the titles of the Psalms he develops the idea that the five books of Psalms form as many steps on the ladder leading to perfection, a notion we meet again in his treatise on the Beatitudes. This conception of the spiritual life as a ladder became a favourite with later ascetical writers, and found its most famous expression in the Scala Paradisi of St. John Climacus. The same trend of thought permeates also his homilies on Ecclesiastes, which in his view has for its object to elevate the soul above the world of the senses. Mystical exegesis naturally reaches its summit in his homilies on the Canticles, which to him represent the union of love between God and the soul. This had also been the view of Origen, whose exegesis of the Canticles Gregory praises in his own work, and this interpretation has been accepted by all mystical theologians since.

Compared with these great works of mystical exegesis, the present two series of homilies, on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Beatitudes, are far more in the nature of real homilies, hence more concerned with moral exhortation than with allegorical interpretation, though the latter is not altogether absent; in fact, such favourite ideas of Gregory as the mystical significance of the Holy of Holies and the restoration of the dimmed Image of God in man to its original splendour occur frequently also in these two minor works. One of their most striking characteristics is that they are intensely practical, and full of highly coloured examples not only from the moral and social life, but also from the medical and scientific thought of his time. This latter is, indeed, a remarkable feature of Gregory’s writings, due no doubt to his thorough training, during his career as rhetor, in the classical authors as well as in contemporary culture. In fact, his mystical theology rests on a solid basis not only of sound dogmatic theology, but also of a wide acquaintance with ordinary human life and non-theological scholarship, which is as characteristic of him as it is of his brother Basil.

The treatise on the Lord’s Prayer begins with an introduction on the need for prayer and its neglect by most Christians, which reads almost as if it were written for our own time. Already in this first sermon a favourite theme of Gregory’s mystic teaching is sounded, one that has already been mentioned: the theme of the Divine Image in which the soul was made, which was tarnished by sin and is to be restored to its original beauty. In order to recover this beauty, man must learn to pray aright and for the right things. The following four sermons deal with the various petitions of the Our Father one by one, castigating the vices of his time, especially greed for riches and gluttony, which were particularly rampant in the Byzantine Empire. Every now and again, however, Gregory leaves the strictly moral sphere and takes flight into the realm of Divine Beauty. It is during such excursions that his exegesis here, too, sometimes leaves altogether the firm ground of the literal sense and loses itself in “mystical” interpretation which the modern reader, untrained in the school of Alexandrian theology, may sometimes find difficult to follow. But happily these flights of allegory are not too frequent in the present two works. In general Gregory has in view the needs of the average Christian, which, on closer acquaintance with his writings, strike one as having remained much the same after the 1600 years that separate his time from our own.

Towards the end of the third Sermon there is a doctrinally important passage on the Trinity, which for some reason or other has dropped out of a number of manuscripts and is also missing from the editions. Migne’s Patrology (MG 46.1109) gives part of it among the fragments. It was first published by Cardinal Mai as a section of the third Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, and again later in his Nova Patrum Bibl. (Rome 1947) as Fragmentum de processione Spiritus Sancti etiam a Filio.⁵ Krabinger⁶ incorporated it in his edition of the Sermons, as did also Oehler.⁷ In 1904 K. Holl⁸ declared the piece to be a “Western forgery” in the interests of the Filioque, without having even touched on the question of the literary and manuscript evidence. He should have seen from Cardinal Mai’s edition, which he used, that the fragment was cited by the Doctrina Patrum de Verbi incarnatione as early as 700 A. D. Besides, the Codex Vaticanus graecus 2066 (7th or 8th cent.) contains Gregory’s sermon with this passage. …

His principal argument, however, is based on the supposedly “non-Gregorian, partly even non-Greek phrases with which the whole is studded”: by these he thought the spuriousness of the fragment could be “palpably” proved. F. Diekamp⁹ readily showed that these phrases occurred—sometimes verbatim—in other writings of Gregory of Nyssa, or else had striking parallels in his style and vocabulary. Thus Holl’s argumentation collapses. His attempt to show up a doctrinal contrast between the piece and Gregory’s other works fares no better. In the former the etiological relationship between the Son and the Holy Spirit is expressed by the Pauline phrase πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ (Rom. 8.9), and Holl adds that it is not only un-Scriptural, but altogether impossible, to reverse the relationship and to call the son Χριστὸς πνεύματος. The author then asserts that Gregory actually wrote what the passage under discussion says to be impossible and adduces Adversus Macedonium (MG 45.1321A) as proof. But in this latter passage Gregory says that the Son is χρισϑεὶς τῷ πνεύματι, anointed with the Spirit, something totally different from Χριστὸς πνεύματος. Holl seems to have overlooked the fact that Gregory here is not dealing with the etiological relationship, but is concerned with proving the identity of nature (ὁμοουσία) of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. Hence his attempt to prove that the fragment is spurious has failed completely: both the manuscript tradition and the theological contents point to its authenticity.

Gregory was not the first of the Greek Fathers to write an exegetical treatise on the Lord’s Prayer. Of Clement of Alexandria we have only a few passages on the subject, scattered among his works, but sufficient to give us an idea of his exegetical views. Origen explained the Our Father in detail in his treatise On Prayer, and Cyril of Jerusalem did the same in the fifth of his Mystagogical Catecheses. Of later Fathers, St. John Chrysostom interpreted it in his Commentary on Matthew (as did Peter of Laodicea) and also in a separate homily. Theodore of Mopsuestia wrote on it in a recently discovered catechesis. Cyril of Alexandria commented it in the version according to St. Luke, and Maximus Confessor wrote a profound treatise on it.

To what extent does Gregory depend on his predecessors, Origen and Cyril of Jerusalem? At first sight the later writer’s conception of man as a child of God, developed in the explanation of the address “Our Father,” shows much affinity with Origen. Both take the address as expressing man’s moral similarity with God. Man is allowed to call God “Father” only if he has purified his life from evil. Hence man’s sonship consists in the moral purity of a good conscience, and the opening words of the Prayer are meant to exhort us to a virtuous life. This consequence of the idea of sonship is the same in Origen and Gregory. But it is derived from different premises. Whereas Origen proves it with a wealth of Scriptural citations, Gregory develops it speculatively from the concept of “father” as well as from ethical maxims generally. If a man knows how to appreciate the Divine qualities, he will not dare to call himself a child of God unless he finds these also in himself. In Origen as in Gregory the Divine sonship of the good is opposed to the diabolic sonship of the wicked.

The explanation of the second petition, too, has philosophical discussions in the place of the Biblical considerations of Origen and Cyril. Whereas the earlier writers see in the Kingdom of God (or of Heaven) the definite religious entity proclaimed in the Gospel, Gregory speculates on the concept of βασιλεία. He first refutes an erroneous interpretation which implies that God is not yet King of this Kingdom. He is King of the universe even now, and in any case His immutability would prevent His changing into another state, some new manner of Kingship. Further arguments are modelled on Plato’s Republic. Hence he emphasizes especially the factor of power. There is no higher kingdom in the world than God’s and it is to be established everywhere, including the moral sphere. But this is to be done by obedience freely given; and it is precisely here that, owing to the First Man’s false decision, the hostile forces of sin and death have set up their terrible tyranny. And so the Kingdom of God among men can be initiated only by means of a relentless warfare on the battlefield of the soul. The perfect dominion of God will not be achieved until sin and death have been overcome, in a holy alliance between God and the soul. Gregory, therefore, stresses the militant aspect of the Kingdom. Origen, on the other hand, emphasizes especially the blissful presence of God in the human soul, while Cyril of Jerusalem fixes his attention on the eschatological conception. He closely unites the Kingdom of Heaven with the Last Judgement and its consequences for the just, so that it is practically identified with beatitude.

The contrast with Origen, under the influence of whose school Gregory had been nurtured, is most noticeable in his exegesis of the fourth petition. For Origen it goes without saying that the daily bread of the Our Father is no ordinary bread; Jesus said we ought to ask for great and heavenly things, and material bread could not be counted among such (27.1). He then proves from Scripture that there we can find the term “bread” used in many senses. Our Lord means by it sometimes faith, sometimes Himself, but above all His Eucharistic Body. Consequently he interprets the term ἐπιούσιος as substantial, deriving it from οὐσία. Thus the bread in the Lord’s Prayer becomes the substantial bread that nourishes our souls and gives them health, strength, and, finally, immortality. For Gregory, on the other hand, it is the ordinary material bread, and, more generally, everything necessary for the preservation of our physical existence, excluding luxuries. He also contradicts Origen in stressing that we not only may, but ought to, pray for earthly things. Hence he cannot but abandon Origen’s derivation of ἐπιούσιος from οὐσία and renders it simply as “daily.” Moreover, he refers or limits the “today” of the petition to the individual day, and concludes that we should not take care for the morrow. Origen, on the contrary, illustrates by many Scriptural arguments that in Biblical usage “daily” is frequently understood of the whole present dispensation, and so understands it in the Lord’s Prayer. He even takes the opportunity to discuss the various periods of the world which Scripture symbolizes by days. Cyril of Jerusalem is even more explicit in his Eucharistic interpretation of the passage, and follows Origen’s rendering of ἐπιούσιος. Both Origen and Cyril reject the literal exegesis of “bread.” In this, then, Gregory’s interpretation is original.

He further differs from his predecessors by introducing Original Sin into his interpretation of the fifth and sixth petitions. Cyril does not mention it at all, and Origen has only a few allusions, though he places great emphasis on the doctrine in other contexts, for instance, in Contra Celsum 3.62 and 66. According to Gregory, when we recite the fifth petition of the Our Father, we daily confess that we still commit sins. These sins are twofold. On the one hand, we all have our share in the guilt of Adam, inherent in our nature by the very fact that we are human. This alone should prevent a man from thinking himself to be without sin. On the other hand, our conscience testifies that we commit many actual sins throughout our life. Indeed, we need but look at the dangers surrounding us on all sides to see how difficult and really impossible it is not to fall into sin. No one, Gregory asserts, can boast of being without sin; hence no one can dispense himself from the fifth petition.

Gregory stresses especially the interrelation between Divine and human forgiveness. If we would be forgiven, we must ourselves forgive. If we would approach God with the petition for pardon, we must first become like Him, especially by ridding ourselves of all harshness and cruelty towards our neighbour. For it would contradict the most elementary conceptions of justice if we received forgiveness without granting it ourselves. Gregory makes effective use of antithesis when inculcating this truth, and, like Origen, he adduces the parable of the unjust steward. But he leaves both Origen and Cyril far behind in emphasizing the idea of retribution. … Origen and Cyril had not gone thus far. With them, too, God appears as partner in an agreement, but they do not lose sight of the fact that in the last resort we owe everything to God’s goodness. They, too, stress that a good deed deserves a recompense. But Gregory goes further and alleges that our forgiveness is actually an example which God is bound to imitate. It is true, he apologizes for this audacity; yet he maintains that God could not possibly suffer Himself to be surpassed by our human generosity. God is bound to imitate man’s good example and forgive in His turn. Even though the sins which God has to forgive are greater than those of our debtors, this disparity is made up by God’s infinitely superior power and perfection.

For Gregory as for Origen and Cyril the forgiveness of sins and charity towards one’s neighbour are the aim of the fifth petition. But Gregory does not rest satisfied with this. He adds a new idea by bringing in the deification of man. Since God alone has the right to forgive sins, by imitating Him in this man in some way becomes like unto God and his nature is divinized. Having thus reached the summit of virtue, man ascends even above the perfection of the angels.

In his exegesis of the sixth petition Gregory interprets “temptation” in a way Origen and Cyril had rejected. Origen thought a literal interpretation impossible because, in his view, our whole life is made up of temptations which are, indeed, the necessary consequence of our bodily nature. Hence he cannot admit that temptations should cease, but explains the petition as a prayer to be preserved from succumbing to them. Cyril goes a step further. Whereas Origen saw temptation as an occasional yielding to the charms of sin, Cyril has in view the final defeat by sin, from which there is no recovery. Therefore we pray here to be preserved from an irrevocable fall. Gregory, on the other hand, takes the temptations to be attacks of the Evil One, who tries to gain our soul by the bait of the allurements of the world. Hence, when the soul is withdrawn from the world—not when it has rid itself from concupiscence—temptation has no possibility of approaching it. Here Gregory’s inclination towards the asceticism of the desert shows itself unmistakably. According to him we actually save ourselves from evil by escaping from the world, just as one can save oneself by flight from being drowned in the sea, burned by fire, or killed in war. In the world, of course, temptations are inevitable, since the world lies in the Evil One; they cease, however, if we escape from the world. This idea of the world as a bait and the possibility of avoiding its temptations is typical of Gregory. It enables him to explain God’s share in temptation in some ways more satisfactorily than Origen and Cyril. For Origen’s conception poses the question how God can lead us into defeat in our struggle with sin. Origen, indeed, tries to meet it by conceiving temptation as a transitory state leading to purification. But besides being somewhat far-fetched this reply does not really solve the difficulty. Cyril’s interpretation of temptation as final apostasy is even more untenable, since it really would exclude God’s share in it altogether. Yet Gregory’s exegesis is equally defective. On the one hand, he attributes the escape to man’s own initiative in fleeing from the world rather than to God; on the other hand, escape from the world does not really protect against temptation, as the case of St. Anthony and so many other desert Fathers so clearly shows.

We see, then, that Gregory follows the traditional teaching, but without giving up his independence. His “Origenism” is often no more than an agreement in form, which he then proceeds to fill with his own personal contents.

In the sermons on the Beatitudes the teaching given is on a somewhat higher level, as befits its subject. The Beatitudes, as has been said before, are represented under the image of a ladder, by means of which the Divine Word leads us from one step to the other, up to the heights of martyrdom. Here again the very elevated teaching on Christian perfection is enlivened by vivid descriptions of the life of the times, of the follies and sufferings of men. The exegesis deals usually first with the literal sense of the Beatitude under consideration, and then goes on to bring out a more sublime meaning.

Gregory of Nyssa is one of the great mystic theologians of antiquity. Throughout his life he was occupied with the question of the vision and knowledge of God. As the Beatific Vision is the highest object of life in Heaven, we ought even here on earth to strive to know God as far as possible. He takes it for granted that we can know God by our natural reason and that we can prove His existence from the order of the cosmos and the perfection of creatures. But he desires more than this elementary knowledge, which is also accessible to pagan philosophy.

The vision of God in the mirror of the pure soul can be attained only by Christians, who reach it through their co-operation with grace.¹⁰ If man’s life is pure, the original image, in which he was created and which was darkened by sin, will shine forth in new splendour. By contemplating this image in ourselves we can form a conception of the Divine perfections. This is one of Gregory’s favourite subjects, which he has expounded nowhere with greater clarity than in his sixth sermon on the Beatitudes. He never applies the vision of God promised to the clean of heart to the Beatific Vision in the next world. Yet St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul, and even Moses, teach unequivocally that no man has ever seen God in this life. Hence the Beatitude cannot mean that we shall be able to see God’s essence already here on earth. On the other hand, it is impossible that the vision of God promised by Christ should be the same knowledge that is also accessible to the non-Christian philosophers. Thus there must be an intermediary knowledge between the vision of His essence and the natural knowledge through creatures.

Gregory illustrates his meaning by a parallel. It is of little avail to know health only by hearsay; one must know it because one possesses it. In the same way the Beatitude of which Our Lord speaks consists less in knowing something about God, but in possessing Him within oneself. Indeed, as Gregory points out, Scripture frequently uses the term “see” in the sense of “possessing.” The Christian must realize in himself the word of Christ: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The soul of man is created in the image of God as a mirror reflecting Him.¹¹ But like a metal mirror defaced by rust, the soul stained by sin no longer shows this image. The rust must be removed from the mirror, which is the soul, so that its original beauty may reappear. We achieve this by developing the virtues of the soul, especially purity and freedom from passions, which latter conception he treats with wise moderation, especially in the second and sixth sermons. These virtues which lead us to sanctity establish in us the Kingdom of God and restore the Image. Just as one sees the sun itself when one sees it reflected in a mirror, so also the man who is purified from passion sees God Himself when he perceives His image in his soul. But this metaphor of the mirrored image of God must not mislead us. If such a man “sees himself, he sees in himself what he desires.”¹² In the act of mystic contemplation man immediately apprehends the perfectly pure in the reflexion of his own image, and so he does not need the discursive reasoning of ordinary knowledge.

Hence the promise of seeing God is realized in the intimate union with Him, which is the fruit of a pure life. The Gospel teaches us how to achieve this purity by keeping the Commandments and practising asceticism. The ideal of the Christian life is expressed in the words of the Canticle: My Beloved to me and I to Him. This means being empty of all but God, and, by fixing one’s regard only on the immaterial and spiritual, to become a pure image of the Divine Beauty. The same ideal is expressed in the words of St. Paul: Christ is my life. This, too, means detachment from all that might stain the soul, so that it may be filled with God who is purity, immortality, light, and truth.¹³

This teaching is certainly thoroughly Christian. Yet whoever knows the Enneads of Plotinus will realize how close is the connection between the conceptions of Gregory and Neo-Platonist philosophy.¹⁴ The Neoplatonists, too, teach that purification leads to deification, and that the former consists in removing the passions and acquiring virtue. The beauty of the soul lies in her likeness to the Divine, in which God’s beauty is reflected. It is Gregory’s achievement that he has Christianized his Neo-Platonist borrowings so that but little remains that is foreign to Christian spirituality.

There is, nevertheless, one feature in both the treatises, which may perhaps shock the modern reader. It is the seeming assumption that it is entirely in the power of man to reach the goal of perfection. Gregory argues repeatedly that the mercy God will show to man is entirely dependent on the mercy man shows to his fellows; there is no mention of grace, which first enables man to show mercy at all. … But in reading these Fathers we have always to remember that neither Augustine nor Pelagius had argued this subject when they wrote, and that, generally, the question of grace never arose in the East, because no particular heresy on this matter had been propounded there. … On the other hand, the two treatises presented here were series of sermons meant to spur the hearers to greater effort, hence the predominance of the human factor is all the more understandable.

The picture of Gregory of Nyssa that emerges from the two works here presented should be attractive to the modern reader. It is that of a man thoroughly conversant with human nature in general and the needs of his contemporaries in particular; not a Desert Father, living in isolation from the world around him—a world that presents many features similar to our own—but steeped in its culture and interested in all it has to offer. At the same time, the former rhetor has found that, attractive though this world may often be, the only goal worth living for is the Kingdom of Heaven; and having become a bishop and shepherd of souls, he uses all his powers and knowledge to imbue others with the same conviction.

As we have said in the beginning, it is unfortunate that there should be no modern critical editions of these treatises. I have followed for The Lord’s Prayer the best old edition, that of Krabinger, 1840, and for The Beatitudes the Paris edition of 1638, reproduced by Migne, Patrologia Graeca 44.1193–1302.

The Latin translation by Sifanus is reproduced by Migne; Krabinger has his own Latin translation for his edition of The Lord’s Prayer. A German translation of the same work appeared in Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, 2. ed., vol. 56, by K. Weiss (Munich 1927).

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