The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [49]
January 10
GREGORY OF NYSSA
Gregory is the fellow who gives us an unforgettable account of the way in which everyday fourth-century life was permeated with theology, particularly debate concerning the nature of Christ. Everyone had an opinion, it seems. As Gregory says about Constantinople: “Garment sellers, money changers, food vendors—they are all at it. If you ask for change, they philosophize about the Begotten and the Unbegotten. If you inquire about the price of bread, the answer is that the Father is greater and the Son inferior. If you say to the attendant, ‘Is my bath ready?’ he tells you that the Son was made out of nothing.”
What people were discussing was the controversy that had arisen concerning the divinity of Christ and his relation to God the Father, which the first official council of the Christian church, held at Nicaea, had attempted to settle just ten years before Gregory’s birth. Soon, however, even bishops who had signed the Nicene Creed found that they didn’t always agree on what it meant, and competing philosophies—chiefly Arianism, which held that Christ was a created being, less divine than the Father—had much popular appeal.
Born into a remarkable family—his sister Macrina and his brother Basil the Great both founded monasteries—Gregory was the dreamer of the bunch. He appeals to me mainly because he seems equally a poet and a theologian. Discovering his Life of Moses, finding that Christian theology could contain such poetry, such wild and inspiring typology, was something I desperately needed at the time. I read the book slowly, not wanting to finish it.
What Gregory said of Moses, that he “entered the darkness, and then saw God in it,” that in God’s sanctuary “he was taught by word what he had formerly learned by darkness,” seemed to me to tell an essential truth about poetry, as well as religion. It confirmed a sense that I’d held as a child of the holy as dwelling in deep darkness, despite being told by my Sunday-school teachers that “God is light.” They were nice enough grown-ups and brave souls; they did their best to teach me origami. But I always sensed that they weren’t giving me the full story.
As befits a poet, Gregory is a theologian of desire; he looks at Moses and sees a “bold request which goes up the mountains of desire,” asking only to see the beauty of God “not in mirrors and reflections, but face to face.” Gregory’s own search for God seems to have been fueled more by desire than a certitude of faith. (As the church historian William Placher has said of Gregory, “For a long time he drifted through life without either a career or much religion, but he eventually found a deep faith.”) I frequently take consolation in Gregory’s sense that with God there is always more unfolding, that what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough.
February 2
CANDLEMAS/ PRESENTATION OF THE LORD
And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold
this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to
be a sign that will be contradicted (and you yourself a sword will
pierce) so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.”
(LUKE 2:34-35)
The darkness is still with us, O Lord. You are still hidden and the
world which you have made does not want to know you or receive
you . . . You are still the hidden child in a world grown old . . . You
are still obscured by the veils of this world’s history, you are still
destined not to be acknowledged in the scandal of your death on the
cross . . . But I, O hidden Lord of all things, boldly affirm my faith
in you. In confessing you, I take my stand with you . . . If I make
this avowal of faith, it must pierce the depths of my heart like a