St Gregory of Nyssa on the Human Soul
By John P. Cavarnos, Edited and Revised by Constatine Cavarnos
95 pp, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
NOTE: This review will appear in two separate posts. This is part I.
Click here for Part II ⇒.

We regard all knowledge as beautiful and precious, but one kind of it more so than another, either by reason of its exactness, or because it has reference to superior and more wonderful objects. On both these accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul. ~ Aristotle, On the Soul

Originally published as a doctoral dissertation, this edition was revised for use by a more general audience. Since the fundamental goal of Christianity is the “salvation of souls”, it is curious that there was no systematic understanding of the soul until the efforts of St Gregory of Nyssa. Mr. Cavarnos points out:

Christianity, being concerned above all with man’s destiny and salvation, must inevitably undertake to explain the mystery of life. For the Christian that means more specifically the human soul.

Curiously, St Gregory turns to the great pagans of antiquity, in particular Plato and Aristotle, for his understanding of the soul. There are a few explanations that have been proposed by Gornahoor. The first is attributed to Julius Evola, who would regard this as the process of “rectification”, i.e., the partial restoration of the Middle Ages to its pagan roots following the shock of primitive Christianity. Guido De Giorgio, on the other hand, would regard the two Romes — the Ancient and the Medieval — as two forms of the same tradition, the later a deepening of the earlier. Our preference is that St Gregory is giving us a guidebook to the soul, not a theory, and anyone who makes the efforts at self-knowledge will simply see that it is true.

Unfortunately, Mr. Cavarnos falls prey to the modernist notion that St Gregory was merely making “good use of classical and contemporary material for giving form and expression to accepted Christian doctrines and concepts.” Were that true, then why couldn’t modern theories of the mind or soul be put to the same use? No, it is not a pragmatic concern for good usage, but whether the doctrine is true or not.

Anthropology

Like the pagan philosophers, St Gregory conceived the cosmos as divided into two orders: the spiritual and rational over against the material and irrational. In his understanding of the purpose of man, St Gregory is closer to his Christian roots. Mr. Cavarnos summarizes:

Man was created in the image and likeness of God so that he could partake of the divine nature and make it known to the rest of the creation. He is related to God by his endowment of the divine principle of reason, through which he knows God and imitates Him to attain to virtue and perfection.

So man is suspended between the two poles and is to be the link between them. Following Rene Guenon, we have referred to those poles as form and matter, or essence and existence. The former binds man with the divine and the latter with the subrational world. In his higher role, man possesses divine attributes such as life, reason, wisdom, and so on. Man is also a microcosm, so his self-knowledge relates to the knowledge of the cosmos by analogy.

Nature of the Soul

St Gregory makes a useful distinction of his study. The metaphysics of the soul relate to the essence, origin, and destiny of the soul, and the psychology of the soul is concerned with determining, defining, and classifying the diverse faculties of the soul. This psychology is necessarily a phenomenology, since the soul can only be directed observed from the inside.

Starting with the nature of the soul he claims that the soul is the principle that gives life to the body. That is, it animates the body, from the Latin word anima for soul. Immediately, this is the opposite of educated men today who believe, on the contrary, that the soul is a function, or epiphenomenon, of the body. Not so, and this is why Rene Guenon identifies the five fundamental preconditions for manifestation: space, time, form, matter, and life. Hence, there are both material forces and psychic forces in play, irreducible to each other. Evola makes use of this idea in his own doctrine of the degrees of race. Of course, these are the natural forces, which operate on the horizontal plane, and not the supernatural, or vertical, forces.

St Gregory, like Plato, accepts the immortality of the soul as well as its simplicity. Mr. Cavarnos does not point this out, but this is analogous to the Roman idea of divine simplicity, which should be expected if the soul is truly the likeness of the divine. In this case, the human soul is chiefly identified with the rational, or intellectual, faculty; this faculty is therefore the ruling principle. Again, this is consistent with the ancient pagans and the Medieval tradition.

Gregory brings up an excellent and very important point: the “passions” are actually distinct from the soul, hence cannot be considered part of it. For Gregory, the soul is beautiful, which would preclude any ugliness. This means two things in practice:

• Man’s interiority is subject to inferior and subrational influences arising, as it were, from outside of himself
• When a man submits to the demands of these influences, he is not fulfilling himself, but, on the contrary, he is surrendering up his self to an outside agent

Gregory, like St Anthony of the Desert, regards these passions as animal traits. These are the beasts of the field that must be named and mastered. The questions that we brought up at one point are worth revisiting: if a being is dominated by his passions, to what extent can he be considered as a man rather than an animal? On one hand, the case can be made that he is a “virtual” man, since he has the possibility of being rational.

The Origin of the Soul

Gregory rejects two doctrines: the preexistence of the soul and the theory of reincarnation. Like contemporary writers on tradition, Gregory demonstrates the metaphysical impossibility of reincarnation, with an argument that doesn’t need to be discussed at the moment. Keeping in mind Aristotle’s five versions of priority, Gregory rejects the temporal preexistence of the soul, but not the ontological preexistence.

For Gregory, the whole of humanity preexisted in God’s mind as a possibility, not an actuality. Clearly, this is consistent with what Guenon writes in the Multiple States of Being. A soul is a possibility of manifestation. Gregory accepted traducianism (the rational soul is passed in the semen), which is hard to defend, as it makes of it a natural process. In keeping with traditional metaphysics, the soul manifests in a world in which it is compossible with the rest of the world. That is, the soul manifests when there is an affinity between the possibilities of the soul and the particular world in which those possibilities can be actualized. I’m sorry that his cannot be proved in the manner of the geometers, but a man can just “see” that it is so, provided he has sufficient self-knowledge.

Like St Thomas Aquinas after him, Gregory claims that the soul passes through three stages: the insensible stage, the sensible stage, and the rational stage. Since the soul is the form of the body,

the soul is the determining principle or cause in the living being. It constructs for itself a body that is suitable, like a seal that impresses its stamp on wax.

Once again, this is an idea that has been insufficiently developed. It seems, therefore, that the features of a man’s body are not accidental, incidental, arbitrary, irrelevant, or unimportant. Rather they are the visible manifestations of the invisible soul. We will explore this idea further in the mailing list.

Part II ⇒