Tag Archives: Gregory of Nyssa

Let Light Shine

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Depictions of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, blinded by the divine light of Christ who spoke to him as he was going to arrest Christians for execution in Jerusalem.


On the contrary, we have renounced the deeds one hides for shame; we do not practice cunning or falsify the word of God, but through the open preaching of the truth we commend ourselves to anyone’s conscience in the sight of God…. it is the same God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has caused his light to shine in our hearts to spread the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:2, 5-6)

St. Paul was accused by his enemies in Corinth of “cunning” financial business; i.e., they accused him of shady and dishonest business deals with church money. They also accused him of “cunning” ways to read the Bible that were also shady and dishonest. He tells them that he has not been involved in any “cunning” behavior–not with money and not with reading the Bible. His interpretation of Scripture is open and honest and available to anyone with an honest, open conscience.

St. Paul alludes to Genesis 1 (“Let there be light”) when he paraphrases the Father’s command, “Let light shine out of darkness.” He might also be paraphrasing the prophet Isaiah: “O people walking in darkness, behold a great light: you that dwell in the land and shadow of death, a light shall shine upon you.” (Is. 9:2) St. Paul is saying that the same light that overcame the darkness in the beginning of the world and at the destruction of Death has shone in his heart-mind and shines in the hearts-minds of all honest people.

The light of God that shines in St. Paul and in honest people reveals the truth of the Gospel. (Remember the light that shone on St. Paul at his conversion? It struck him blind in order to heal his heart, St. Augustine said.) People “see” the brightness of the Gospel and then personally adopt it and are transformed by it; they are transformed into the image of the glorious Christ and communicate it to others who are “illuminated.” (One ancient way to refer to baptism is to call it “illumination.” Old prayers for those about to be baptized asl God to bless “those preparing for holy illumination.”)

But our actual daily experience is not bright and glorious. We are wasting away and eventually die. Yet what is strong already manifests itself in what is weak and the future erupts into the present. The eternal breaks into the perishable and enlightens what is temporary and transient.

Knowing Christ as the true light, inaccessible to falsehood, we learn this, namely, that it is necessary for us to be illuminated by the rays of the true light. But virtues are the rays of the Sun of Justice streaming forth for our illumination, through which we lay aside the works of darkness and walk becomingly as in the day and we renounce those things which shame conceals. By doing all things in the light, we become the light itself so that it shines before others which is the unique quality of light. If we recognize Christ as sanctification, in whom every action is steadfast and pure, let us prove by our actions that we ourselves stand apart, being ourselves true sharers of his name, our deeds–not just our words–coinciding with his power of sanctification.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection

From Glory to Glory

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Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament and begins to preach (Luke 4). Illumination in the Gladzor Gospels, a manuscript from Armenia AD 1300-1307.


Indeed, until today, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. However, when one turns to the Lord the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom. But all of us, with uncovered face beholding the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as this comes from the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Cor. 3:12-18)

St. Paul tells us that a veil lies on the hearts of those who read the Old Testament without understanding that it speaks to us about Christ and points to Christ. Only by reading it in the light of Christ’s birth and life, his Death and Resurrection does the Old Testament tell us everything that God intends us to hear. Reading the Old Testament through the prism of the Gospel removes the veil from our hearts so that we can begin to grasp the full message of the words. In the Old Testament, we don’t see Christ directly but we see him reflected, “as in a mirror.”

We have to remember that a mirror in St. Paul’s day were not the silver-backed pieces of glass that clearly show us our own faces. In St. Paul’s time, a mirror was a polished piece of metal that reflected an image but the reflection was fuzzy and hazy. Sometimes it was hard for a person to really understand what they were looking at. So it is with Christ in the Old Testament: sometimes it his reflection is fuzzy and hazy. Sometimes it is hard for us to understand how we can see him in a particular Old Testament passage.

Reading the Old Testament from the perspective of the Gospel, we stand before God with naked faces–no veils!–and behold the glory of God that made Moses cover his face so that the people could look at him. Because we see the glory of God, we are being transformed into that same glory. We are always progressing from our current glorious state to an even more glorious state-of-being, suffused and saturated by the glory of God. Christian life is never-ending growth, becoming more and more like God. (When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, they lost their “likeness” with God but not the “image of God” in which they were made. It is the choice of each of us to recapture that “likeness.”)

The phrase “from glory to glory” is especially associated with St. Gregory of Nyssa nowadays because of the famous collection of his writings published under that title. (See it on Amazon here.) St. Gregory wrote:

Change is nothing to be afraid of. We are always changing. What is bad is if we are not changing for the better …. For this truly is perfection: never to stop growing toward what is better and never placing any limit on perfection.

Lent is coming. Lent is the time when the Church asks us to spend more time reading the Bible, including the Old Testament. In the early centuries of the Church, people coming to be baptized would be taught about Genesis, Proverbs, Isaiah in the Old Testament and the Gospel According to St. Mark and the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament. (One of St. Gregory’s own, most important works is a collection of sermons on the Song of Songs in the Old Testament.) Most of the attention of the catechists (teachers) and catechumens (people wanting to be baptized) would be focused on the Old Testament. This might surprise most people today but should guide us in how much effort we put into reading which portions of the Bible.

God of All Comfort

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This icon at St. Paul’s K Street in Washington DC shows the Holy Trinity visiting Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament. It reveals the Kingdom of God as the life of the divine community shared with humans by the Holy Spirit. During the Middle Ages, when people did not receive Holy Communion frequently, they said, “Thy kingdom-thy Spirit-come!” as the equivalent of sharing the divine life through the reception of Holy Communion.


Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (2 Cor. 1:3-4)

St. Paul writes his second epistle to the Corinthian church about a year after he wrote 1 Corinthians. Some people think II Corinthians is actually parts of two letters put together. We know that the parish in Corinth kept having problems for a long time … St. Clement, one of the early bishops of Rome, wrote letters to the parish in Corinth because they were still having problems in AD 95!

St. Paul begins by blessing God the Father who comforts the Church. Nowadays “comfort” means “feel good” but the Father did not send his Son to make us feel good. “Comfort” used to mean “strengthen” or “make strong.” It means “to be strong with.” The Father gives his Son to make us strong to face affliction and to share this strength with others who are facing various afflictions.

This comfort–strength–is given us by the Holy Spirit. Many times the great preachers and teachers of the past identify the presence of the Holy Spirit with the Kingdom of God; to pray “thy Kingdom come” is asking for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell within us and among us. St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

But what does it mean to say that the kingdom of God is within us? It can only mean the gladness which comes from on high to souls through the Spirit! It is like an image and a deposit and a pattern of everlasting grace which the saints enjoy in the time to come. So the Lord summons us through the activity of the Spirit to salvation through our afflictions and to sharing in the goods of the Spirit and his own graces.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Christian Way of Life

The Father shares the Spirit to us now so that we can begin to experience a little bit of what eternity is like. We are called to experience the gift–the presence–of the Holy Spirit not as the absence of affliction but as we are experiencing affliction. The presence of the Holy Spirit –Kingdom of God–is not to make us feel good but to enable us to already experience a little of what we will experience in eternity.

Afflictions are our chance to experience the victory of Christ now. Afflictions are the opportunity we have to know that God truly stands with us, no matter what. Afflictions are our chance to share the Good News with others, not by preaching and lecturing but by holding the hand of someone in pain and being strong together with them.

“Thy kingdom come!” The kingdom–the Spirit–is given to us to share, not to hoard for ourselves. The kingdom-Spirit-gospel-comfort is primarily a SOCIAL experience that God is WITH us here and now rather than an individualistic experience of “salvation.”