Passion and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa (review)

This book, which is based upon the author's doctoral dissertation, takes on the difficult task of examining the relationship between human emotions and divine apatheia in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa. In the introduction Smith notes that in a desire to find a positive role for emotions in Nyssen's ascetic theology modern scholarship has made the great Cappadocian's thought "more coherent and consistent than it actually is and, accordingly, more palatable to modern sensibilities" (16). Rather than composing a false harmony that ignores the paradoxes and inconsistencies which exist within Gregory's principal works (in particular, De Anima et Resurrectione, De Hominis Opificio, Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum,and De Vita Moysis), Smith leads the reader through a careful examination of the texts toward a "constructive synthesis" which conveys Nyssen's multifaceted and stimulating vision. In short, the author desires to understand Nyssen's conception of humanity's erotic relationship with God "in all its historical messiness" (18).

Smith begins his study of human passions by examining Nyssen's anthropology and psychology. The creation of human beings as the imagines Dei means that we possess the likeness of God both structurally and morally, but we remain entirely dissimilar because the image can never be equal to its source. Our likeness rests particularly on the moral level because through our rational faculties we can grow in divine beauty by acquiring the divine virtues: purity, blessedness, righteousness, and apatheia. While we differ ontologically from God as creatures, there are also other differences in anticipation of sin, e.g., gender distinction and non-rational faculties. As the result of sin there are also the passions, which prevent us in our fallen state from becoming the intended imagines Dei. An account of Nyssen's soteriology, i.e., our return to the intended image, therefore, requires an analysis of "the rational faculties that bear God's image and the non-rational faculties that bear the image of the beasts" (47).

In his treatment of Nyssen's "eclectic psychology," Smith demonstrates that, while Plato's tripartite psychology appears in Gregory's thought as a descriptive model of the tension between the rational and non-rational faculties, Aristotle's "trichotomous" structure of the soul (vegetative, sentient, rational) serves as the primary model for conveying the soul's essential unity and growth with the body. This eclectic psychology allows Nyssen to present the passions not as a dualistic conflict between body and mind but as errant judgments of the mind or as a failure of the rational intellect to direct the lower appetites. The emotions exist in the "borderland" between sensual activities of the soul and intellectual activities, and they can be either rightly ordered toward higher goods or perverted toward material attractions. Through his Aristotelian vision of the soul's unity, Nyssen maintains that "the intellect functions as the hegemonikon that harnesses all the soul's powers into an alliance enabling its ascent to God" (102).

The remaining chapters of the book address Smith's main thesis: "that divinization of the soul is the result not primarily of a change in human nature, but of the soul's eschatological relationship with God" (104). Nyssen's theory of epektasis and the immediate, uninterrupted enjoyment of God's infinite beauty overcomes the difficulties of Origen's concept of koros by making our relationship with God in the eschaton an inexhaustible and radically new experience of God's infinite goodness. In fact, Gregory's Aristotelian psychology, which understands the soul as organically maturing with the body, allows for a "dynamic" participation of the soul in God. In earthly life, the soul matures with the body by adapting itself to the soul's various levels (vegetative, sentient, and rational); this dynamism continues in the eschaton as the soul grows in its capacity for entering ever deeper into the divine nature.

After an excellent study of purgation...