Bad News for Professional Victims

Gregory of Nyssa, the mystic, is generally paired with his brother, Basil the Great, the organizer and pragmatist. There is much to this generalization, though it possibly short-changes Basil's mysticism and Gregory's ascetical works. Here is Gregory with some good practical advice:

"Do not accept the honors of this life; run in such a way as to conceal your struggles in behalf of virtue lest the devil, finding an opportunity to tempt you with worldly honors and having distracted you from leisure for good, lead you to vanity or error."
(from "On the Christian Mode of Life")

Let me add only two observations on this passage to explain my choice of a title for this post: where in Gregory's day, honor and fame were thought to belong to especially virtuous persons who sacrificed greatly for civic ideals, today, 'struggles' are more often for emancipation from civic duty. Perhaps worldly acclaim accrues from successfully prosecuting one's case on 'Judge Judy'?

Second, how much 'leisure for good' do we lose to mulling over gripes that we have with others? How much leisure for good do we cultivate, period? Leisure has a bad name in religious circles: It sounds like the privilege of an upper class. In fact, I don't think it needs to mean anything other than regularly taking time to turn our minds toward heavenly things so as not to fall into distraction and error, as Gregory warns can happen. If we take the time for a regular 'searching and fearless moral inventory' (to borrow AA's excellent phrase), then the possibility of us making a big show of our virtue is certainly less. Corresponsingly, our progress in spiritual warfare will be greater.

Jesus Christ the Cornerstone

The Fathers get a lot of mileage out of the image of Christ as cornerstone. The best one I've found yet comes from St. Gregory of Nyssa:

"The cornerstone of all becomes our cornerstone, fitting Himself diagonally to the two walls of our life which are built out of our body and soul with elegance and correctness....The beauty of the chief cornerstone sets off our building when our dualistic existence, straight and true, is harmoniously set up according to the right rule of life by the plumb line of the virtues, having nothing in itself that is bent or crooked."

Elsewhere in this passage, it is clear that Gregory sees that a sprituality devoid of any bodily impact is as deficient as one that 'serves the body'.

The notion that Christianity is inherently anti-body is one that is still widely held. Gregory is suggesting that in fact, a failure to appreciate the body and harmonize it with the spirit is a failure to imitate Christ. The idea suggests to me that Christ is exactly what is missing in a dualistic world. Hatred of the body is hatred of its Creator and the One whose Body brought life to the world. So is hatred of the mind and soul.

Footnote: St. Benedict teaches that the body and soul are the sides of ladder to heaven that we ascend by humility and descend by pride. So in a very different context we see a very centrist teacher of the faith insisting on the need for both in salvation. If one side of a ladder is weak or missing, the ladder can't stand.