“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).
Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ.[1] For Paul, this simultaneously refers to “knowing Christ” in “resurrection life,” through being “conformed to his death” (3:10-11), which means “forgetting what lies behind” (3:13), even counting as “rubbish” legal accomplishment (3:8) so as to “lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (3:12). There is a going beyond (past accomplishments or failures), a forgetting and moving forward, which involves what Christ has done (he “laid hold” of Paul) and Paul’s response (a “laying hold of Christ”). Paul uses the term “perfect” (τετελείωμαι), to indicate he has not achieved this end (3:12), and those who are “perfect” (τέλειοι) he indicates should have the same attitude (3:15). He may be ironic in describing them as perfect, or he may, in fact, be describing the goal as the process of perfecting.
Gregory, in his Life of Moses, presumes perfection is an unceasing growth: “The perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”[2] According to Gregory, Paul “never ceased straining toward those things that are still to come. Coming to a stop in the race was not safe for him. Why? Because no Good has a limit in its own nature but is limited by the presence of its opposite as life is limited by death and light by darkness. And every good thing generally ends with all those things which are perceived to be contrary to the good.”[3] Progressing, evolving, perfecting, being joined to Christ, participating in the divine life, becoming like Christ and God, according to Gregory, is an eternal process.
[Paul] teaches us, on the one hand, that what is ever and again discovered of that blessed Nature that is the Good is something great but, on the other hand, that what lies beyond what is grasped at any particular point is infinitely greater; and during the entire eternity of the ages this becomes the case for the person who participates in the Good, since those who participate in it receive increase and growth in that they encounter ever greater and better things.[4]
As I previously described (here), conversion and salvation are not one-off events of the past, but as with Christ, the beginning and end are interwoven and thus eternal. The expanding and spiraling realization of divine love, through an expanded moral sense, to a broadened intellectual engagement, to a psychic experiential shift (the fruits of the Spirit) sums up the New Testament dynamic, which by definition stretches out eternally. The knowledge of God, and the accompanying expansion of virtues and understanding, and the experience of love and peace never come to an end. We are created to be in the divine image and this is an unending goal. Becoming like God, and not just self-improvement, is the human purpose, and this purpose entails the eternal. This eternality is more than a long or infinite time, but is a qualitative goal in which the finite and the creaturely are ceaselessly transformed. The limited enters the unlimited, the finite takes up the eternal, such that the stretching forth (epektasis) in God cannot be finalized.
Gregory also takes up this explanation in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which means he is describing an expanded desire or even a divine and eternal eroticism. As he describes, thirst for God is never quenched:
The wellspring of good things always draws the thirsty to itself—just as in the Gospel the wellspring says: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). For in using these words, he sets no limit, whether to thirst, or to the urge to come to him, or to the enjoyment of the drinking. Rather, by the open-endedness of his injunction, he issues a continuing invitation to thirst and to drink and to be impelled toward him.[5]
While physical thirst and satisfaction has its limits, the spiritual thirst for God is unlimited as God is infinite. In the soul’s longing for God there is no ultimate satisfaction, no final union, no perfect vision, no final satiation, and to imagine there is, would amount to considering God as finite. In Gregory’s allegorical interpretation of the life of Moses, Moses is an allegorical Christian pilgrim, desiring to see God, but recognizing there is no end to this pursuit. “Whereas, Moses, your desire for what is still to come has expanded and you have not reached satisfaction in your progress and whereas you do not see any limit to the Good, but your yearning always looks for more, the place with me is so great that the one running in it is never able to cease from his progress.”[6] It is not that there is a lack of satisfaction, but an ever deepening desire and satiation. “He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.”[7]
When I described this to my daughter, she said, “It sounds exhausting.” It may be that we tend to attach notions of rest and peace to stasis. Luther’s disparaging of works may tinge our conceptions of effort with a physical, or sinful agonistic struggle, but Gregory is offering up an alternative form of peace and stability. There is a stability in standing on the rock. “I mean by this that the firmer and more immovable one remains in the Good, the more he progresses in the course of virtue.”[8] It is the one who “is tossed one way and another (as the Apostle says)” or the one who is “doubtful,” or in Paul’s picture the one who seeks stability in the law, or something less than Christ, that experiences the exhaustion of effort and works. There is rest and peace to be found in putting on Christ, and this putting on is not subject to the “body of death.”
As Gregory describes, there can be a futility of effort, on the order of climbing a hill of sand, in which one is ever sliding back down the hill. There is a lot of effort but no progress. “But if someone, as the Psalmist says, should pull his feet up from the mud of the pit and plant them upon the rock (the rock is Christ who is absolute virtue), then the more steadfast and unmovable (according to the advice of Paul) he becomes in the Good.”[9] Gregory compares it to putting wings on the heart, and flying upward through the upward stabilizing draft of the good.
The cleft of the rock, in which God placed Moses during his vision of God (his being planted on the rock), Gregory says is “a heavenly house not made with hands which is laid up by hope for those who have dissolved their earthly tabernacle.”[10] The heavenly home, or the spiritual rock, is absolutely secure and stable, but this is not a delimiting stability, but a rock of ascent. According to Liviu Petcu, there is a stability in this “continuous ascension” on the order of climbing the rungs of a ladder, with each step leading to a higher step. “This movement is born out of the forever infinite distance between what he is from God and Who God is. The spiritual life is thus a permanent transformation of the soul in Christ, in the form of an ardour which grows more and more, as it becomes more united with and stabilised in God.”[11]
As Gregory says of Paul, “he is still hastening toward something higher and never leaves off his ascent by setting the good he has already grasped as a limit to his desires.”[12] There is a continual surpassing of the self or self-transcendence, as “God is always within us in unification and always outside of us, in His transcendency.”[13] The move toward God who is simultaneously dwelling within, and yet beyond and without, is not an object obtained at death, but a person with whom one is continually converging in eternal life.
Hence we find that the apostle taught this truth concerning the nature of the inexpressible goods when he said: “eye has not seen” that Good even if it be ever gazing upon it (for it does not see as much as there is, but only as much as the eye is capable of taking in); and “ear has not heard” the full extent of what is revealed, even though its hearing be ever receiving the Word; and “it has not entered into the human heart” (1 Cor 2:9) even though persons who are pure in heart may regularly see as much as they are capable of.[14]
There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher. While there is rest and peace that are incorporated into knowing God, this rest does not mean stasis but effort toward completion. “But now finish doing it also, so that just as there was the readiness to desire it, so there may be also the completion of it by your ability” (2 Cor. 8:11). With every end accomplished there is a new beginning, for where the beginning is in the end (which is Christ), the beginning is eternally stretched out, enabling a new step in the ascent to divine likeness. “Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the good brought to an end because it is satisfied.”[15] There is a continuing depth of desire and satisfaction that knows no end in the stretching forth of being joined to Christ.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
[1] Gregory spells this out in his sermons on the Song of Songs. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Homilies on the Song of Songs’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, ed. and trans. Richard A. Norris (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).
[2] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1978), Book I paragraph, 10, p. 31.
[3] Life of Moses, I:5, 29.
[4] Gregory, Homily 8, 259.
[5] Gregory, Homily 8, 268.
[6] Life of Moses, II, 242, p, 116.
[7] Life of Moses, II, 230, p. 114.
[8] Life of Moses, II, 243, p. 117.
[9] Life of Moses, II, 244, pp. 117-118.
[10] Life of Moses, II, 245, p. 118.
[11] Liviu Petcu, “The Doctrine of Epektasis. One of the Major Contributions of Saint Gregory of Nyssa to the History of Thinking,” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (ISSN 0870-5283; 2183-461X, Pages 771-782, 2017) 774.
[12] Gregory, Homily 8, 259
[13] Petcu, 774.
[14] Homily 8, 259-261.
[15] Life of Moses, 239, p. 115.