The Third Theophany,
From Gregory of Nyssa,
Book 2.
Face to Face Vision,
Exploring the passage of Exodus 33,
7-23.
When the soul is moved towards what is naturally lovely,
It seems to me that this is the sort of passionate desire with which it is moved.
Fitting with the loveliness it sees,
It's drawn upwards to what is transcendent.
The soul is forever inflaming its desire for what is hidden,
By means of what is already grasped.
For this reason,
The ardent lover of beauty understands what is seen as an image of what he desires,
And yearns to be filled with the actual substance of the archetype.
This is what underlies the bold and excessive desire of him who desires to see no longer through mirrors and reflections,
But instead to enjoy beauty face to face.
The divine voice concedes what is demanded by actually refusing it,
And in a few words displays the immeasurable depths of its ideas.
On the one hand,
The divine generosity grants the fulfillment of his desire.
On the other hand,
It promises no end to desire,
Nor to satiety of it.
In fact,
He would never have shown himself to his servant if what was seen were enough to still the desire of the beholder.
For he declares,
My face you shall not see,
For no one shall see my face and live.
Scripture makes it plain that it is not the vision of God that is the cause of death.
For how should the face of life be the cause of death to those who draw near to it?
But since the divine is naturally life-giving,
And further,
That it is the special character of the divine nature to lie above all definition,
Whoever supposes that God is one of the things he knows is himself without life,
Having turned aside from the really real to what is supposed to be grasped by a concept.
For the really real is the true life,
And it is inaccessible to our understanding.
If then,
The life-giving lies beyond our knowledge,
What we have grasped cannot be the life,
And what is itself not life is powerless of itself to communicate it.
Moses' desire,
Therefore,
Is satisfied precisely insofar as his desire remains unsatisfied.
This is instructed through what has been said that the divine is of itself infinite,
Circumscribed by no limit.
For if the divine could be thought of as in some way limited,
It would be absolutely necessary to consider what comes after it along with it.
Whatever has a limit has a boundary,
Even as air is a limit for winged creatures and water for what lives in the water,
And even as fish are surrounded in all their parts by water,
So too are birds by the air.
So too the limit of the water for the fish and the air for the birds is the extreme surface of either which serves as the boundary for the fish,
The sea,
Or the birds of the sky,
Respectively.
The same operates in the case of the divine.
If it were thought to have a boundary,
This would imply the existence of a limit distinct in character from itself,
And our argument has shown that whatever limits is greater than that which it encloses.
And the true vision of God consists in this,
In never reaching satiety of the desire.
We ought always to look on through the things that we see and still be on fire with the desire to see more.
So let there be no limit to curtail our growth in our journey upwards to God.
This is because no limit to the beautiful has been found,
Nor can any satiety cut short the progress of the soul in its desire for the beautiful.
What is the place referred to by God?
What is the rock?
And again,
What is the space within the rock?
What is the hand of God which covers the mouth of the hollow in the rock?
What is the passage of God?
What is the back part of God,
Which God promised to give Moses who had asked him for a face-to-face vision of himself?
It should be the case that each of these things is great and worthy of the munificence of the giver.
Once his great servant had received this wonderful revelation,
What followed must be believed to be both grander and more lofty still.
How might anyone grasp the nature of this loftiness from what has been said?
For it is there that after all this previous ascent Moses himself desires to ascend,
As does he who works in all things for good to those who love God.
And so through his leadership facilitates each ascent.
For behold,
He says,
There is a place beside me.
This idea is in close agreement with our previous discoveries.
For when it speaks of place,
It does not mean that something circumscribed by quantity.
For where there is no size there can be no measure either.
But by using the image of a measured surface,
It conducts the listener to what is unlimited and infinite.
The sense of the utterance seems to be something like this.
Your desire is always strained forwards,
And your forward motion knows no weariness.
Further,
You know no limit to the good,
And your desire is always intent on something more.
This all means that the place is ever near you,
So that whoever runs therein never comes to an end of his running.
Yet from another point of view this running is also a standing still.
For he says,
I will station you upon the rock.
And this is the greatest paradox of all.
The same thing is both standing still and on the move.
For normally he who ascends never stays still,
While he who stands still does not ascend.
Yet in this case it is precisely through being still that the ascent occurs.
The meaning of this is that the more firm and immovable a person is in the good,
So much the more does he accomplish the race of virtue.
For whoever is uncertain and unstable in his convictions has an unsure grasp on the noble.
He is storm-tossed and carried around,
As the apostle says,
And is in doubt and shaken in one's conception about reality,
And as a result incapable of ascending to the height of virtue.
It is like people who endeavor to make their way upward through sand,
Who despite taking their great strides,
Labor fruitlessly.
Their footing always slips in the sand as they go down,
With the result that,
Despite their perpetual motion,
They fail to make any advance.
But if anyone,
In the words of the psalmist,
Extracts his feet from the miry bog,
And sets them instead firmly on rock,
That is,
On Christ,
Who is perfect virtue,
He will be firm and immovable in virtue.
So as the apostle exhorts us,
So much the more speedily will he accomplish his course.
He uses his stability as a sort of wing and makes his way upward,
His heart winged,
As it were,
By his firmness in the good.
In showing Moses the place,
God encourages him in this course,
And by promising him stability on the rock,
He shows him how he is to run this divine course.
