Gregory, What’re You Nyssan?

Faith is one of the most powerful things in the world. I say this because Christianity has managed to last solely on faith for a couple thousand years now. No small feat, I think, especially considering there is a vast gamut of things that can shake faith to its very core.

One of the most notable of these things is death. The defeat of death and the eternal soul are the very basis of the Christian faith–and yet, so often, it the very thing that snuffs it out.

Enter Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory is a well-known figure in the early church (though, interestingly enough, this didn’t come about until roughly the 1950s). He is revered as one of the Cappadocian Fathers, in addition to being a saint. At the time of On the Soul and Resurrection, Gregory’s brother Basil had just died. He seeks out his sister Macrina for consolation, only to discover that she too is on her deathbed. All in all? Rough period for Gregory.

Here’s the interesting part: this saint, this revered church father, begins to doubt the eternity of the soul. He worries that Basil is gone for good, and soon Macrina will be too. He has misgivings about the very core of Christianity!

Doubt is something that can seem foolish and weak to Christians who have known nothing else but childlike faith. They hear that someone is doubting the gospel (or even outright turning away from it) and scoff about how that person is much less smart than they. But doubt really is something you don’t know the power of until it slaps you square in the face. I can speak firsthand to this: I won’t go into detail since I believe that qualifies as a personal and unrelated tangent, but it was (and sorta still is) a murky part of my life.

But this doubt makes Gregory aggressive, theologically speaking at least. He attacks the Christian idea that the soul is eternal with two main points: if the soul is with the body than it must die with the body, and if it is not part of the body then it cannot exist since there is no other place it could be. Macrina rebuffs him, saying that the soul doesn’t have to be made of the same stuff as the body at all. It is just a bit beyond out comprehension. We must understand this and have faith.

Gregory and Macrina dialogue about the soul for a bit longer, until Gregory is satisfied. He then turns to resurrection itself, and the doubts and questions he possesses regarding that. His questions are as follows:

He wonders how the body is restored, since if it were the same as before that’d be a bad thing, and if it were different it wouldn’t really be us. He wonders at what stage the body would be restored, and whether the old would suffer for the choices of the younger. He wonders if we will be resurrected along with the parts that we won’t need any more, and how foolish that would be. Macrina rebuffs these once more, and assures him that the resurrection will happen as God originally intended humans to be–like we were in Eden.

Just have faith, and put your trust in God.

It’s easier said than done, of course. Blind faith is extraordinarily difficult.

But despite this, Christianity has made it this far. And there has to be a reason for that, right?