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The Great Catechism
The presiding ministers of the “mystery of godliness” have need of a system in their instructions, in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved , through the teaching of the word of Faith being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers. Not that the same method of instruction will be suitable in the case of all who approach the word.
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About the author
Gregory of Nyssa
168 books128 followersGregory of Nyssa was a Christian bishop and saint. He was a younger brother of Basil the Great and a good friend of Gregory Nazianzus. His significance has long been recognized in the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Roman Catholic branches of Christianity.
Gregory along with his brother Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus are known as the Cappadocian Fathers. They attempted to establish Christian philosophy as superior to Greek philosophy.
Gregory along with his brother Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus are known as the Cappadocian Fathers. They attempted to establish Christian philosophy as superior to Greek philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 15, 2015
I have so enjoyed working through the writings of long dead Christians whose work has stood the test of time. Recently I've been reading the Cappadocian Fathers, three men who lived in the second half of the 300s. Their work on the Trinity and Christian spirituality is fantastic.
Gregory of Nyssa's The Great Catechism is no exception. What I most enjoy about reading historic works is that they go about things in an entirely different way then we do today. That is, coming from a different context, they are not answering the questions with the same assumptions that we bring to the questions today. Thus, reading these authors can serve as a corrective for how we read, revealing our own blindspost.
One point Gregory emphasizes here is that God is not the creator of evil. There are many passages on this, such as:
"No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil is, in some way or other, engendered from within, springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of the soul from the beautiful. For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition between virtue and vice."
This is an important point to be reminded of today, as Christians and skeptics debate what it means for God to create. If God created everything, some ask, doesn't that make God the author of sin? Definitely not, says Gregory. God created sight, for example, not blindness just as God created virtue and not vice.
As an interesting side-note, I've read a lot of David Bentley Hart recently and he has been greatly influenced by Gregory. So it is interesting to see the similarities between the two. When Hart argues that something is traditional Christian theism, it is to be expected to see it in Gregory and we do.
Where evil comes from is a mystery. There is much mystery when we speak of God. It is the same mystery that leads to God taking on human flesh to save us. Gregory spends a lot of time defending this point too, for example:
"This, then, is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His resurrection from the dead; namely, instead of preventing the dissolution of His body by death and the necessary results of nature, to bring both back to each other in the resurrection; so that He might become in Himself the meeting-ground both of life and death, having re-established in Himself that nature which death had divided, and being Himself the originating principle of the uniting those separated portions."
The transcendent God who is everywhere present has walked among us as a human:
"That Deity should be born in our nature, ought not reasonably to present any strangeness to the minds of those who do not take too narrow a view of things. For who, when he takes a survey of the universe, is so simple as not to believe that there is Deity in everything, penetrating it, embracing it, and seated in it? For all things depend on Him Who is , nor can there be anything which has not its being in Him Who is. If, therefore, all things are in Him, and He in all things, why are they scandalized at the plan of Revelation when it teaches that God was born among men, that same God Whom we are convinced is even now not outside mankind?"
Finally, we get Gregory's explanation of the atonement. He speaks of God tricking the devil. The devil had rights to humanity, so when he saw Jesus he grabbed him, but the deity was concealed in the humanity which means the devil went too far:
"the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish , the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active."
This view of the atonement was the primary understanding of the church for centuries and still has much to offer thinkers today as we reflect on what Jesus has done.
Overall, do yourself a favor and read some Gregory.
Gregory of Nyssa's The Great Catechism is no exception. What I most enjoy about reading historic works is that they go about things in an entirely different way then we do today. That is, coming from a different context, they are not answering the questions with the same assumptions that we bring to the questions today. Thus, reading these authors can serve as a corrective for how we read, revealing our own blindspost.
One point Gregory emphasizes here is that God is not the creator of evil. There are many passages on this, such as:
"No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil is, in some way or other, engendered from within, springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of the soul from the beautiful. For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition between virtue and vice."
This is an important point to be reminded of today, as Christians and skeptics debate what it means for God to create. If God created everything, some ask, doesn't that make God the author of sin? Definitely not, says Gregory. God created sight, for example, not blindness just as God created virtue and not vice.
As an interesting side-note, I've read a lot of David Bentley Hart recently and he has been greatly influenced by Gregory. So it is interesting to see the similarities between the two. When Hart argues that something is traditional Christian theism, it is to be expected to see it in Gregory and we do.
Where evil comes from is a mystery. There is much mystery when we speak of God. It is the same mystery that leads to God taking on human flesh to save us. Gregory spends a lot of time defending this point too, for example:
"This, then, is the mystery of God’s plan with regard to His death and His resurrection from the dead; namely, instead of preventing the dissolution of His body by death and the necessary results of nature, to bring both back to each other in the resurrection; so that He might become in Himself the meeting-ground both of life and death, having re-established in Himself that nature which death had divided, and being Himself the originating principle of the uniting those separated portions."
The transcendent God who is everywhere present has walked among us as a human:
"That Deity should be born in our nature, ought not reasonably to present any strangeness to the minds of those who do not take too narrow a view of things. For who, when he takes a survey of the universe, is so simple as not to believe that there is Deity in everything, penetrating it, embracing it, and seated in it? For all things depend on Him Who is , nor can there be anything which has not its being in Him Who is. If, therefore, all things are in Him, and He in all things, why are they scandalized at the plan of Revelation when it teaches that God was born among men, that same God Whom we are convinced is even now not outside mankind?"
Finally, we get Gregory's explanation of the atonement. He speaks of God tricking the devil. The devil had rights to humanity, so when he saw Jesus he grabbed him, but the deity was concealed in the humanity which means the devil went too far:
"the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish , the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active."
This view of the atonement was the primary understanding of the church for centuries and still has much to offer thinkers today as we reflect on what Jesus has done.
Overall, do yourself a favor and read some Gregory.
February 11, 2018
A masterpiece of early Christian thought by one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, the brother of the better-known Basil. He is also my favorite of the three - his language is beautiful and poetic, and his all-embracing, loving interpretation of the Christian teaching on afterlife has led him to expound the (perhaps radical?) doctrine of apocatastasis, universal salvation. This is a gem of Orthodox Christianity and required reading for Christians. Today's Christianity is dominated too much by its Western branch, in particular the teachings of Augustine and his spiritual successors, Luther and Calvin - which were certainly brilliant and profound thinkers, but perhaps less generous and less broad-minded than early Greek Fathers.
June 16, 2023
Hard to rate something like this obviously. If you’re familiar with theology or the era or the Cappadocians then there’s nothing new here, but there are some good examples of the Cappadocian soteriology and the importance of the Incarnation for our salvation. The language is archaic and convoluted. Sometimes beautiful and sometimes uses arguments we would no longer employ. It also includes specific reference to the Eucharist as the actual body and blood of Christ and the central nature of this belief.
July 5, 2022
Deep
St. Gregory's spiritual writings have a depth to them beyond that of the other Cappadocian Father's. But this characteristic in a catechism would not, I think, be advantageous to beginners. Perhaps, though, the catechumens he was. addressing were more able to receive these instructions. Nevertheless, in comparison with the Catechism of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, which is regarded as the best patristic catechism, St. Gregory's catechism suffers.
St. Gregory's spiritual writings have a depth to them beyond that of the other Cappadocian Father's. But this characteristic in a catechism would not, I think, be advantageous to beginners. Perhaps, though, the catechumens he was. addressing were more able to receive these instructions. Nevertheless, in comparison with the Catechism of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, which is regarded as the best patristic catechism, St. Gregory's catechism suffers.
February 26, 2024
Perhaps it is only the translation, but I found the text to be awkward and the phrasing distracting for most of the book. St Gregory of Nysa makes several very elegant points, but they lose their full power due to the obscurity of the translator’s verbiage.
January 23, 2025
nice catechism i love nyssa
May 28, 2015
Is it theology, or is it poetry? Sometimes Gregory of Nyssa's writing is both. Before there was Milton's Paradise Lost, there was this telling of the fall of Lucifer: "when he had closed his eyes to the good and the ungrudging like one who in the sunshine lets his eyelids down upon his eyes and sees only darkness, in this way that being also, by his very unwillingness to perceive the good, became cognizant of the contrary to goodness." One finds in Gregory of Nyssa profound explanations of Nicene orthodoxy and the seeds of Eastern Orthodox Christian theology.
Before reading this book, I recommend reviewing some church history to get a better grasp of what Gregory of Nyssa addresses and why. Gregory lived in the century following the Council of Nicea, a time marked by intense theological debates about the Trinity -- and everyone was participating. The fourth-century marketplace was buzzing with arguments about the Son, the Word; and Gregory argues for the deity of this Second Person of the Trinity in The Great Catechism. He also spends much time demonstrating the truth of the Incarnation, that "the Word became flesh" and lived a human life. Moreover, he addresses the problem of evil (and gives a free will defense), God's redemptive work to save human beings (with a ransom theory of the atonement and a full universalism, a redemption even of Satan), and the meanings of baptism (apparently regenerative, but not necessarily) and the Lord's Supper (transubstantiation but somewhat clumsily defended). Thus, The Great Catechism is not exactly a series of questions and answers for believers to memorize in doctrinal training; rather, it is a work of apologetics, a defense of the Christian faith against the Jews, pagans, Gnostics, and others of his day. Gregory handles various objections as he summarizes Christian theology to that point, echoing Origen and some Neoplatonic thought. Yet he lacks the Chalcedonian Definition (worked out in 451, some 55 years after his death); and so his description of the person of Christ falls short of that careful language. Reading Gregory of Nyssa takes time and some background knowledge, but it's well worth it, especially for deepening one's understanding of the Christian faith and its clarification over these early centuries.
Before reading this book, I recommend reviewing some church history to get a better grasp of what Gregory of Nyssa addresses and why. Gregory lived in the century following the Council of Nicea, a time marked by intense theological debates about the Trinity -- and everyone was participating. The fourth-century marketplace was buzzing with arguments about the Son, the Word; and Gregory argues for the deity of this Second Person of the Trinity in The Great Catechism. He also spends much time demonstrating the truth of the Incarnation, that "the Word became flesh" and lived a human life. Moreover, he addresses the problem of evil (and gives a free will defense), God's redemptive work to save human beings (with a ransom theory of the atonement and a full universalism, a redemption even of Satan), and the meanings of baptism (apparently regenerative, but not necessarily) and the Lord's Supper (transubstantiation but somewhat clumsily defended). Thus, The Great Catechism is not exactly a series of questions and answers for believers to memorize in doctrinal training; rather, it is a work of apologetics, a defense of the Christian faith against the Jews, pagans, Gnostics, and others of his day. Gregory handles various objections as he summarizes Christian theology to that point, echoing Origen and some Neoplatonic thought. Yet he lacks the Chalcedonian Definition (worked out in 451, some 55 years after his death); and so his description of the person of Christ falls short of that careful language. Reading Gregory of Nyssa takes time and some background knowledge, but it's well worth it, especially for deepening one's understanding of the Christian faith and its clarification over these early centuries.
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May 18, 2021Only read the first parts on God and the Trinity.
March 16, 2016
The good bits of this book are totally outstanding; however, he sounds like an Arminian and I even thought (though someone may correct me) that he was advocating transubstantiation.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews