St. Gregory of Nyssa’s contemplative treatise The Life of Moses was well-known to me even before I read it for the first time, because I had heard it referred to in both academic and non-academic circles, quoted in Sunday homilies, alluded to in philosophical debates, and listed in anthologies of patristic literature. The reasons for such universal regard for the work became more and more apparent with each chapter. It expositionally develops a well-known area of Old Testament scripture and keenly balances Greek philosophy with thoroughly Orthodox theology, while at the same time revealing a mysticism both revolutionary and deeply personal. As expected in such a comprehensive exegesis, much of Gregory’s interpretation relies heavily on spiritual, or allegorical, interpretation. In some cases, he provides such interpretations simply as options which can be beneficial for the Christian spiritual journey. However, in the case of some of these spiritual interpretations, he finds it necessary to contend that a literal interpretation would involve the imputation of wrongdoing onto the Almighty.
Normally, this would be easy to pass over as the overemphasis of a rather narrow-minded church father, while keeping an open mind to allowing for competing interpretations by other equally authoritative figures in other contexts. However, several of the sections from The Life of Moses where Gregory insisted on spiritual interpretation were important in a contemporary sense because they stuck out as the sorts of Bible passages touted today by enemies of the Christian faith seeking to “expose the great evils of the Bible” and “show Christianity’s true colors.” Most remarkably, Gregory often seemed to be in agreement with these criticisms, abandoning all narrative sense in favor of an intangible allegory which seemed to take no account of the text on its own historical terms. Hence, it is important to address a question which is twofold: first, what is to be done with the troublesome passages in the Torah, and is Gregory right to insist on solely allegorical interpretations? Second, does Gregory’s overall purpose in The Life of Moses provide any clues as to why he remains so committed to spiritual interpretations?
The first question must be answered generally, by a Christian on a personal level, to Christians in general. Anybody who has read the Bible, provided he does not just skip over troublesome details, has come upon plenty of “rough spots” which are hard to work out on one’s own. Numerous examples could be provided, but any single one could make the point: sometimes our God-given, internal notions of justice and fairness do not mesh with the account of God’s justice provided in the Old Testament. What is the Christian to believe in such a situation? Take, for example, Gregory’s complaint against the Angel of Death wiping out the Egyptian firstborn in Exodus 12: “If [the Egyptian infant] now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries, ‘The man who has sinned is the man who must die’ and ‘A son is not to suffer for the sins of his father’? How can the history (ἱστορία) so contradict reason? Therefore, as we look for the true spiritual meaning…” (Gregory, 57). Gregory, as previously mentioned, is quick to reject the ἱστορία as “history” and instead treats it as an allegorical “story.” Is this our only option in such a passage?
Philosophically, there are of course several logical explanations. One could take any number of positions not prohibited by traditional church doctrine, and many have even taken positions which are. Perhaps, for example, God foreknew the infants’ uninstantiated yet logically necessary potential future actions, and based his actions on that knowledge. Maybe the infants, whose eternal fate is a mystery, were better off with their lives cut short. Or possibly the Angel of Death is a symbol for the Egyptians’ own child sacrifice rituals which they sinfully performed of their own free will. All these are logically possible, and indeed, have been posited as solutions of this dilemma. Yet none of these appeals need to be made! These are discussions either for pedants or for great saints and theologians. Let us not presume. Our role as Christians is primarily to know what we believe, not about the great mysteries of the faith, but about its basic tenets. One categorically precedes the other. It has always struck me as ridiculous when these problems are presented as defeaters for the Christian worldview. Place such an argument in propositional form, and you will see why I am so amused: “You claim that the Bible is God’s Word, yet here it reveals God to be a vile criminal! Why would God impugn Himself?” Why indeed! The solution “we must have something wrong” immediately becomes equally probable as “this must not be sacred scripture,” and thus the objection defeats itself, and simultaneously highlights an important and rather humorous heuristic for the reader of scripture: the Bible cannot argue away God. When it begins to, you are reading it wrong. And after that is understood, whether a spiritual interpretation is required, or some other explanation will do equally well, you will be getting on far more efficiently than you were. So much for the question of what we as Christians are to do with these troublesome passages.
The next question which must be addressed is how to best understand Gregory’s treatment of the Exodus passages as primarily spiritual. To continue with our example of the tenth plague, it is rather distressing that Gregory underemphasizes the plague’s actual historicity: “How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history?” (Gregory, 56). In fact, in the context of all he says about the injustice of the plague, it is reasonable to assume that if he believes God is just (which he obviously does), God could not have done this and the plague must not be historical. At this point I can feel a polemic about proper Biblical exegesis rising in my throat.
However, it may be helpful to look at this passage and the others like it in context of the whole Life and start to understand Gregory on his own terms. We should ask ourselves if this great Cappadocian father has really blundered into the unthinkable hermeneutic we are foisting upon him: “If an Old Testament act of God seems unjust, it must not have truly happened.” Did Gregory really believe that? Well, a brief foray into the study of genre may be helpful to determine Gregory’s train of thought in his seeming overemphasis of allegorical interpretation in this work. Stephen E. Fowl, in his book The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, explains: “The Life of Moses is exegetical, following the narrative portions of Exodus in the Septuagint, but it is not a commentary. It is, rather, a bios, a well-defined classical genre…which characteristically held up the life of its subject as a moral example” (Fowl, 104). Fowl goes on to explain that a bios, or biography (though the modern terminology is mildly inappropriate), is designed to place every event in its subject’s life on a pedestal, mining each detail for meta-historical significance and didactic edification of the reader. Hence, the abundance of spiritual interpretations in the Life is justifiable if it is understood that the work’s genre calls for such an emphasis.
Why, then, did Gregory consider it necessary to argue for his use of allegory through arguments about justice and God’s nature, when those arguments seem to have side effect of debunking the true historicity of the work? Well, it was certainly not because Gregory purposed to discredit the timeless story of Moses the Lawgiver. In fact, there would be no reason to write a bios if the events of the subject’s life had never taken place. The truth of Gregory’s purpose takes us with the author, one level deeper into the text, to see from his perspective. Gregory did not mean to make dogmatic assertions about the mysteries of divine decision-making. All he wanted to do, given the morally instructive purpose of the work, was to affirm the conscience of the reader which welled up in rejection at the death of innocents. Gregory means to reassure, to say “Your revulsion is appropriate. To lose that moral revulsion would be to lose your humanity. Yet,” he silently adds when we read between the lines, “your revulsion may not extend to the Divine Person. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. All that he does is a mystery.”
We can already see this perspective in his description of God as λαμπρός γνόφος, or “luminous darkness,” impenetrable by human contemplation, yet the very source of our ability to contemplate. To put it rather ironically, it is God who gives us, through free will and the power of the intellect, the ability to doubt and accuse Him. Were he only λαμπρός, the illuminated intellect would crowd out all faith, and were he only γνόφος, there would be no other minds. Gregory of Nyssa, the great Cappadocian master, made room for both in his mystical theology and scriptural interpretation. I see no reason why we cannot follow suit as we attempt to understand his teaching.
I recommend reading this short work to any who are seeking to achieve righteousness through both contemplation of the mysteries of godliness and emulation of a holy man of faith.
