This document discusses Gregory of Nyssa's three stages of spiritual growth and ascent to union with God using Moses' experience as an allegory. The first stage is an intellectual grasp of God through grace. The second stage involves passing through darkness and unknowing to understand God beyond images and rational thought, paralleling Moses' experience of God in a cloud. The third stage occurs on Mount Sinai, reaching existential knowledge of God beyond reason by surrendering limited understandings through grace. Gregory's contribution to apophatic theology on spiritual enlightenment continues to interest modern readers searching for meaning.
This document discusses Gregory of Nyssa's three stages of spiritual growth and ascent to union with God using Moses' experience as an allegory. The first stage is an intellectual grasp of God through grace. The second stage involves passing through darkness and unknowing to understand God beyond images and rational thought, paralleling Moses' experience of God in a cloud. The third stage occurs on Mount Sinai, reaching existential knowledge of God beyond reason by surrendering limited understandings through grace. Gregory's contribution to apophatic theology on spiritual enlightenment continues to interest modern readers searching for meaning.
This document discusses Gregory of Nyssa's three stages of spiritual growth and ascent to union with God using Moses' experience as an allegory. The first stage is an intellectual grasp of God through grace. The second stage involves passing through darkness and unknowing to understand God beyond images and rational thought, paralleling Moses' experience of God in a cloud. The third stage occurs on Mount Sinai, reaching existential knowledge of God beyond reason by surrendering limited understandings through grace. Gregory's contribution to apophatic theology on spiritual enlightenment continues to interest modern readers searching for meaning.
how what Moses experienced was an illumination of his understanding that only in God does everything sensory depend and subsist (24). But this grace of inner knowledge is intended not only for Moses. It is also given by God to all those who look to the light shining in the bramble bush, that is, to the Radiance which shines upon us through this thorny fesh and which is (as the Gospel says) the true light and the Truth itself (26). However, the grace of the frst theophany remains at the level of an intellectual grasp of God; neither Moses nor the soul is yet in possession of an existential knowledge of God, one that goes beyond the rational. To move to further growth in perfection, one will have to pass through the darkness of unknowing in order to arrive at an understanding of God who is beyond all images and the limits of rational thought. These will be the second and third stages, parallel to Moses experience of God in the cloud (Ex 33:7-11) and on Mount Sinai respectively (Exodus 34:29-35). Gregory thus writes of three stages of the ascent to union with God using Moses experience as an allegory of spiritual growth. Through grace and consistent fdelity to a holy and virtuous life, a person comes to understand that God cannot be contained within the limits of human perception; it is paradoxically only in surrendering these limited understandings through grace that one truly comes to see God. 24
Gregorys contribution to apophatic theology and spirituality has been enormously important in the history of Christian spirituality and mysticism. In our own time, it is perhaps best known through the anonymous 14 th century treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, a small work that has recently received an unusual resurgence of interest for Christian readers. This in itself suggests that, in spite of modern materialism and cynicism, or perhaps because of it, people continue to search for spiritual enlightenment in ours as in every age.
In Psalmorum Inscriptiones Gregorys goal or in his Commentary on the Inscriptions of the Psalms 25 is similar, but his exegetical approach is quite different. It has