Translation of a portion of St. Gregory of Nyssa's "The Spirit and Resurrection"

This is a translation I am working on for my final in Patristic Greek on Gregory of Nyssa. Its not totally finalized. A couple things need to be considered or the translation will not make sense. There are some word plays in the original Greek because "kalos" or "the good," can also mean more precisely "the beautiful," but is in some places switched with "agathos" which also means "the good," but in a more moral sense. Hence Gregory is trying to create a close interconnection between God's goodness morally and his beauty, so that the beauty we see in creation is a reflection of God's good beauty and moral pleasure. But this is hard to pull off in english since "good" and "beautiful" arent as closely connected. Hence where sometimes one will see "good," and in other places "beautiful." To we "moderns" with our penchant for discrete concepts this sometimes makes us uneasy, but Gregory is attempting to argue within a conceptuality of an Infinite God: any attributes of God, being infinite, cannot have discrete attributes in this way, hence are "convertible" with one another. I should note also before some get up in arms that Gregory says "evil does not exist" that he means in a philosophical sense: as God is Good/Beautiful, the only true existence of things for Gregory can be Beauty and Goodness. Evil is a privation or corruption of this original purity, but not something that "has" existence: it can only be parasitic. There is also a line here that goes "in the occupation concerning the enjoyment of good things pours forth memory from consciousness," which of course wont make sense to anyone these days. Gregory is altering a concept of "memory" from a philosophical school called "neo-Platonism." Long story short neo-Platonism taught that the finite, material world was a "fall" or "emanation" from an originally pure Source (God). Material creation still longed to return to the eternity of the One. To do so it was thought that one must ascend from materiality to "remember" the spiritual unification one had with the One in "Eternity past." This "remembering," then essentially meant one must de-temporalize and de-historicize oneself to ascend again to the abyss of the One. Gregory with his Christian sensibility of creation as God's good gift, historicizes the neo-Platonic concept of "memory," saying that we become increasingly unified with God, not in a flight from creation, history, or the finite, but when we enjoy His good creation, that is "memory [i.e. increased unification with God] pours forth from consciousness" every instant of our good pleasure.

Anyway, heres the excerpt. Enjoy!

But a nature which is excessive beyond all conceptions of the Good and exceeds every power, having no lack of anything which is considered good, itself is the fullness of all Beauty, not according to participation in a particular beauty by moving in the sphere of the beautiful, but itself being the nature of Beauty, which includes whatever the mind considers beautiful at any time. [The Beautiful] is not receptive to the movement of hope in itself, for hope is operative only toward that which is not present--but, as the Apostle says, the one who [already] has, for what shall he also hope? Neither is [the Beautiful] in need of the operation of memory for the knowledge of things, for that which is continually being seen has no need to be remembered.

Since, then, the divine nature exceeds every individual good, and the good is wholly beloved by the good, because of this while looking at Itself, that which [the Beautiful] contains, it desires, and that which it desires, it contains--it receives nothing external into itself. Indeed there is nothing outside [the Beautiful], with the sole exception of evil, which, even if indeed it is to speak paradoxically, possess existence in not existing. For there is no other additional origin of evil except the privation of the existent, the true existent being the nature of the Good, and that which is not in the existent is wholly in the non-existent. So also the soul, having divested itself of all the manifold perturbations of nature, becomes like the divine and exceeding desires by that which it might become, toward that which it was formerly driven by desire, it no longer gives a harbor in itself for either hope or memory. For it possesses that for which it hopes, and the occupation concerning the enjoyment of good things pours forth memory from consciousness. And thus [the soul] imitates the superabundant Life, becoming formed to the characteristics of the divine nature. And no other [characteristic] is left to it except the steadfast position of an aptitude for love, [which] naturally grows toward the Beautiful.

For this is love: an inherent disposition toward an object of affection. When then the soul has become sincere and singular in form and perfectly god-like, it may find the truly sincere and immaterial good the only such thing to be worthy of love and enthusiasm, both growing towards it and blending with it through both the movement and energy of love, constantly forming itself to that which it grasps and finds. Becoming this through the assimilation to the Good [and] whatever the nature of that with which it participates is, [since] there is no desire in [the Beautiful] because nothing of the good is lacking in Him, it follows that the soul may also become of no lack, casting out from itself the movement and constant position of desire, for desire only occurs when the thing desired is not present.

And for such a teaching, God's own Apostle authorized it to us, announcing a subduing and ceasing of all the activities zealously occurring now among us, even for the greater things, yet finds no limit for love alone. For prophecies, they say, shall fail, and knowledge shall cease. Love shall not fall, which is equivalent to its always having its identity as Love...Love therefore is the foremost of all excellent achievements and the first of the commandments of the law. If ever the soul reach this perfection, it will be in no need of any other thing [but] will embrace the plenitude of things which are, whereby alone it seems in any way to preserve within itself the stamp of God's actual blessedness. For the life of the Supreme Nature is Love, since the Beautiful is wholly beloved to those who know it, and the Divine knows itself, and this knowledge becomes Love, that which is recognized being essentially Beautiful. This True Beauty the hubris of satiety cannot touch, and no satiety interrupting this continuous capacity to love the Beautiful, God's life will have its activity in love; Whose life is thus in itself Beautiful, and is essentially of a loving disposition toward the Beautiful, and receives no impediment to this energy of love. In fact, there is no limit to be found in the Beautiful. For [the Beautiful] can only be ended by its opposite, but when you have a good as here, which is in its essence incapable of a change to detriment, then that good will go on unchecked into Infinity.