HistoricalChristian.Faith

Gregory of Nyssa on the Intermediate State

Dates: c. 395 · Wikipedia
Summary: Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – c. 395), Cappadocian bishop and brother of Basil the Great and Macrina, sets out his teaching on the soul after death chiefly in the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, a deathbed conversation with his dying sister Macrina ("the Teacher"). He holds that the soul is "simple and uncompounded" and therefore survives the dissolution of the body, persisting as a conscious, intelligent essence that retains memory and recognizes its own — it does not lapse into sleep or non-existence while it awaits the resurrection. Reading the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, he treats "Abraham's bosom" not as a physical place but as a symbol of the good state of the soul at rest, the harbour toward which the virtuous sail when they depart this life.

Claims & evidence

"Abraham's bosom" is a symbol of the soul's good state at rest

This is the reason, I think, that the name of Abraham's bosom is given to that good situation of the soul in which Scripture makes the athlete of endurance repose. For it is related of this patriarch first, of all up to that time born, that he exchanged the enjoyment of the present for the hope of the future; he was stripped of all the surroundings in which his life at first was passed, and resided amongst foreigners, and thus purchased by present annoyance future blessedness. As then figuratively we call a particular circuit of the ocean a "bosom," so does Scripture seem to me to express the idea of those measureless blessings above by the word "bosom," meaning a place into which all virtuous voyagers of this life are, when they have put in from hence, brought to anchor in the waveless harbour of that gulf of blessings.

— On the Soul and the Resurrection, historicalchristian.faith. Commenting on Luke 16:22, Gregory reads "Abraham's bosom" figuratively: as a bay or gulf of the sea is a "bosom," so the resting place of the righteous names not a location but the soul's secure condition — the "waveless harbour" in which those who have lived virtuously anchor after death. The repose of the righteous in the intermediate state is thus a state of the soul, with Abraham the pattern of one who preferred the hope of things to come.

The soul survives the body's dissolution, conscious and recognizing its own

she remains after dissolution in those very atoms in which she first grew up, and, like a guardian placed over private property, does not abandon them when they are mingled with their kindred atoms, and by the subtle ubiquity of her intelligence makes no mistake about them

— On the Soul and the Resurrection, historicalchristian.faith. In the dialogue with the dying Macrina, Gregory defends the soul as a "simple and uncompounded" intellectual essence that does not perish when the composite body breaks up. It persists with its faculties intact — keeping watch over the scattered elements of its own body so that nothing is lost against the resurrection, and (as Macrina adds a little later) "she always remembers her own as it was when compact in bodily form, and after dissolution she never makes any mistake about it." The soul between death and resurrection is therefore awake, intelligent, and self-identical, not asleep or annihilated.

Christ in "the heart of the earth": the descent as the bait-and-hook defeat of death

For it was impossible for the prince of darkness to mix with the presence of light without seeing some portion of flesh in Him, for this reason, when he saw the God-bearing flesh and also the miracles performed through it by the deity, he hoped, if he could conquer the flesh through death, to also overpower all the force within it. For this reason, the bait of the flesh, encircling the hook of deity, was swallowed, and thus the dragon was drawn by the hook, as he who foretold through himself what would happen says to Job, "You will pull the dragon with a hook."

— On the three days between the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, historicalchristian.faith. In this paschal homily Gregory reads Christ's descent into "the heart of the earth" (Matt 12:40) as the place where death and "that evil mind" are defeated: the devil, lured by the visible flesh, "swallowed" it — only to be caught on "the hook of deity" hidden within. The famous bait-and-hook image (a Christus Victor motif Gregory shares with his brother's circle) makes the three days in the realm of the dead the very theatre of the enemy's undoing — "the mortal swallowed by life," "death" abolished. This is a distinct work from On the Soul and the Resurrection above: there Gregory treats the soul's rest; here, Christ's own sojourn among the dead. See the descent to the dead argument page for the wider adjudication.

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