St. Gregory "The Theologian" The Intellect and the Knowledge of God

The Intellect and the Knowledge of God

God is intellect. Gregory states that the Great Intellect "or any ether perfect essence is comprehensible only by intellectual effort." The intellectual powers, the angels, are created in the "image of God. For centuries the Mind of the World, "reigning in the emptiness of the ages," saw within itself the archetypes of world that would later arise. God "invents" the "images" of the intellectual and heavenly world first, and then He designs the material and earthly world. His "thought becomes action," which is completed by the Word and perfected by the Spirit. The world of angels is the first creation to come into being. They are like God through their intellectual and spiritual nature. They are not only immutable but actually cannot be inclined to sin. Then God creates the world of visible things, and harmoniously combines the heavens and the earth. The unrefined and sensual nature of earthly things is foreign to God, but their beauty and proportion reflect His Wisdom and Strength. Within the material world God creates man, "the form of creation which is intermediate between mortality and immortality." This is a new world, and "this small world contains the great world."

Man, who "beholds visible creation and also mysteriously participates in intellectual creation," is placed on the boundary of the two worlds and at the very center of existence. It is in man that God "by His great wisdom has mingled creation." Man is created from dust and yet he bears the image of Divinity, "the image of the Immortal One, because intellect rules in them both." The Word of God "took part of the newly created world and fashioned my image with His immortal hands. He imparted to me His own Life when he gave me a soul, which is the spirit of the invisible Divinity." Gregory elsewhere refers to the soul as the "breath of God" or a "small part of the Divinity."

This is the reason that the goal of human life lies beyond the earth and beyond the senses. Man is a "new angel" who has been put on earth, and he must rise to the heavens and the radiant realm of the elect. He has been called to become a god through adoption and to fill himself with the supreme light. "This is a magnificent goal, but it can be achieved only with difficulty," Gregory writes. Man has been created in the image of God and is therefore expected to "become similar" to God. According to Gregory, the nobility of lofty souls consists only in "preserving the image within themselves, and making themselves similar to the Archetype" to the greatest degree that is possible for prisoners of the flesh. Men are able to do this because of the natural relationship which exists between the human soul and the Divine.

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http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/fathers_florovsky_1.htm#_Toc3723867