Come Fly With Me

A couple of posts ago we touched on St. Gregory of Nyssa's vision of the spiritual ascent as one of endless progress. 

The journey never ends, but as they say, to travel well is better than to arrive anyway. I wouldn't mention it except that this comports with my view, and it's always nice when a saint has your back.

Let's begin by repeating the following passage and move on from there: the basic idea is that "the spiritual life both here and in eternity" is "an infinite and perpetual becoming" which "ever more closely approaches and pursues the infinite God, ever reaching out, always being filled, and yet never being sated with the experience and knowledge of God."  

For Gregory, perfection consists... precisely in this perpetual movement toward the interior that constitutes a never-ending discovery of God.... 

[S]ince it [the ascent] consists in partaking of the divine nature and since the divine nature is infinite, this participation is by definition always capable of further increase.

So, perpetual becoming. Just like here -- bearing in mind that this becoming is always in tension with eternal Being. Our state "is one of tension but progress, a perpetual deification."  

Again, Gregory speaks of the three stages of the spiritual ascent, which come down to illumination, purification, and union. 

We'll yada yada over the first two and plunge straight to the third. Not that we are so pure and luminous, rather, because it's kind of a fractal situation, with each partaking of the others. In other words, there is no real end to the purification and illumination. Rather, it's more like an endless cycle. For example,

Already in this life, it [the ascent] anticipates through contemplation its eschatological restoration to the world on high.... Thus, although there is a sense in which contemplation is an accomplishment..., even so it is not a conclusion.

Instead, "the divine essence still remains infinitely inaccessible":

The soul always believes that it has arrived at the end, yet each time discovers that what it took to be the end is in reality nothing other than a new beginning.... 

When we have managed to climb to what we think to be the highest rung, a new ladder always appears before us.

So, it's ladders all the way up. You could say this is disappointing or you could say that it's an endless surprise (?!), and why not?

Only the unexpected fully satisfies. Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes

Moreover, 

God is the name of the sole enigma that, if it were deciphered, would not be a disappointment.

Which implies that everything short of God is going to be a little disappointing, if that's how you want to look at it. But such a gloss is more than half fool.

Sure, death is disappointing, but "The mystical life encompasses a whole world of deaths and new resurrections," so get used to it. 

Gregory has much to say about about what we call the Divine Attractor in vertical phase space, AKA Celestial Central: "the transformation of the soul results in a growing attraction to God." It increasingly yields to this divine attractor, "who pulls it to himself by a sort of gravitation," much like "a weight [that pulls] upwards." 

Since, therefore, every nature tends to attract what is proper to it, and the human is in some way proper to God, because it bears in itself the imitation of its Archetype, necessarily the soul is attracted to the Divine which is related to it. 

"This gravitation, that attracts the purified soul to God," is analogous to the "physical attraction [that] draws bodies to each other":

Fundamentally, then, it is an attraction of like for like that lifts the soul increasingly closer to God, as it becomes ever more like him.

And to repeat,

This transformation will have no end. Being infinite, God always infinitely overflows the capacity of the soul....

Which results in a kind of "endless dilation" of the soul, whereby "despite being at each moment satisfied and fulfilled, finds that each injection of grace dilates its capacity still further in the very act of filling it."

That's the end of the chapter. I'll read the next one today and get back to you tomorrow.