viii PREFACE. understood formula that the ^kyewriaia was the essence of the Father—an idea which in the Dated Creed Valens had repudiated. What, then, was to be done ? Eunomius seemed by his parade of logic to have dug a gulf for ever between the Ungenerate and the Generate, in other words between the Father and the Son. The merit and interest of this Treatise of Gregory consists in showing this logician as making endless mistakes in his logic ; and then, that anything short of the " eternal generation " involved unspeakable absurdities or profanities ; and lastly, that Eunomius was fighting by means of distinctions which were the mere result of mental analysis. Already, we see, there was floating in the air the Conceptualism and Realism of the Middle Ages, invoked for this last Arian controversy. When Eunomius retorted that this faculty of analysis cannot give the name of God, and calls his opponents atheists for not recognizing the more than human source of the term 'AytVvTyro?, the last word of Nicene orthodoxy has to be uttered ; and it is, that God is really incomprehensible, and that here we can never know His name. This should have led to a statement of the claims of the Sacraments as placing us in heart and spirit, but not in mind, in communion with this incomprehensible God. But this would have been useless with such opponents as the Eunomians. Accuracy of doctrine and clearness of statement was to them salvation ; mysteries were worse than nothing. Only in the intervals of the logical battle, and for the sake of the faithful, does Gregory recur to those moral and spiritual attributes which a true Christianity has revealed in the Deity, and upon which the doctrine of the Sacraments is built. Such controversies are repeated now ; /. e. where truths, which it requires a certain state of the affections to understand, should be urged, but cannot be, on the one side ; and truths which are logical, or literary, or scientific only, are ranged on the other side ; as an instance, 1:hough in another field, the arguments for and against the results of the " higher criticism " of the Old Testament exhibit this irreconcilable attitude. Yet in one respect a great gain must have at once resulted to the Catholic cause from this long work. The counter opposition of Created and Uncreate, with which Gregory met the opposition of Generate and Ungenerate, and which, unlike the latter, is a dichotomy founded on an essential difference, must have helped many minds, distracted with the jargon of Arianism,- to see more clearly the preciousness of the Baptismal Formula, as the casket which contains the Faith. Indeed, the life-work of Gregory was to defend this Formula. The Treatise 0// Virginity is probably the work of his youth ; but none the less Christian for that. Here is done what students of Plato had doubtless long been asking for, /. e. that his *' love of the Beautiful " should be spiritualized. Beginning with a bitter accusation of marriage, Gregory leaves the reader doubtful in the end whether celibacy is necessary or not for the contemplative life ; so absorbed he becomes in the task of showing the blessedness of those who look to the source of all visible beauty. But the result of this seeing is not, as in Plato, a mere enlightenment as to the real value of these visible things. There are so many more beautiful things in God than Plato saw ; the Christian revelation has infinitely enriched the field of contemplation ; and the lover of the beautiful now must be a higher character, and have a more chastened heart, not only be a more favoured child of light, than others. His enthusiasm shall be as strong as ever ; but the model is higher now ; and even an Aristotelian balance of moral extremes is necessary to guide him to the goal of a successful Imitation. It was right, too, that the Church should possess her Phcedo^ or Death-bed Dialogue ; and it is Gregory who has supplied this in his On the Soul and the Resurrection. But the copy becomes an original. The dialogue is between a sister and a brother; the one a saintly Apologist, the other, for argument's sake, a gainsayer, who urges all the pleas of Greek materialism. Not only the immortality of the soul is discussed, but an exact definition of it is sought, and that in the light of a truer psychology than Plato's. His "chariot" is given up ; sensation, as the basis of all thought, is freely recognized ; and yet the passions are firmly separated from the actual essence of the soul ; further, the " coats of skins " of fallen humanity, as symbolizing the wrong use of the passions, take the place of the " sea-weed " on the statue of Glaucus. The grasp of the Christian philosopher of the traits of a perfect humanity, so conspicuous in his Making of Man., give him an advantage here over the pagan. As for the Resurrection of the flesh, it was a novel stroke to bring the beHefs of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, and the later Platonists, into one focus as it were, and to show that the teaching of those philosophers as to the destinies of the soul recognized the possibility, or even the necessity, of the reassumption of sojue body. Grotesque objections to the Christian Resurrection, such as are urged nowadays, are brought forward and answered in this Treatise. The appeal to the Saviour, as to the Inspiration of the Old Testament, has raised again a