St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and Great Divorce

Today we will learn and reflect on the collection of sermons by St Gregory
of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Church Fathers, on the Beatitudes,
which was referenced in the Catholic Catechism for the Commandment,
Do Not Envy.
These sermons read like divine poetry, and St Gregory of Nyssa is one of
the early Church Fathers, including Origen, who sought to express the
Christian faith through the lens of the philosophy of the Plato and the
neo-Platonic philosophers. In the very beginning of his works on the
Beatitudes he refers to Plato’s allegory of the cave, and how once the
Christian is able to throw off his chains of ignorance and climb into the
sunlight of true knowledge, he can continue up the mountains proclaimed
by the prophet Isaiah and become a true follower of Christ.

Since so few modern readers are familiar with this key notion of
Platonic philosophy, we will first reflect on Plato’s remarkable
Allegory of the Cave, and another similar allegory, the bus that
gives the occupants of Hell another chance to decide to reject the
laziness of evil and take the bus that ascends to the foothills of
Heaven, as described in the work by CS Lewis, the Great Divorce.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video, and my blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we
welcome interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and
reflect together!

YouTube Video:
St Gregory of Nyssa,
On Beatitudes:
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
CS Lewis Great Divorce
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https://youtu.be/wuqwy3GyO_4

St Gregory of Nyssa was a fourth century theologian of Caesarea,
Cappadocia, in what is now Turkey.
St Gregory of Nyssa, his brother St Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea,
and their friend St Gregory of Nazianzus, were together known as the
Cappadocian Church Fathers, and were leading theologians in the church.
Unlike his brother Basil, he had little administrative talent, but he wrote
theological works that read like poetry.
St Gregory begins his discourse on the Beatitudes by having us follow
Jesus up the mountain as he is preparing to speak to the crowds in the
Sermon on the Mount:

.
St Gregory of Nyssa begins, “Who among us is
a disciple of the Word, seeking to ascend with
our Lord from the low ground, from
superficial and ignoble thoughts to the
spiritual mountain of sublime concentration?
This mountain leaves behind all shadows cast
by the rising hills of wickedness, this
mountain is lit up on all sides by the rays of
true light, from the summit of this mountain
everything that is invisible to those
imprisoned in the CAVE may be seen in the
pure air of truth.”

Here Gregory of Nyssa is referring to Plato’s famous allegory of
the cave. But the climb up from this cave lies at the center of
Platonic moral philosophy, and ancient readers would
remember this parable just as all Christians remember the
Parable of the Good Samaritan.
The allegory of the cave is a platonic parable showing how we,
mere mortal men, imagine that our mortal ignorance can truly
comprehend the immortal wisdom of the stars above, and how
men stubbornly cling to their ignorant beliefs rather than
seeking the truth.
We cannot improve on Plato’s description of the allegory:

Plato proclaims, “Behold! Mere mortals living in an underground den, with a mouth open to
the light and reaching all along the den, these men have had their legs and necks chained
since childhood, they can only see before them, they cannot turn their heads. Above and
behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, behind them is a low wall like the screen which
marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”

Plato continues, “Men are walking on top of the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of
animals made of wood and stone and various materials, some of the men are talking, some are silent. In
front the chained men only see the shadows of the men walking on the opposite wall of the cave.”

The men in the cave, the men staring at the shadows on the wall of the
cave, those shadows on the wall of the cave are all the men know, they
imagine that is all there is to know, they do not know what is up beyond
the cave.
If Plato were alive today, he would instead have these slaves chained to
their couches in a dark room where they would be anesthetized by their
eternally droning televisions babbling on endlessly for eternity.

What does Plato tell us when “any one of the prisoners is liberated and
compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look
towards the light? He will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him.”

Then he will realize “that what he saw before was an illusion,” as he climbs out of the
cave into the light, and he will see the sun and the moon and the stars and the true
reality rather than the reflections of the shadows on the cave, where the true riches are
not the silver and gold of the cave, but “virtue and wisdom, the true blessings of life.”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, by Michiel Coxie, painted 1540’s. What does Plato tell us of
the man who spent time in
the light and then
descended back into the
cave? His fellow men in
chains would no longer
understand what he had to
say to them, they would say
that “he went up and came
back down without his eyes,
and that no other man
should even think of
ascending, and if anyone
tried to loose another and
lead him up to the light, let
them only catch the
offender, and they would
put him to death.”

Plato explains the allegory,
the cave, or “the prison-
house is the world of sight,
the light of the fire is the
sun, and the journey
upwards is the ascent of
the soul into the
intellectual world. . . In the
world of knowledge the
idea of good appears last
of all, and IS SEEN ONLY
WTH AN EFFORT, and when
seen is inferred to be the
universal author of all
things beautiful and right,
parent of light and of the
lord of light in this visible
world, and the immediate
source of reason and truth
in the intellect.”
Plato's Cave, Cornelis van Haarlem and Jan Saenredam, printed 1604

Perhaps the Matrix was but a rehash of the Allegory of the Cave, except that those peopling the
Matrix weren’t chained to a wall but could wander around what they thought was a city in
which they could wander around.
The Allegory of the Cave can also be a metaphor for higher education, or for someone who fills
all his spare time not by watching television, which is nothing but passive images on the wall of
our living room cave, but rather by improving his soul by studying morality and philosophy. If
we see the Church Fathers and philosophers as either dangerous or as interminable bores,
rather than as friends reaching out their hands over the millennia to pass down their wisdom to
us, then that tells us more about ourselves than it tells us about these sages of the ages, this
may reveal we prefer to stay in our cave of willing ignorance.

Another allegory similar to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the central story in the Republic and
Platonic philosophy, is CS Lewis’ great book, the Great Divorce, about how Hell itself is another
type of dark cave of deceptions, where the brave few can still choose to board the bus to climb
into the bright sun and visit a brighter place, the foothills of the mountains where the faithful
climb in their eternal quest for perfection and union with Christ.
You may object that analogy is flawed, since the deluded in Plato’s cave make an intellectual
journey, while the riders in the CS Lewis’ divine bus that lifts in the heavens to travel to the
outskirts of heaven is a spiritual journey. The difference is not that great, both are a climb away
from a willful ignorance, and St Gregory of Nyssa is suggesting that we need to make Plato’s
journey out of the cave before we can take the bus to heaven. If you listen to our videos on the
teachings of the Eastern Church Fathers in the Philokalia, you will find that they do not make an
overly sharp distinction between the intellect and the spiritual side of man. Indeed, when an
illiterate initiate first joined an ancient monastery, they were often compelled to learn to read
so they could read the Psalters and the Gospels. Studying the faith was a critical part of the
ancient church.

Paradise, by Jan Bruegel the Elder, 1620

CS Lewis never wants to get bogged down in the typical controversies that so often divide
Christians, especially in the social media. One such divider is the doctrine of Purgatory. He
simply explains that in his story that Hell is Hell for the overwhelming majority who decline to
even board the bus, but for the very, very few who board the bus and choose to stay in heaven,
for them the dark, dank, lonely world is Purgatory. In the end, whether Purgatory actually exists
is God’s choice, not ours, and if God can choose that Purgatory exists, God can also choose that
Purgatory exists for some people and not others. So perhaps if you are baptized Catholic and
believe that you do not need to repent and live a godly life to be saved, because you can spend
the tens of thousands of years in Purgatory in repentance, perhaps then Purgatory would not
exist for you.
There are no flames in the Hell of CS Lewis, so it can also serve as Purgatory in this story. This
painting by Rubens depicts a Purgatory that the sinners climb out of, much like those who stay
after the bus leaves Heaven. Purgatory is described in the Catholic Catechism as a place of
purifying fire, rather than the tormenting fire of bitter memories of Hell, in a way a joyous fire,
but many paintings depict a Purgatory that is as miserable a place as Hell, which is not helpful.

Purgatory, by
Peter Paul
Rubens,
painted 1636
An Angel
Frees the
Souls of
Purgatory, by
Ludovico
Carracci,
painted 1610

Everyone is alone in Hell,
every day is “always raining,
always in perpetual twilight,”
street after street of empty
streets, everyone always
moving further away to be
alone, the grey city
expanding endlessly. Like
those chained to the wall in
Plato’s cave, most of those in
Hell are not eager to leave
this dark and dreary place;
very, very few even consider
getting on the bus.
"In Dickens's London" (1914) , written and illustrated by F. Hopkinson Smith

The bus to heaven is described by CS Lewis as a “wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light,
heraldically colored. The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive
with. The other he waved before his face as if to fan away the greasy steam of the rain.”
Everyone perpetually complains and argues and finds fault with their neighbors in Hell. CS
Lewis continues, “a growl went up from the queues as the bus came in sight. ‘Looks as if he had
a good time of it, eh?’”, “thinks himself too good to look at us.”

In the Great Divorce, is the Driver of the
bus an angel, or Jesus Himself? One the
one hand, the Driver could be an angel, it
might be out of character for Jesus not to
converse with the passengers on the bus,
but they have already rejected Him all
their lives. One the other hand, time in
eternity is eternally in the present, and
this bus could symbolize the harrowing of
Hell, how the Driver is the Jesus in the
Creed who “descended into hell” to
preach to the spirits.
Tobias and the angel, by Karel Dujardin, painted 1660

Our narrator tells us
that “my fellow
passengers fought like
hens to get on board
the bus although there
was plenty of room for
all.” Very few of the
residents of Hell ever
got in the queue for
the bus to Heaven, and
many broke out of the
queue before the bus
arrived.

Later, during the journey, the passengers fought among themselves,
there was even a shooting, although the shooting was pointless, as
everyone on the bus had already died.
The hell that CS Lewis depicts is not someplace where a mean God
condemns those who want to have a little bit of fun in their lives. On
the contrary, Hell is a choice. If you live a selfless life, if you live a godly
life, if you truly Love God, if you truly love your neighbor as yourself,
then Heaven is your choice. If you live a selfish life, if you ignore God, if
you despise your neighbor, or delude yourself by imagining that it is
possible to pick and choose whom you will and will not love, then Hell
is your choice.

As CS Lewis teaches us, “There are two types of people
in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and
those to whom God says, ‘thy will be done.’ Without that
self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously
and constantly wants joy will miss it. Those who seek
shall find. To those who knock the door, it is opened.”
Whether we truly Love God, whether we truly seek God,
must be a question we constantly try to discern, as the
many stories of souls demonstrate. Another way to put
this is the long-told joke, What is the difference between
those who want to go to church on Sunday, and those
who want to go to the beach on Sunday? The difference
is the people who go to the beach on Sunday don’t go to
church because they don’t need to change, while the
people who go to church don’t need to change either,
because they go to church.
The Last Judgement, by Peter Paul Rubens, painted 1617

Jesus in the Gospels proclaims that the Kingdom
of Heaven is among us. Indeed, we create our
own Heaven and Hell in our lives on Earth, our
choice is indeed eternal. CS Lewis explains the
timeless nature of our choices, he teaches us that
that often we, who are mortal do not understand
eternity. “Mortals say of some temporal, or
earthly, suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for
it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will
work backwards and turn even that agony into a
glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, ‘Let
me have but this and I’ll take the consequences,’
little dreaming how damnation will spread back
and back into their past and contaminate the
pleasure of sin.”
The Last Judgement, by Pieter Pourbus, painted 1551

CS Lewis continues, “Both processes
begin even before death. The good
man’s past begins to change so that
his forgiven sins and remembered
sorrows take on the quality of
Heaven, but the bad man’s past
already conforms to his badness
and is filled only with dreariness.”
“And that is why the Blessed will
say, ‘We have never lived anywhere
except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We
were always in Hell.’ And both will
speak truly.”
The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo, painted 1541

As the bus rises and Hell shrinks underneath
the bus, the dark and dreary twilight fades
away into a joyous sky full of brightness, and
they encounter the brilliant colors of the
landscape when the bus arrives at the foothills
of Heaven, “the light, the grass, the trees were
different, made of some different substance, so
much solider than the things in our country,”
that is, Hell, “that men were ghosts in
comparison.” “Greenness and light” was
nearby, and far away was there was “a great
cloud bank or a range of mountains,”
mountains the saved climbed as they rose in
perfection higher in the heavens.
Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painted 1854

But to the ghosts from Hell, the beautiful green grass was like
shards of glass, their feet were not accustomed to the
goodness of the green grass, their feet hurt as they walked on
the grass, their soul was ruined by the years of laziness and bad
habits. So we see the allegory to the teachings of the Early
Church Fathers and Stoics, who teach us that we should work
out our salvation in our daily lives, living each day with self-
discipline.

The genius of CS Lewis is that he draws out the wisdom of the
Church Fathers into dialogue and provides examples modern
man can relate to. He has an interesting dialogue of a lazy soul
who quickly climbs back on the bus back to Hell, who still does
not want to do the work needed to live a selfless and godly life,
who criticizes anyone who dares to suggest he needs to put any
effort into improving himself in any way, in other words, he
does not want to climb out of his dark cave:

A lazy ghost complains:
“People have been telling me the
same old LIE all my life. They told me
in nursery that if I were good, I’d be
happy. And they told me at school that
Latin would get easy as I went on.
After I’d been married a month, some
fool was telling me that there were
always difficulties at first, but with Tact
and Patience I’d soon ‘settle down’
and like it! And all through two wars
what didn’t they say about the good
times coming if only I’d be a brave boy
and go on being shot at? Of course,
they’ll play the same game here if
anyone is fool enough to listen.”
Michelangelo, Temptation of Adam & Eve, Sistine Chapel, 1512

What a convincing argument against salvation this is! In
essence, the ghost is accusing God of lying. If God, or his
mother, or his wife, or his boss, or anyone who dares to suggest
that he needs to do the work so he can live a productive life, a
life of joy, a godly life, then this truly lost soul accuses them of
lying! This is the original sin when the serpent tempted Eve,
telling Eve that God is lying to you, that you can eat the apple,
no effort is needed to be like God, nothing will happen!

Most of the souls climb back onto the
bus before an hour is out, and we hear
the only dialogue with the Driver, “Hi,
Mister” said the Big Man, addressing
the Driver, “when have we got to be
back?”
“You need never come back unless you
want to,” said the Driver. “Stay as long
as you please.” But the glare of the sun
is too bright for those souls who have
for many years been chained to the
walls of the cave, too bright for those
souls whose eyes are used to the dark,
damp twilight of the grey city of Hell.
Heaven, by Marcantonio Bassetti, painted 1620

Our narrator meets the spirit of George MacDonald,
the recent British author whom CS Lewis admired the
most. Each of the ghosts from Hell is conversing with
spirits they knew on earth, as MacDonald explains,
“Every one of us lives only to journey further and
further into the mountains. Every one of us has
interrupted that journey and retraced immeasurable
distances to come down today on the mere chance of
saving some Ghost.”
And these are mere chances, only the narrator, among
all those on the bus, journeys up the mountains of
Heavens, all the rest go back to the bus for the
journey down into the dreary, dark, dank endless
streets of Hell, “spitting and gibbering in one ecstasy
of hatred their envy and their contempt of joy.”

We can learn much from the discussions our narrator relates
between the grey ghosts from Hell and the resurrected souls of
the saved, about the laziness of the suicide who threw himself
under a bus to hurt those who loved him in their own imperfect
way, the nagging mothers whose false love soured in
selfishness, the murderers who did not wish to reconcile with
their victims, and those ghosts who rejected and denied the
evidence of God they could now see with their own eyes out of
a false intellectualism.

Last Judgement by Michelangelo, 1541

One sad story is that of a bride who was happily
and gloriously radiant and joyful in the green
grasses of Heaven, but who was married to a very
sad little man who, although he was always
faithful to her on earth, he also rejected her love,
trying always to make her feel miserable and
guilty for his unhappiness. When our narrator asks
MacDonald about this sad story, he responds that
“the demand of the loveless and self-imprisoned
is that they should be allowed to blackmail the
universe: that till they consent to be happy, on
their own terms, that no one else shall taste joy:
that theirs should be the final power; that Hell
should be able to veto Heaven.”

What does St Gregory of Nyssa say of those who
climbed up out of the cave into the light, then seek
to ascend with Isaiah up the mountain of God?
We read in the Book of Isaiah,
“It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.” (Isaiah 2) Tablets handed to Moses from God, 10th
Century Byzantine Leo Bible

St Gregory of Nyssa teaches us, “The Word
of God Himself calls blessed those who
have ascended the mountain with
Him.” “Jesus points out with His finger
here the Kingdom of Heaven, there the
inheritance of the earth that is above,
then mercy, justice, consolation, kinship
with the God of all creation, and the fruit
of persecution, that is, to become a friend
of God.” “If we are weak through sin, let
our feeble hands and weak knees be
strengthened.” “When we have reached
the summit, we shall find Him who heals
all illness and languor, who takes up our
infirmities and bears our diseases.”

St Gregory of Nyssa continues, “Let us
ascend quickly, so we may be established
with Isaiah on the summit of hope and see
from this vantage point the good things
that the Word shows to those who follow
Him to the heights. May God the Word
open his mouth also for us, and teach us
those things which to hear is bliss. May the
beginning of the teaching He pronounces
become to us the beginning of
contemplation.”
fresco painted by Michelangelo and his assistants for the
Sistine Chapel in the Vatican between 1508 to 1512

Once we decide to open our eyes and leave the cave
and listen to the Word of God, then we are ready to
climb the mountain with Jesus to hear the beautiful
Beatitudes.

Moses on Mount Sinai Jean-Léon Gérôme -1895-1900

Moses shows the
Tables of the Law,
Exodus, Marc
Chagall, 1966
Jew with Torah,
Marc Chagall, 1925

SOURCES: St Gregory of Nyssa’s sermons on the Beatitudes are the
poetry of theology, describing the wonder of Jesus who took on flesh to
walk among us. This work should be a joy to read in the original Greek if
the English translation is so excellent.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is the jewel in the crown of Plato’s most
renown work, the Republic, just as Plato’s Republic is the jewel in the
crown of the entire platonic philosophical system. These sermons
illustrate how the early Church Fathers enriched the Christian faith by
absorbing the platonic and stoic Greek moral philosophy into the
Western tradition.

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YouTube Video:
St Gregory of Nyssa,
On Beatitudes:
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
CS Lewis Great Divorce
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https://amzn.to/3mpnpLB
YouTube Channel (please subscribe):
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St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and Great Divorce

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St Gregory Of Nyssa on Beatitudes, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and CS Lewis and Great Divorce