Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 100

GREGORY: After the first parent of the human race, by his own choosing fault, was expelled from the joys of paradise, he came into the misery of this blindness and exile which we suffer, because, by sinning poured out beyond himself, he could no longer see those joys of the heavenly homeland which he had before contemplated. For in paradise man had been accustomed to enjoy the words of God, and by purity of heart and loftiness of vision to have part in the spirits of the blessed angels; but after he fell hither, he withdrew from that light of the mind by which he was filled (Homily 32).

From his flesh, indeed, we, born in the blindness of this exile, have heard that there is a heavenly homeland, we have heard that its citizens are the angels of God, we have heard that the companions of those same angels are the spirits of the just and the perfect. But all who are carnal, because they cannot know those invisible things by experience, doubt whether that which they do not see with bodily eyes exists. This doubt, assuredly, could not exist in our first parent, because, shut out from the joys of paradise, that which he had lost he recalled, because he had seen it. But these men cannot feel or recall the things they have heard, because none of them, as he did, holds even from the past any experience.

For if, for instance, a pregnant woman be cast into a prison, and there bring forth a boy, and the boy so born be nourished and grow up in the prison; if perchance the mother who bore him should name to him the sun, moon, stars, mountains and fields, flying birds, running horses, but he who was born and nourished in the prison should know nothing else than the darkness of the prison, and should indeed hear that these things exist, yet, because he has not known them by experience, should disbelieve that they truly exist; so men born in this blindness of their exile, while they hear that the highest and invisible things exist, distrust whether they are true, because they have known as visible only these lowest things among which they were born.

Hence it came to pass that the very Creator of things invisible and visible, the Only-begotten of the Father, came for the redemption of the human race, and sent the Holy Spirit into our hearts, in order that, quickened by Him, we might believe those things which as yet we cannot know by experience. As many of us, therefore, as have received this Spirit, the pledge of our inheritance (Eph. I, 14), do not doubt concerning the life of the invisible. But whoever is not yet firm in this belief, ought without doubt to give faith to the sayings of his elders, and to believe them, who already through the Holy Spirit drink in the experience of invisible things—since a boy is even foolish if he therefore reckons his mother to be lying about the light, because he himself has known nothing else than the darkness of the prison. PETER:

What you say pleases me greatly. But he who does not believe that invisible things exist is assuredly an unbeliever; and he who is an unbeliever, in that which he doubts, seeks not faith but reason.