This post will likely make more sense if you have read part one, which can be accessed here.
Having established that the sensory’s primary purpose is to lead to the contemplation of that which is intelligible, Gregory provides several examples of perceiving the latter in the former. He invites us to consider the constant flux in the world as it is revealed to our senses—the setting and rising of the sun, the ever-drinking but never-filling sea, the flux and stability of the earth. Gregory perceives in each the changeableness and limitations of human nature. For human life has its own settings, and death is the end of us all. Our own impermanence is reflected in the impermanence of the world around us. The sea, moreover, reflects the limits of our nature to enjoy that which is pleasant. No matter how much water the sea drinks, it neither overflows nor empties. If we should open our mouths to a whole sea of pleasures, our enjoyment of them would increase to our natural limits, but no further. Nevertheless, struck by insanity, we hoard goods beyond our capacity to enjoy them, unwilling to pass on the excess to others who do not have enough. Caught in a world of change and natural limitations, all our efforts directed to the realm of the senses are like children playing in the sand: they come to nothing.
Considering the earth, Gregory has two apparently contradictory insights. On the one hand, the mutability of the earth, the instability of the whole sublunary realm, is a reflection of all that it impermanent in ourselves and in the sensory as such. Yet the earth is also unmoving, constantly still beneath our feet, and so becomes an image of the stability of the soul in virtue, the steadfastness of a soul unwavering in its commitment to the good. Elsewhere in his work, most notably the Life of Moses, Gregory draws these two insights together. For to be firm in one’s pursuit of the good, to be steadfast in the pursuit of virtue, is to be always stretching out, growing into the good, drinking in more and more of the divine. The earth, in its uniting constant change with perfect stability, is an image of this flight toward and into God.
While all of this offers profound matter for reflection, it is perhaps Gregory’s method of contemplating the sensory that has the greatest potential to transform how one approaches the world. I do not believe that Gregory’s point here is that there is a definitive interpretation of sensory phenomena, that each sensory reality corresponds to a particular idea or doctrine. Rather, he means to show us how to approach the sensory world so as to peer through it to the deeper strata of reality. What truths we perceive their will likely be a matter of the angle we take, the context in which we live, and the particular makeup of our own minds.
Nevertheless, it is through the sensory that we can come to contemplate the invisible. If we attend closely to the world in the proper spirit, we will perceive in it the unchanging principles of all things, spiritual realities, mysteries of unplumbable depth. But if we approach the sensory without reference to its intelligible foundations, in a spirit of rapaciousness or utilitarianism, we will receive only sand, only the mutable and illusory. One must look deeper, and this requires spiritual growth, a capacity to put aside all efforts directed exclusively at the sensory as such: “when we are beyond the shore along which the sand is cast up by the sea of life, and when we are separated from the waves that crash and boom about us,” we too shall lament such efforts as the “vanity of vanities.”
As a final note, I cannot help but link to Jimi Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand,” as it kept playing through my head while writing this.