In the first pages of Genesis, when God creates the world, he unfolds the cosmos in a sequence, a chain that begins with the most basic of elements—light and darkness, water and land—and grows in complexity, culminating in the first human being. Each link in this chain is good, God declares, each more deeply embedded than the last, and the whole follows on the councils of the Lord, in accordance with his will. So it goes through the early pages until the eating of the fruit, the descent to the east of Eden, and the entry of violence and death into the world. Cain is a murderer, but his descendants will forge weapons of war, and if Cain was avenged sevenfold, Lamech shall be avenged seventy-seven-fold. The sequence of God’s creative will, unfolding in accordance with his intention, has shattered, and that breakage has become infectious, multiplying and spreading through the damaged wills of God’s wayward creatures. 

Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Cappadocian father famous for his defence of Nicene theology, articulated the nature of these sequences with perhaps greater clarity than anyone before or since. He understood with profound metaphysical insight the two paths that an ever-dynamic creation has open to it: either to unfurl and develop in accordance with God’s will or to act against it and fall into death. 

The basis of Gregory’s thinking on this subject is his understanding—largely categorizable as “Christian Neoplatonism”—of the difference between God and creation. There is a gap, he says, between the two. For on the one hand stands God, who is infinite, beyond all borders and thus beyond all conceptualization. He “is contained by no limit,” writes Gregory in his commentary on the Song of Songs. “For there is nothing that mind can discern that contains it: not time or place or color or shape or form or bulk or magnitude or interval or any other confining thing, be it name or thing or idea.” Accordingly, God can lack nothing, can only be fullness itself, being itself, unity itself, though all such categories are at best analogical. God, in other words, is not subject to change; he is pure being and transcends all becoming. 

On the other hands stands creation. Called forth from nothingness by the infinite, eternal act of God’s creative will, creation is placed on a road, must travel an interval, a gap, from its beginning in nothingness to its end in the fullness of God’s will for it. These two facets of created existence Gregory terms arche, “beginning” or “principle,” and telos, the end for which each thing is created. Yet the two are not truly separate; the end for which God creates is the foundation, the impetus on which that creative act rests. As Jaroslav Pelikan puts it in Christianity and Classical Culture, “because the telos was not merely the end but the goal and the consummation, it comprehended the arche in a complete schema.” 

The end toward which creation moves is, moreover, God himself, the infinite fullness of being in whom all creatures participate, from whom they receive in their own finite modes the being that is themselves. Nothing is self-sufficient but is rather like a mirror that receives not only its light from the sun but its very existence, its reflectiveness as gift. Creatures do not, strictly speaking, exist, for “the transcendent essence and cause of the universe, on which everything depends, alone subsists,” as Gregory puts it in The Life of Moses. And thus no creature has “the self-sufficiency by which they could exist without participating in true Being.” 

And that Being is good. For God is not merely existence but goodness and beauty. “The Divine One is himself the Good (in the primary and proper sense of the word), whose very nature is goodness,” declares Gregory elsewhere in The Life of Moses, and thus all created beings, as participators in God’s life, are themselves good, as Genesis reveals. Goodness and being are, in fact, identical, both words pointing at the single transcendent reality of God, who encapsulates both and yet is infinitely greater than both. There is no reality for Gregory that is not goodness, that is not the sharing in the life of divine beauty. Each finite thing begins in the infinitesimal reception of this life, called forth out of absence, out of nothingness, and grows into ever greater fulfillment, ever greater reception of Being in itself. It is, he says, like drinking ever more deeply of an endless fount, and as we drink, our capacity and desire to drink grows, and our joy and satisfaction in each moment grows along with our desire. 

But created beings can only grow toward God by following the path of his creative will, by the expansion of their nature embedded in them as their beginning and their end. Another direction, another sequence, is possible. Because God is the fullness of being and goodness itself, evil can be only the absence of being, non-existence in fact, or more properly the rebellion against being, the perverted will that turns away from God’s plenitude and begins to destroy itself and everything around it. This is the downward road, the chain of sin, which is the breaking of that original sequence by which the world unfolds according to God’s will. We see this sequence in the Bible, and we see it in all the stories that involve the parasitic growth of evil. 

Robert Bresson’s film L’Argent is a remarkable example of just such a story, for it depicts the processes by which evil grows from small seeds of vice to infect nearly everything. Yet the film also suggests, however obliquely, a way out of this sequence that accords remarkably with Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of evil’s trajectory. 

L’Argent begins with two Parisian teenagers passing off counterfeit bills in a photo shop. The boys are wealthy and have little need of what they purchase—they use the money only because one of them was refused an advance on his allowance—so we may assume that it is vice alone that motivates them. While not recognizing the bills at first, the workers at the photo shop realize they are fake and pass them off to a blue-collar worker named Yvon, thus avoiding any loss of profit. Unsuspecting, Yvon uses these bills at a restaurant and is arrested. When the police question the people in the shop, they lie, saying they know nothing of the bills, and so Yvon is convicted. Although he avoids jail time, he loses his job and is quickly in need of money. Out of desperation, he agrees to be a getaway driver for a robbery. The whole group is arrested, and Yvon is put in prison. While there, he learns that his daughter has died and his wife has left him. He attempts suicide but fails. Finally, he is released from prison but is so damaged by his experiences that he turns not only to robbery but to murder, killing two people to rob a hotel. He is eventually taken in by a kind woman and her family, but these, too, he murders in a gruesome act of violence, yelling, “Where is the money?” In a cafe shortly afterward, he approaches a police officer, confesses, and is taken away. The last shot of the film shows onlookers beside the open door of the empty cafe, their faces obscured by shadow. All is quiet. 

While L’Argent, the title of which means “money,” is a profound film with any number of possible readings, it displays clearly the sequence by which sin not only infects individuals but also spreads between them. Yvon is systematically taught by the vice and chaos around him that money is the sole good, that human beings themselves are nothing in comparison to it. Having lost his child and been abandoned by his wife, he loses his connection to love, to goodness, and has only misanthropy and greed remaining to him. He attempts to sever his connection to existence, but fails, and is only the more bitter as a result. Though he is shown goodness and taken in, it proves insufficient to immediately redeem him. 

So why, in the end, does he turn himself in? Why does he seemingly turn away from this trajectory, toward, we may hope, his redemption? Gregory of Nyssa provides an answer. For him, while the upward road, leading into ever greater fullness with God, is infinite, the downward road, away from God, is not. All evil is the negation of being, but because it can only be the separation of creatures from that goodness which was never originally theirs, but only bestowed on them, evil can only progress downward to a finite degree, for it finally arrives at nothingness itself, at absolute absence, and can go no further. Gregory goes so far, in On the Making of Humanity, as to suggest that created beings, because change is intrinsic to their nature, inevitably turn back once they have reached such a point: 

And so, perhaps, it is with Yvon. For Gregory, evil is intrinsically self-exhausting, intrinsically finite and contingent. Yvon has arrived at rock bottom; there is no way forward but back. The empty room that lingers in the final seconds of the film is the nothingness, the end of all being, and so he can only exit, take again the upward way. 

Yet this raises a question regarding Gregory’s understanding of redemption. For by such an account, creation would inevitably return to God, and the latter need not intervene directly to lead his creatures back to him. But this is not Gregory’s understanding. Rather, God is deeply involved in creation. He does not simply leave the sequence of evil to progress endlessly, does not let evil “work itself out,” but responds by creating a new sequence, that of salvation. 

This sequence, which may be seen in all of salvation history, culminates finally in the incarnation and Christ’s death on the cross. God does not leave his creation to perish but enters into it as a physician seeking to heal those whom he loves. Nevertheless, evil has spread far and wide, has in fact grown to its maximal extent. But this, too, was for Gregory part of God’s plan: “When, then, wickedness had reached its utmost height,” he writes in The Great Catechism, “and there was no form of wickedness which men had not dared to do, to the end that the healing remedy might pervade the whole of the diseased system, He, accordingly, ministers to the disease; not at its beginning, but when it had been completely developed.” 

It is, moreover, questionable whether Gregory really intended to suggest that created beings by their very nature must inevitably turn back from evil. As the scholar Alden Mosshammer has argued, Gregory may have seen this turning back as possible only because God’s infinite love comes to meet the wayward soul on the edge of the abyss, where the will has become catatonic and only death awaits. A creature so far gone into non-being may lose even its motion, even its capacity for change. But such is not its fate, for God has come down and as Christ entered into death. “Man’s return to the good is free,” writes Mosshammer, “only because Christ has purchased that freedom and restored to created intelligence its lost mobility.” 

However Gregory ultimately understood the turn away from evil, it is undoubtedly the case that he believed it was possible only because the infinite love and goodness of God outstrips all wickedness, all passion, all vice, and speaks to the truth of our own natures, which are made for the reception of God, indeed are nothing but that reception. This love culminates in Christ’s joining himself to our condition, gripping us in the very abyss of non-being and leading us back, healing the whole of human nature. Death becomes by this means not a grave but a gate, through which one comes again to endless life. 

Is this what Yvon saw, sitting alone in the grief or numbness of his wickedness? Was it nothingness that stared out at him and made him approach the police officer? Or perhaps as he looked on this downward road, the blank to which it led, some light, some presence appeared and called to him, revealed to him the truth of his own nature, of the possibility of transformation. Perhaps it said, with the persuasiveness of love, that all one needs to find one’s life again is metanoia, repentance, change of mind—itself a form of death. It is significant that Yvon’s final act in the film is to confess, and he is led away. We can hope the path he walks bends upward, through the doorway, through the gate of death and back again to God.