There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound religious feeling in the whole description of the stars, the seasons, etc.  The expression of Ptolymaeos, that when he gazed at the stars he felt himself raised to the table of Zeus, is weak in comparison with Basil’s words, ’If, on a clear night, you have fixed your gaze upon the beauty of the stars, and then suddenly turned to thoughts of the artist of the universe, whoever he be, who has adorned the sky so wonderfully with these undying flowers, and has so planned it that the beauty of the spectacle is not less than its conformity to law....if the finite and perishable world is so beautiful, what must the infinite and invisible be?’[8]

For him, as for modern minds, starlight brought thoughts of eternity:  ’If the greatness of the sky is beyond human comprehension, what mind, what understanding could fathom eternal things?’

Gregory Nazianzen’s feeling for Nature was intensely melancholy.  His poem On Human Nature says: 

For yesterday, worn out with my grief alone, I sat apart in a shady grove, gnawing my heart out.  For somehow I love this remedy in time of grief, to talk with mine own heart in silence.  And the breezes whispered to the note of the songster birds, and from the branches brought to me sweet slumber, though my heart was well-nigh broken.  And the cicadas, friends of the sun, chirped with the shrill note that issues from their breasts, and filled the whole grove with sound.  A cold spring hard by bedewed my feet as it flowed gently through the glen; but I was held in the strong grip of grief, nor did I seek aught of these things, for the mind, when it is burdened with sorrow, is not fain to take part in pleasure.

The classic writers had also contrasted Nature with mind, as, for example, Ibykos in his famous Spring Song[9]; but not with Gregory’s brooding melancholy and self-tormenting introspection.  The poem goes on to compare him to a cloud that wanders hither and thither in darkness, without even a visible outline of that for which he longed; without peace: 

I am a stream of troubled water:  ever onward I move, nor hath any part of me rest; thou wilt not a second time pass over that stream thou didst before pass over, nor wilt thou see a second time the man thou sawest before.

In his dreamy enthusiasm he likes nothing better than solitude:  ’Happy he who leads a lonely life, happy he who with the mighty force of a pure mind seeth the glory of the lights of heaven.’

The same tone constantly recurs in his writings.  Human life is but dust, blown by the wind; a stormy voyage, faded grass; kingdoms and powers are waves of the sea, which suck under and drown; a charming girl is a rose with thorns, etc.

Gregory of Nyssa again praises the order and splendour of Nature and her Creator in Old Testament style:  ’Seeing the harmony of the whole, of wonders in heaven and in earth, and how the elements of things, though mutually opposed, are all by Nature welded together, and make for one aim through a certain indefinable intercommunion.’