With the pathos of Job he cries: 

      Who has spread out the ground at my feet? 
      Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome? 
      Who carries the sun as a torch before me? 
      Who sends springs into the ravines? 
      Who prepares the path of the waters?

And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I leave earth behind and hasten through the wide ocean of air, know the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe all their splendour, and, not staying there, but passing beyond the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature—­the immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and supports all that exists?

This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the passage in Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates says:  ’If any man could arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then, like a fish who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true earth.’  But even the thought, that the order and splendour of Nature witnessed to the eternal powers which had created her, was not strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which Cicero preserved to us in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods.

Well then did Aristotle observe:  ’If there were men whose habitations had been always underground, in great and commodious houses, adorned with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who are reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence, they should be informed of a certain divine power and majesty, and after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their dark abode to come to us, where they should immediately behold the earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent of the clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his grandeur and beauty, and also his generative power, inasmuch as day is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when night has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising variety of the moon in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and the inviolable regularity of all their courses; when,’ says he, ’they should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude that there are gods, and that these are their mighty works.’

Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the thoughts of the great classic philosophers, only substituting a unity for a plurality of godhead.  To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or cloud, a motif which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the evening scene in Faust, had reached a very modern degree of development in antiquity.[10]