Abba Gregory the Theologian said: These three things God requires of every person who has baptism: right faith from the soul, truth from the tongue, and temperance from the body.
— Paterikon
The saying is short as a tally and deep as an anthropology. It does not say „three virtues” but „three things required,” and it requires them not from man taken as a block but from each part of him separately, according to what each can give. The body is not asked for faith, and the soul is not asked for temperance. Each member receives the request that belongs to it, which is its own offering.
The request presupposes the gift. Whoever asks back has first given. The saying is addressed not to the philosopher or the ascetic but to „every person who has baptism,” that is, to one who has already received: buried and raised together with Christ (Rom. 6:3-4). Faith itself is a gift (Eph. 2:8). The three requests are not the price of salvation but the answer of the healed, and God asks nothing more than that the gift not lie unused in man.
Three members, three offerings. Scripture gives each part its own offering. To the soul, faith: „Without faith it is impossible to please Him” (Heb. 11:6). To the lips, „the sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of our lips” (Heb. 13:15). To the body: „present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). The Abba invents nothing; he gathers into one line what Scripture had scattered, which is why his word holds.
The three places of the wound. Genesis 3 shows where man was struck. First in faith: „Has God indeed said…?” (Gen. 3:1) is the question that gnaws at trust in the given word. Then in the tongue: the serpent’s first word is a lie (John 8:44), and Adam’s first word after the fall shifts the blame: „the woman whom You gave me” (Gen. 3:12). Truth about oneself turned into accusation. Finally in the body: the fruit was „good for food” (Gen. 3:6), the first want of measure. Gregory’s three requests are the three places where baptism lays the remedy.
The right faith of the soul. Orthē doxa means both „right opinion” and „right glorification.” The faith asked for is not correct information, for „even the demons believe and tremble” (James 2:19), holding doctrine without the soul. „From the soul” means what Paul binds in a single motion: „with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom. 10:10). Our age has produced the opposite: a religiosity without dogma, chosen à la carte, which sociology has precisely named „moralistic therapeutic deism” (Smith and Denton), in which God is an instrument of well-being. Gregory himself ties right faith to the purity of the other two: theology is not for anyone at any time, but for those who „have been purified, or are at least being purified,” in soul and body (Or. 27). Psychology confirms the link in its own way: Festinger’s cognitive dissonance shows that when life contradicts creed, the mind does not change the life but rewrites the creed to the measure of the life. Faith is corrupted through body and tongue before it is corrupted through argument.
The truth of the tongue. Kant saw in the lie the destruction of man’s dignity as a moral being, the gravest violation of the duty to oneself. Harry Frankfurt showed that contemporary man is not even a liar, since the liar respects the truth enough to hide it, but a bullshitter, indifferent to it. Heidegger named Gerede the speech that circulates without foundation, repeated because it is repeated. The Gospel knew it: „for every idle word (argon rhēma, a word without work) that men speak, they will give account” (Matt. 12:36). But the root of the tongue’s lie lies deeper: Trivers’s work on self-deception argues that the mind first deceives itself in order to deceive others more convincingly. So the truth asked of the tongue cannot be wrung out without the faith asked of the soul, and the highest truth of the tongue is confession, saying what one is before God (1 John 1:9), because Truth is a Person (John 14:6) and not a communication policy.
The temperance of the body. Sōphrosynē comes from sōs (whole, sound) and phrēn (mind): temperance is the mind kept whole. The Fathers did not despise the body, for God found all „very good” (Gen. 1:31); the enemy of temperance is not pleasure but pleasure without limit. Aristotle set it among the pleasures of touch and taste, the commonest and least refined (Nic. Eth. III, 10). Today’s world has made the lack of measure an industry: the design of addiction, studied by Natasha Schüll, uses precisely unpredictable reward, while Byung-Chul Han describes the achievement society in which man exploits himself „freely” and zealously. Frankfurt distinguishes the person from the wanton, one who has no will about his own desires: temperance is the place where man becomes a person, that is, has a will about what he wants.
The threefold cord. „A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccl. 4:12). The three are not a catalogue but a single rope. The loosened body loosens the tongue: „your eyes will see strange things, and your heart will utter perverse things” (Prov. 23:33). The lying tongue dulls conscience and cools faith. Cooled faith leaves the body without a reason to restrain itself. And in the other direction: right faith eases truth, and truth keeps measure. This is integritas in Latin, wholeness, and Kierkegaard says it too: purity of heart is to will one thing. The man whose creed says one thing, whose tongue says another, and whose body a third is not „complex” but divided.
What is asked and what is not. Genius is not asked, nor ecstasy, nor subtlety. The intellectual who calculates endlessly can spend a lifetime debating faith without having brought the offering, because Gregory’s request is not for subtlety but for bringing. Wholeness is asked, which the unschooled man and the much-read man can both carry.
The Abba asks, then, not for three virtues but for the whole man, requested in three places: in the soul, that believes; in the tongue, that does not lie; in the body, that measures itself. And what is asked is also given, by Him who gave baptism.
