From Saint Gregory’s same Theological Oration:
Had Paul been able to express the experiences
gained from the third heaven, and his progress, or ascent, or
assumption.
. . .
I think that our great and holy
teacher, in elaborating on the rapture of the holy apostle Paul, had the aforementioned
principles in mind, and thus appropriately assigned to each aspect of the
apostles’ experience the most fitting name or word. Thus I am of the opinion
that he uses the word “progress” to name the habitual state of virtuous
dispassion, which established the holy apostle above the level of natural necessity,
for in his dispassion he entered into no voluntary relation with nature; indeed
he went beyond even the natural activity of sense perception itself, or rather
he transformed even this into a permanent spiritual state. By “ascent” the teacher
designates both the abandonment of all sensory objects—which no longer affected
or [1237D] were affected by the apostle’s senses—and the transcendence of
natural cognitive contemplation in the spirit, which reflects on those objects.
“Assumption” is the name given to Saint Paul’s subsequent remaining and abode
in God, which the teacher appropriately called an “assumption,” indicating that
this was not something that the apostle accomplished, but rather experienced.
. . .
The “third heaven”—to hazard a conjecture—most
probably signifies the boundaries that circumscribe practical philosophy and
natural contemplation, as well as the highest principles of theological mystagogy,
in other words, their limits, since there is a certain measure to the comprehension
of virtue and of nature, and of the theology pertaining to both, and this is
determined for all beings by God in a manner appropriate to the nature of each.
. . . Again, when Scripture speaks of the “third heaven,” it may perhaps be
referring to the three successive orders of holy angels that are immediately above
us, which Saint Paul may have reached, being initiated into their positive
affirmations through the negation of his own cognitions and imitating their
permanent habits of mind through the transcendent negations of those proper to
himself. For every nature of rational beings, in accordance with its order and potential,
is initiated into and imitates the cognitive states, propositions, and affirmations
of the order and essence above it, and it does this by way of privation [1240D]
that is, through the apophatic negations of what is proper to itself. (Maximus
the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 20, in On Difficulties in the
Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:409,
411, 413, 415, 417)