Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man with his deeds;
All Commentaries on Colossians 3:9 Go To Colossians 3
Gregory of Nyssa
AD 394
And even so we say that the true and perfect soul is the human soul, as is clear from the very nature of its operations in both sensory power and intellect. Anything else that shares in life, because it possesses the power of growth, we call animate by a sort of customary misuse of language, because in these cases the soul does not exist in a perfect condition…. Thus Paul, advising those who were able to hear him to lay hold on perfection, indicates also the mode in which they may attain that object. He tells them that they must “put off the old man” and put on the man “which is renewed after the image of him that created him.” Now may we all return to that divine grace in which God at the first created man, when he said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.”
