Thus the former had to wait until the disease of human sinfulness had fully manifested itself (Great Catechism 29 [73 – 76]). "Gregorius Nyssenus, bp. How are my varied perceptions, deriving from various sense organs, all coordinated with each other? On Virginity and other treatises on the ascetic life are crowned by the mystical Life of Moses, which treats the 13th-century-bce journey of the Hebrews from Egypt to Mount Sinai as a pattern of the progress of the soul through the temptations of the world to a vision of God. Gregory answers these questions by distinguishing between God’s nature (phusis) and God’s “energies” (energeiai)–the projection of the divine nature into the world, initially creating it and ultimately guiding it to its appointed destination (Beatitudes VI [1269]). He belongs to the group known as the "Cappadocian Fathers", a title which reveals at once his birthplace in Asia Minor and his intellectual characteristics. The second theophany occurs atop Mount Sinai (Life of Moses II 117 – 201 [360 – 392]), and here we find not light but darkness. For the existence of the nous rests on a “design” argument analogous to the argument for the energies of God. As Gregory puts it, “Deity is in everything, penetrating it, embracing it, and seated in it” (Great Catechism 25 [65]). Dustin Bruce, The First Abolitionist: Gregory of Nyssa on Slavery Gregory was a highly original thinker, drawing inspiration from the pagan Greek philosophical schools, as well as from the Jewish and Eastern Christian traditions, and formulating an original synthesis that was to influence later Byzantine, and possibly even modern European, thought. But Gregory moves beyond Aristotle’s psychological explanation. And by submitting to the latter, Christ offered himself in bondage to Satan in exchange for the whole of humanity, whom Satan then had under his tyranny (Great Catechism 22 – 24 [60 – 65]). 2 a. The final component of Gregory’s eschatology is his famous theory of perfection, which is derived from his conviction, which he inherits from Plato (Theaetetus 176b1 – 2) through Origen (First Principles III 6.1), that the purpose of human life is to achieve nothing less than likeness to God (homoiosis theoi). Not only that, but several of Gregory’s most important theories bear some resemblance to modern thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant (though through what channels of transmission, if any, is unclear–perhaps John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810 – c. 877), who quotes him extensively, and the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century). in Cappadocia (in present-day Turkey). While their joint accomplishments in doctrinal definition were…. Consequently, it is sufficient if we use Christ’s life as a model for our own (On Perfection [264 – 265, 269]). He is venerated as a saint in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism. The Old Law deals with externals–works. This procedure is clearly rational; and Gregory will be found in what follows applying that quintessentially rational criterion–consistency–to the acquisition of religious truth. Though Basil had considered him unsuited for ecclesiastical diplomacy, after Gregory’s return to his diocese, he was active in the settlement of church affairs in the years that followed. Gregory counters Eunomius, not by simply staking out the opposite position and defending it with Scriptural artillery, as most of his fellow Nicenes had done, but, more interestingly, by repudiating the central presupposition of Eunomian theology–that one can derive by a process of analysis concepts that are essentially predicated of God. Gregory, in what is considered “the most scathing critique of slaveholding in all of antiquity,” attacked the institution as incompatible with humanity’s creation in the image of God [the previous post explains why I see image here synonymous with universal family]. Cambridge: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1984. To perfect one’s outward behavior is one thing; to purify one’s own heart is quite another. . Pbk. Wherefore also, of the elements of this world we know only so much by our senses as to enable us to receive what they severally supply for our living. One who becomes aware of God’s complete mysteriousness has, paradoxically, learned more about God than the most articulate theologian. Earlier it was noted that according to Gregory humankind was fashioned in two creations–one of the nature of the nous, the other of its energies together with the body. To ourselves we owe the effort to overcome the deficiencies in our likeness to God; for we are unable to contemplate God directly, and morally our free will has been compromised by the passions (pathe). However, as a highly original and sophisticated thinker, Gregory is difficult to classify, and many aspects of his theology are contentious among both conservative Orthodox theologians and Western academic scholarship. But there would seem to be a problem here: if God’s very essence is incomprehensible, how can we know what God is really like? First, Gregory insists that God exists in God’s energeiai just as much as in God’s nature (Against Eunomius I 17 [313], cf. Yet beginning with the Church councils, the Trinity gradually came to be understood differently, as three distinctions to be made within God’s inner nature itself. Primarily a scholar, he wrote many theological, mystical, and monastic works in which he balanced Platonic and Christian traditions. Moses is pictured as one who has a thirst for utter intimacy with God, and the three theophanies are stages on his journey to that intimacy. Earlier he had requested to know God’s name; now he asks to behold God’s glory. January 10. One is reminded of Kant’s theory of the transcendental unity of apperception (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Deduction). Now there are several things to notice about this argument. Duties of virtue, on the other hand, tend to deal with the will and, as “thou shalts,” can never be completely fulfilled. For example, how is one to understand Jesus’ claim that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) when it seems to be contradicted by the admission that “the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28)? Gregory of Nyssa is revealed by Balthasar as both an outstanding theologian and philosopher, who applies Greek metaphysical ideas of Being and Infinity to the God of Christian belief. Does all of this have any sort of rational basis? Now the intelligible world was by Gregory’s day pictured as a pleroma of Platonic forms existing as ideas in the mind of God; for ever since the advent of Middle Platonism in the first century BCE, the Platonic forms had been transmuted from self-subsistent entities (as Plato conceived them) to ideas in the divine mind. The account unfolds via an allegorical reflection on the first chapter of Genesis, and closely follows the much earlier work of Philo of Alexandria. This should not be particularly surprising since Gregory regards the human body as a miniature, harmonious version of the cosmos as a whole (Inscriptions of the Psalms I 3 [441 – 444]). For it means that because there is a part of the human person that is literally not of this world, human beings are possessed of an intrinsic worth which is unique in creation. Once again, the similarity to Kant is striking. Lecturer in Early Church History, University of Cambridge, 1969–75. Why not an infinite chain of causes, for instance? Thus the Israelites were first led through the desert by a cloudy pillar; and finally they arrived at the mountain of divine knowledge, which was wrapped in darkness. St. Gregory … 12, a. Not only is the earlier model of the Trinity more consistent with Gregory’s view of God as a transcendent nature whose energies are projected into the world; it also adds to it a dynamic and historical dimension that the bare nature-energies distinction fails to capture on its own. And in fact that is precisely what Gregory argues concerning the human nous (a word that is traditionally translated “mind” but which by the fourth century CE had submerged its intellectual connotations into the religious idea of its separateness from the physical world). At one time he portrays philosophy, like Moses’ stepmother, as barren (Life of Moses II 10 – 12 [329]), and, like the Egyptian whom Moses killed, as something to be striven against (Life of Moses 13 – 18 [329 – 332]). The turning point in Gregory’s life came about 379, when both his brother Basil and his sister Macrina died. In 372, his brother Basil ordained him the bishopof Nyssa in Cappa… Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Latin Gregorius Nyssenus, (born c. 335, Caesarea, in Cappadocia, Asia Minor [now Kayseri, Turkey]—died c. 394; feast day March 9), philosophical theologian and mystic, leader of the orthodox party in the 4th-century Christian controversies over the doctrine of the Trinity. Platonic and Christian inspiration combine in Gregory’s ascetic and mystical writings, which have been influential in the devotional traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church and (indirectly) of the Western church. Gregory of Nyssa St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330-c. 395) was a younger sibling in a family that gave the church many years of service and at least five saints. The original creation, in which God makes the human race “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26) is of the transcendent human nature. Formerly, that image was seen in the structural relation between the nature and energies of the human nous; now it is projected onto the axis of history. Together, the Cappadocians are credited with defining Christian orthodoxy in the Eastern Roman Empire, as Augustine (354—430 C.E.) 394), or Gregory Nyssen as he is also known, was born in Neocaesarea, Pontus, now known as the Black Sea region of Turkey. Gregory disliked attending gatherings of bishops but was periodically invited to preach at such occasions. Gregory declined election to the important bishopric of Sebaste; however, the care of his small diocese left him free to preach at Constantinople on such special occasions as the funerals of Theodosius’s wife and daughter. He came from a large Christian family of ten children–five boys and five girls. Now one could object at this point that these phenomena are by no means surprising; they are surprising to Gregory only because the scientific knowledge of the fourth century is not as advanced as that of the twenty-first. The latter work is especially notable for developing systematically the place of the sacraments in the Christian view of restoration of the image of God in human nature—lost through sin in the fall of Adam. . Resisting the invitation of his brother, Basil the Great, to join his monastic community at Annesis, Gregory married and became a teacher of rhetoric. Now Gregory observes that although we ordinarily speak of these immanent qualities as inhering in substances, all we really perceive are the qualities of things, not their substances. Gregory’s philosophy of history begins with the fall of Adam from perfection. Please consider adding 3% to offset PayPal's service fee. While Nyssa agrees with the knowability of such manifestations, he suggests that the true religious path must ultimately transce… In the former case, the presence of Christ “transforms what is born with a corruptible nature into a state of incorruption” (Great Catechism 33 [84], cf. For the quality of holiness is shown not by what we say but by what we do in life.” -- Gregory of Nyssa So Basil in all probability became the teacher of his younger brother. Centuries after his death, the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) rendered Nyssen as the “father of fathers,” named alongside Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. these things be in you,” Gregory concludes, “God is indeed in you” (Beatitudes VI [1272]). GREGORY OF NYSSA (c. 330 – c. 394). 3). “De Professione Christiana and De Perfectione: A Study of the Ascetical Doctrine of Saint Gregory of Nyssa.”, Ladner, Gerhart D. “The Philosophical Anthropology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa.”, Otis, Brooks. It is the second Person of the Trinity who is the most interesting because it provides Gregory with the conceptual apparatus to explain God’s operation in history, for the point at which the second Person enters the world becomes the point in time in which God is more intimately present to the world than before. Answer: Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. This treatise is popularly cited as the evidence that Gregory of Nyssa was a universalist and proponent of apokatastasis. St. Gregory of Nyssa was born in the 4th century, about the year 335 in the region of Cappadocia (modern day Turkey). Up to this point intellectual development is characterized by the rigorous application of the rational criterion of consistency. In the latter, Christ “disseminates himself in every believer through that flesh, whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending himself with the bodies of believers, to secure that, by this union with the immortal, man, too, may be a sharer in incorruption”–a process Gregory calls metastoicheiosis, “transelementation” (Great Catechism 37 [97]). Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs (Writings from the Greco-roman World) Like Philo (Creation of the World 3.13), Gregory does not take literally the temporal sequence depicted therein; rather, he envisions creation as having taken place all at once (Work of the Six Days [69 – 72, 76]). The fundamental fact about human nature according to Gregory of Nyssa is that humans were created in the image of God. Moreover, because, as Gregory of Nazianzus put it, “what was not assumed was not healed” (Letters 101.5), Christ had to touch all aspects of human existence from birth to death (Great Catechism 27 [69 – 72], 32 [77 – 80]). He appointed his younger brother to the see by which he is now known, and rightly predicted that Gregory would confer more distinction on the obscure town of Nyssa than he would receive from it. Others, such as Gregory’s attacks on usury and on the postponement of baptism, deal with ethical problems of the church in his time. Gregory of Nyssa was born about 335 C.E. 2 Pages. On reading his works, one cannot but be struck by the abundance of allusions to the Platonic dialogues. Because God is an infinite being, the desire to know God is an infinite process; but in Gregory’s eyes this really makes it much more satisfying than some static Beatific Vision. Updates? It was followed by many more works, the most significant being On the Work of the Six Days, Gregory’s account of the creation of the world; On the Making of Man, his account of the creation of humankind; The Great Catechism, the most systematic statement of Gregory’s philosophy of history; On the Soul and the Resurrection, a dialogue with Macrina detailing Gregory’s eschatology; Biblical commentaries on the life of Moses, the inscriptions of the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer; theological works on Trinitarian and Christological doctrine; and shorter ascetic and moral treatises. Letters and sermons to improve this article, we will briefly summarize the argumentation in Il Illud prove! In mind seems to be broken ” ( Essay II xxiii 3 ) on Aug... 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