Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa was the most philosophically daring of the Cappadocian Fathers, and he gave Christian thought two ideas that transformed it. The first is that God is infinite. The second follows from it: that because God is infinite, the soul's ascent into him can never come to an end. Perfection, for Gregory, is not arrival but perpetual progress, an eternal stretching forward into a Good that can never be used up. From that single insight grows the whole later tradition of Christian mystical theology, and Gregory stands at its source.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads Gregory from the fifth volume of the second series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (the Moore and Wilson translation of 1893), public domain by way of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The volume gathers his major works: On the Soul and the Resurrection, The Great Catechism, On the Making of Man, On Virginity, and the long polemic Against Eunomius. The chat cites by treatise, and by book or section where the text supplies them. Expect citations of the form Against Eunomius, Book I, or On the Soul and the Resurrection.

Life. Gregory was born around 335 in Cappadocia, in the highlands of central Asia Minor, into an extraordinary family. His older brother was Basil the Great, his friend was Gregory of Nazianzus, and the three are remembered together as the Cappadocian Fathers who secured the Nicene faith; his elder sister Macrina, a formidable thinker in her own right, was his first teacher and his lifelong model. A reluctant rhetorician who became bishop of the small town of Nyssa, he proved the most speculative mind of the three and a leading voice at the Council of Constantinople in 381. His writings became the wellspring of Eastern Christian mysticism.

Where to begin. Start with On the Soul and the Resurrection, his dialogue with Macrina, then turn to The Great Catechism for the system of his theology, to On the Making of Man for his account of humanity as the image of God, and to Against Eunomius for the doctrine of divine infinity worked out in the heat of controversy.

Divine infinity. Here Gregory breaks with the deepest instinct of Greek philosophy. The Greeks prized the bounded and the definite and treated the unlimited as something imperfect, a thing not yet brought to form. Gregory turns this upside down: God is infinite, without limit or boundary, and that infinity is not a defect but the highest perfection. And because God is unlimited, he is incomprehensible, for no concept can enclose what has no bounds. It was on this ground that Gregory fought Eunomius, who had claimed to capture the very essence of God in a single word; against him Gregory insists that the divine nature forever exceeds the reach of the mind.

Epektasis, the unending ascent. From divine infinity follows Gregory's most original idea. If God is infinite, then the soul that moves toward him can never reach a final limit, because beyond every height attained there is always more. The soul is forever stretching forward, in the word Paul used, epekteinomenos, straining toward what lies ahead, and it grows ever more capacious by the very blessings it receives. Perfection is therefore not a state one arrives at and holds, but an endless progress; even in the life of the blessed the soul passes from glory to glory without ever stopping. Gregory makes unending desire and unending growth the very form of beatitude, so that to be saved is to ascend forever into a God who can never be exhausted.

The luminous darkness. Because God surpasses every image and idea, the highest knowledge of him turns out to be a kind of unknowing. Gregory takes Moses climbing into the dark cloud on Sinai as the pattern of the soul's ascent: as it rises, it leaves behind concepts and pictures and enters at last a luminous darkness, meeting God precisely in his incomprehensibility. This apophatic vision, the way of negation that finds God beyond all that can be said, is the gift Gregory hands to Pseudo-Dionysius and, through him, to the whole mystical tradition.

On the Soul and the Resurrection. Gregory cast his treatise on the soul as a dialogue with Macrina, a Christian counterpart to Plato's Phaedo in which his sister takes the teacher's role that Socrates plays in the original. They reason together about the nature and immortality of the soul, the meaning of the resurrection, and the final destiny of rational beings, and the Platonic ascent of desire is baptized and carried forward into Christian hope.

The restoration of all things. Following Origen, Gregory taught that evil has no substance of its own but is only a privation of the good, and that what has no real being cannot be everlasting. Evil is therefore finite and will at last be wholly used up, so that in the end every rational creature, purified, will be restored to God. This universal restoration, apokatastasis, is among the boldest doctrines in Christian antiquity, and it follows naturally from Gregory's confidence that the infinite Good must finally outlast every limit and every loss.

The image of God. In On the Making of Man Gregory presents the human being as made in the image of God, the soul a mirror fashioned to reflect the divine beauty. Sin clouds the mirror; the spiritual life is its endless polishing, the restoration of an image never wholly lost. Human freedom is essential to that image, for a mirror that reflected by compulsion would reflect nothing of a God who is free. Epektasis, seen from this angle, is simply the mirror growing brighter forever.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Gregory was the philosophical engine of Cappadocian theology and the fountainhead of Christian apophatic mysticism. Read now, he is the great Christian Platonist of divine infinity and perpetual progress, the thinker who made the soul's unending desire into the very shape of heaven. He learned the immortality of the soul and the ascent of love from Plato, whose Phaedo stands behind his dialogue with Macrina, and the doctrine of evil as privation from Plotinus; his luminous darkness passed to Pseudo-Dionysius, and through Dionysius to Meister Eckhart and to Nicholas of Cusa, whose learned ignorance and infinite God are Gregory's legacy made explicit. His conviction that perfection is endless growth into the infinite has never lost its power to enlarge the imagination.