The Cappadocian Fathers

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The Cappadocian Fathers are three closely linked Greek theologians of fourth-century Asia Minor: Basil of Caesarea, called the Great; his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa; and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. Working in the decades after the Council of Nicaea, they gave the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the vocabulary it has carried ever since.

The problem they inherited was a quarrel over words. Nicaea in 325 had declared the Son “of one substance” with the Father, but the key Greek terms remained unsettled, and for two generations the churches of the East argued over whether that formula made the three divine persons one being or merely one in agreement. The Cappadocians proposed a distinction that held: one ousia — a single divine nature or essence — in three hypostaseis, three distinct modes of subsistence that share it without dividing it. The settlement is conventionally read into the revised creed of the Council of Constantinople in 381, and it became the standard grammar of Greek Trinitarian thought. The three were not interchangeable. Basil was the organizer and bishop, builder of monastic rule and of a famous hospital complex outside Caesarea; Gregory of Nazianzus was the orator, whose theological orations earned him the rare title “the Theologian”; Gregory of Nyssa was the speculative mind, the most philosophically adventurous of the three.

That speculative strand is what draws the most attention beyond church history. Gregory of Nyssa taught that God, being infinite, can never be comprehended, and that the soul’s approach to him is therefore endless: each attainment opens onto a further reach, a perpetual stretching-forward he called epektasis. In his Life of Moses he read the prophet’s climb of Sinai into cloud and darkness as a figure for this ascent — the higher the soul rises, the less it sees, until it meets God in a luminous dark that is knowing precisely by way of unknowing. The debt to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy here is plain and was partly acknowledged; scholarship has long traced how the Cappadocians absorbed that inheritance while bending it to ends Plotinus would not have recognized.

The apophatic line did not stop with them. It passed, above all through the later writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite, into the whole tradition of Christian mystical theology, and the language of the divine darkness reappears in the medieval West. The resemblance to other traditions of unknowing — the via negativa, the Sufi insistence that God exceeds every name — is real and has often been noted, though each works it out in its own terms. What the Cappadocians left was double: a settled formula that closed an argument, and an open one that invited the soul to keep climbing.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Logos · Nous · Gnosis