Gregory of Nyssa

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Nyssa was a town that left almost no other mark on the record — a small see on the road through Cappadocia, in the high plateau country of what is now central Turkey, raised to a bishopric mostly so that Basil of Caesarea could plant a loyal man in it during a jurisdictional quarrel. The man Basil planted there in 372 was his own younger brother, and he turned out to be a poor administrator, an indifferent diplomat, and the most daring mind the fourth-century Greek church produced. Gregory of Nyssa governed badly, was deposed on a charge of mishandling funds, wandered in exile, came back, and in the years he could spare from a contested diocese wrote the books that made the unknowable God speakable — or rather, that made the unspeakability of God into a doctrine, a discipline, and a map of the soul’s whole life.

He belongs to a trio. With Basil, the elder brother and organizer, and with their friend Gregory of Nazianzus — called the Theologian — he forms the Cappadocian Fathers, the three men who in two generations after the Council of Nicaea fixed the grammar of the Trinity in Greek and bent that grammar toward contemplation. Of the three he was the latecomer to theology and the furthest reacher in it. Basil built the institution and wrote the rule; Nazianzus gave the cause its oratory. Nyssa took the settled doctrine and asked what it did to the mind that held it — and answered that it opened a road with no end on it.

A life lived in someone’s shadow

Gregory was born around 335, into a Christian family of the Pontic gentry already crowded with saints. His grandmother had suffered under the persecutions; his elder sister, Macrina the Younger, ran an ascetic community on the family estate and was for Gregory the true philosopher of the household — the one who had renounced the world while he, for a time, had not. He trained as a rhetorician and married, and seems to have drifted toward a secular career before Basil’s gravitational pull and Macrina’s example turned him back. He was, by his own telling, the brother who came late.

Basil made him bishop of Nyssa around 372 as a piece in a larger contest. The Emperor Valens favored the Homoian party — the broad anti-Nicene settlement that declined to call the Son fully equal to the Father — and the orthodox sees were under pressure. In 376 Gregory was deposed by a synod of his opponents and went into exile; the politics, not any heresy, removed him. When Valens died at the battle of Adrianople in 378 and the religious weather turned, Gregory returned to his see, and within a few years he had become a figure of weight in the wider church. Basil died in 379, and Gregory, who had stood always behind him, stepped into something like his brother’s authority just as the decisive council approached.

That council met at Constantinople in 381. It reaffirmed the full divinity of the Holy Spirit — the point on which the earlier Nicene formula had been thin — and ratified the creed the churches of the East would carry forward. Gregory was among its leading pro-Nicene voices, and in its aftermath the emperor’s legislation named him as one of the bishops communion with whom defined orthodoxy in his region. He had outlived the brother in whose shadow he worked, and he spent his last years writing. He died around 394.

Against Eunomius: the essence no name reaches

The book that made him a theologian was an act of fraternal piety turned into a revolution. Eunomius, the sharpest of the radical Arian thinkers, had taught that the divine essence was not merely knowable but already named: God’s very being was agennēsia, ingeneracy, the property of being unbegotten — and since the Son was begotten, the Son could not share that essence. Language, on this view, ran all the way down to God; a single right concept seized the divine nature whole. Basil had answered Eunomius and then died; Gregory took up the unfinished fight in the long treatise Against Eunomius (Contra Eunomium), and in defending his brother he laid the foundation of an entire mystical tradition.

His counter-stroke was to deny that any name reaches the essence at all. The divine ousia — what God is in himself — is not unknown by accident, as a distant country is unknown, but unknowable in principle, because it is infinite, and the infinite cannot be circumscribed by a finite mind or contained in a finite word. What the creature knows are God’s energeiai, his operations or activities turned outward — his power, his wisdom, his goodness as they act upon the world. Through these the mind reasons back to their source, but it never crosses from the operations to the operating nature itself. Gregory pressed the point further than Basil had, anchoring it in the radical claim that infinity belongs to the divine perfection as such — the first time a Christian thinker made boundlessness a positive name for God rather than a defect of definition.

To explain how the one nameless God comes to bear many names, Gregory developed the doctrine of epinoia: conceptual reflection, the mind’s own work of forming distinct notions and applying distinct words to a reality that is in itself simple and beyond them all. The names are not arbitrary and not false; they track the operations truly. But they are the creature’s instruments, devised by the understanding, not labels lifted off the divine substance. Against Eunomius’s confidence that theology could be exact, Gregory set a theology whose precision lay in knowing where precision stops. This is the locus classicus of Cappadocian apophasis — the negative way given a technical apparatus — and it descends in a recognizable line from the divine simplicity of Philo of Alexandria and the One beyond being of Plotinus, carried over into Trinitarian dress.

Three Persons, one God, and the arithmetic of the Trinity

The same instinct governed his Trinitarian writing. In the short, sharp letter On “Not Three Gods” (Ad Ablabium), Gregory met the obvious objection to the Cappadocian formula — one ousia in three hypostaseis — head on: if Peter, James, and John are three men, why are Father, Son, and Spirit not three gods? His answer turned on the unity of action. The three share a single, undivided operation upon the world; every divine act begins from the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is completed in the Spirit, and is one act, not three cooperating acts. Where the operation is one, the nature is one, and “God” names the nature, not a count of agents. He argued the same ground in On the Holy Spirit Against the Followers of Macedonius, defending the full divinity of the third hypostasis against those who would make the Spirit a creature — the very question Constantinople settled in 381.

It is worth marking how tightly the apophatic and the dogmatic are bound in him. The unknowability of the essence is not a mystical extra laid on top of the creed; it is the creed’s own logic. If the essence were nameable, Eunomius would be right and the Son would be excluded from it by his name. Because the essence is beyond all names, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit can be confessed as one God without the mind being able to resolve the manner of it — and the creed marks exactly the place where confession must stop and silence begin.

The ascent of Moses into the luminous dark

If Against Eunomius gave the unknowable God a doctrine, the Life of Moses (De Vita Moysis), written near the end of his life, gave it a spiritual itinerary. The work reads the career of Moses twice — first as plain narrative, then as allegory of the soul’s ascent — and in the second reading Gregory builds the great structure of Christian darkness-mysticism. The soul climbs in three movements. It begins in light: the burning bush, the first turning from the darkness of ignorance toward the truth, the purification of the senses. It passes into cloud: the pillar that leads through the wilderness, the entry into contemplation, where the things of sense are progressively left behind and the visible gives way to the invisible. And it arrives, at the summit of Sinai, in darkness — the gnophos, the thick cloud into which Moses enters to meet God.

The audacity is in what the darkness means. It is not the darkness of the beginning, the blindness from which the soul set out. It is a darkness above light, reached only by those who have climbed through illumination and out the far side of it. Moses enters the cloud and finds that to see God is to know that God cannot be seen — that the seeing the soul sought is fulfilled, paradoxically, as a kind of not-seeing, because the closer the mind comes the more plainly it grasps that its object exceeds every concept it could form. The summit of the ascent is not a vision that ends inquiry but the discovery that inquiry has no end. Gregory names this the luminous dark: the place where vision and concept give out and the soul is present to a God it cannot circumscribe.

This is the negative way turned from a logical caution into a practice of presence, and it is the architecture — never a technique to be performed — on which later apophatic theology is built. Behind it stands Philo, who first read Moses’s entry into the cloud as the mind’s passage beyond images; behind it stands Origen, whose allegorical method and whose hunger for the spiritual sense of scripture Gregory inherited whole; and behind both stands the Plotinian ascent of the soul toward a One that no predication touches. Gregory baptizes all of it.

Epektasis: perfection as perpetual motion

From the infinity of God, Gregory drew a consequence that reshaped the very idea of spiritual perfection. If God is boundless, then the soul that turns toward him is turning toward an inexhaustible good, and no possession of that good can ever be final, because there is always more of it. The soul does not climb to a top rung and rest. It advances, and each arrival opens onto a further reach, and the advancing has no terminus. Gregory called this epektasis — the unending straining-forward — taking the word from the Apostle Paul’s image of forgetting what lies behind and reaching out toward what lies ahead.

This is one of the most original turns in Christian thought. Perfection is ordinarily imagined as a state to be attained and held. Gregory makes it a motion that never stops, and in doing so converts the very thing that might seem a frustration — that the creature can never grasp God whole — into the form of beatitude itself. Desire and satisfaction increase together; the soul that has the most of God wants the most, and the having and the wanting feed each other forever. The darkness on Sinai is not a wall the soul runs into but an open horizon it moves into without end. He works the idea out at length in the Life of Moses and again in his Homilies on the Song of Songs, where the bride’s perpetual search for the bridegroom who is always just beyond her becomes the figure of the soul’s endless pursuit of God — the Song of Songs read as the charter of an ascent that finds rest only in not resting.

Apokatastasis and the body that rises

Gregory’s speculative reach went further still, into the shape of the end of all things. From Origen he took, and adapted, the doctrine of apokatastasis — the ultimate restoration of all rational creatures. On Gregory’s account evil has no substance of its own; it is a privation, a turning-away, and because it is finite while God is infinite, it must finally be exhausted. The whole of rational creation, purged through processes he describes as medicinal rather than merely punitive, will at the last be restored to the good, and God will be all in all. He held this not as a speculation idly entertained but as a considered position, woven into his account of the resurrection and the healing of the soul. It would later become one of the most disputed legacies in his corpus: where Origen’s name was formally condemned, Gregory’s was not, and the universalist hope kept a foothold in the tradition partly on the strength of his authority, even as the mainstream of both East and West held against it. The doctrine belongs to him historically; its standing as Christian teaching has been contested ever since.

His anthropology runs alongside this. On the Making of Man (De Hominis Opificio), written to complete a work of Basil’s, reads the human being as made in the divine image precisely in its freedom and its mind, and treats the resurrection of the body not as a curiosity but as the restoration of the whole person. The companion piece is his most personal book. On the Soul and the Resurrection stages a deathbed dialogue with his sister Macrina — modeled openly on Plato’s Phaedo, with Macrina cast in the role of Socrates — in which she, dying, instructs her grieving brother on the soul’s immortality and the body’s restoration. The Christian Teacher in that dialogue is a woman, and the philosopher of the family is the sister, not the bishop: Gregory hands the argument to her.

His other major works fill out the range — the Great Catechetical Oration, a systematic defense of the faith for those instructing converts, with its bold account of the Incarnation and redemption; On Virginity, his early treatise on the ascetic life, written by a married man in praise of a state he had not chosen; and a body of sermons and letters that range from the technical to the consoling.

The taproot of the negative way

Gregory’s significance is finally a matter of transmission. He took the materials ready to hand — the unknowable One of Plotinus and the Neoplatonist ascent of the soul; the allegorical method and the spiritual exegesis of Origen; the God-beyond-images of Philo — and fused them with the Nicene confession into something genuinely new: a Trinitarian apophatic mysticism in which the unknowability of God is not a limit imposed from outside but the inner meaning of the doctrine itself. A few decades or a century later the anonymous Syrian author writing under the name of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite would systematize the darkness into a Mystical Theology of cataphatic ascent and apophatic negation, and through Dionysius the line runs forward to Maximus the Confessor, to the Latin West through Johannes Scotus Eriugena, to the English Cloud of Unknowing, and to the hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas, whose own distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the participable divine energies is recognizably the Cappadocian ousia/energeiai worked out under a later pressure. The whole later edifice of Christian negative theology, and much of Christian mysticism besides, rests on a foundation he laid.

It is worth being exact about what that foundation is and is not. Gregory’s apophasis negates the names of a personal, triune God whose hidden essence grounds the cataphatic procession of his energies into the world; the silence it reaches is the silence proper to that God and no other. The structural move — approach the ultimate by unsaying — recurs across traditions: in the divine simplicity protected by negation in Maimonides, in the tanzīh of the Sufi masters, in the henology of Plotinus from whom Gregory partly drew. The grammar is shared; what the grammar guards is not. Gregory’s unknowable God is the Father of the creed, and the darkness on his Sinai is the darkness of a particular ascent toward a particular God who is also, through the Logos and the operations, abundantly named.

The man who governed Nyssa badly understood one thing better than any of his contemporaries: that the mind’s defeat before God is not the failure of theology but its consummation. He turned the place where the concepts give out into a doorway, and told the soul to keep walking through it — which, on his account, is what the blessed will be doing forever.

Texts, editions, and the scholarship

The Greek text of the whole corpus is gathered in the great critical edition begun by Werner Jaeger, the Gregorii Nysseni Opera (Leiden: Brill, from 1921), within which the Contra Eunomium occupies the first two volumes (ed. W. Jaeger, 1960); the edition continues today as the digital Gregorii Nysseni Opera Online (Brill series page). The standard public-domain English of the dogmatic and ascetic works is the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, volume V — Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc., translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson under the editorial supervision of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York: Christian Literature Co.; Oxford & London: Parker & Co., 1893). That volume carries Against Eunomius, the Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book, On the Holy Spirit Against the Followers of Macedonius, On “Not Three Gods”, the Great Catechetical Oration, On the Soul and the Resurrection, On the Making of Man, and On Virginity; the full text is freely readable at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and in facsimile-quality PDF at Documenta Catholica Omnia.

The one conspicuous absence from that nineteenth-century volume is the Life of Moses, which had no English translation before the twentieth century: the first modern-language edition was Jean Daniélou’s French, the inaugural volume of the Sources Chrétiennes series (1942), and the first complete English was the translation by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) — the version through which the gnophos and epektasis entered the modern Anglophone study of mysticism. Among recent critical studies, Anthony Meredith’s Gregory of Nyssa (London: Routledge, 1999) is the standard short introduction, and the relation of Gregory’s divine-infinity argument to its Philonic and Origenian roots remains a live scholarly thread, as in the long-running comparison of divine infinity in Gregory and Philo of Alexandria. The careful work of the last century has been to keep the Cappadocian ousia/energeiai distinction distinct — from its Neoplatonic ancestry on one side and from its later Palamite descendants on the other — without collapsing the three into one perennial doctrine.

→ Related: Cappadocian Patristics · Basil Of Caesarea · Gregory Of Nazianzus · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Origen · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · Holy Spirit · Christian Mysticism · Gregory Palamas · Moses