Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2024
Gregory of Nyssa is the most philosophically minded of the Cappadocian Fathers and one of the most insightful interpreters of Origen.1 Harold Cherniss (1930–1971) considered Gregory a Platonist thinker thinly plated with Christianity; Jean Daniélou and others thought that Gregory progressively abandoned Platonism and/or Origen; I suspect that the latter option is not really the case (2018b), but Cherniss’s thesis is not tenable either. Von Balthasar (1942) and other scholars have seen Gregory as a great innovator with respect to Greek metaphysics.2 I have detected a consistency in his Christian Platonism3 – a consistency that has been denied: Gregory has been represented as confused and contradictory as a philosopher (e.g. Stead 1976); however, this position does not take into account that Gregory’s philosophical theology was not simply Platonism, but Christian Platonism,4 specifically Patristic Platonism, like that of Origen.5
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.