The introduction looks at the different ways that the unique, but troublesome, injunction at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount for the followers of Jesus to ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48) has been interpreted within Christian history. It looks specifically at the interpretations of John and Charles Wesley, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa and Tertullian and argues that Aquinas’ is the most sophisticated. It suggests how each reflects the influence of their particular social contexts and their radically different theological takes on humanity, while holding in common a clear distinction between human and divine perfection.

The relationship between the perspectives of the perennialist tradition of pluralistic thinking and the kind of apophaticism articulated in the patristic era by Gregory of Nyssa and in the modern era by Vladimir Lossky is examined, and parallels in Islamic thinking are noted. The kind of intuitive apprehension of divine realities associated with the ancient Greek concept of the nous is seen as central to this relationship. The perennialist distinction between esoteric and exoteric aspects of any faith tradition is examined in this context, and Lossky’s sense of the importance of antinomy is seen as significant for rejecting the kind of critique of pluralism that is based on the notion that the doctrinal statements of different faith traditions should be seen as philosophical ‘truth claims’.

The distortions of Augustinian and Calvinist approaches to natural theology are noted, and the different approach of Eastern Orthodoxy is examined, especially in relation to the notion of noetic perception in the approach of Gregory of Nyssa and to its application to the contemplation of nature as understood by Maximus the Confessor. More purely ‘philosophical’ considerations are also examined, especially in relation to the ‘weight’ that is assigned to competing arguments. In this context, the concept of noetic perception is applied to the notion of ‘baptized reason’. It is suggested that in relation to the praeambula fidei approach of Thomas Aquinas, even scholastic versions of natural theology may need revision because of nuances in that work that are often unrecognized.

One of the central issues to which the Cappadocian fathers frequently returned was the possibility of Christian paideia. It has been pointed out that the idea of morphosis, a never-ending process of giving shape to one’s life in imitation of Christ, is at the heart of Gregory of Nyssa’s educational thinking. What has been overlooked is the way Gregory’s awareness of paideia as an engagement of the subject with an object raises the methodological problem of how this relationship can be established. This chapter illuminates Gregory’s concept of self-formation by investigating the ways in which he theorises the acquisition and ordering of knowledge suited to the life of faith. A reading of his Life of Moses demonstrates that, drawing on the rhetoric of an opposition between Christianity and classical culture, Gregory re-evaluates this tension from a pedagogical perspective. His novel idea is that the negotiation of foreignness and kinship can be a catalyst for Christian self-perfection.

From the Socratics to Augustine, men used women’s voices in philosophical dialogues to speak as experts on the body, especially in three aspects: birth, the physical details of death, and erotic desire. These connections were inaugurated by Plato and Xenophon. However, a changing anthropology, and especially the belief that the body persisted after death, led certain Christian authors to increase the role given to female characters. When the body was revalued and brought into the centre of philosophical focus, women’s voices moved from reported speech into direct speech. Simultaneously, late ancient Christian authors reflected on the inherent connection between erotic desire and the genre of the dialogue itself, matching their subject to their form. Using female characters in their dialogues helped male authors come to know certain things that using male voices could not do as well, by thinking through specific topics ‘like a woman’; the female, with her culturally embodied nature, became a model of an ideal life which insisted on the persistence of the body, even in the afterlife.

Chapter 1 locates Augustine’s earliest documentary adumbration of the resurrection in Soliloquia. It first contextualizes Augustine’s theology of the resurrection within the early Church by surveying the thoughts of other closely connected patristic theologians on the resurrection: Tertullian of Carthage, Ambrose of Milan, and Gregory of Nyssa. It then offers an approach to and an appreciation of the resurrection in Augustine’s earliest works, where he investigates the structure of the human person, identifies the essence of the happy life, and considers the status of the body. While Augustine’s mention of and allusions to the resurrection remain ambiguous, along with the tensions it generates with certain adopted Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines, their significances remain. His later adjustments to and attenuations of his markedly philosophical notions of the soul’s immortality and the body’s dispensability evince his commitments to the Catholic faith in the resurrection and to the God of Jesus Christ.

In this chapter I argue that we should take seriously the numerous vivid images of material begetting in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius because they provide him with a more experientially based, and so intuitive, way to conceive of the hard-to-grasp idea that the first and second Person of the Trinity were both distinct entities and also unified in essence or nature. However, I shall also argue that Gregory was at the same time continuously correcting problems that an intuitive model of begetting might bring to the divine by returning to more theologically correct, reflective ways of conceiving of the divine. I shall argue that via this oscillation between intuitive ways of thinking about the divine and reflective and theological ways of thinking about it, which Ilkka Pyysiӓinen has argued is normal for theological discourse, Gregory was able to present the Trinity as what Dan Sperber has defined as a ‘relevant mystery’.

Philosophical asceticism played an important role in the opposition to social injustice, oppression, and slavery across religious traditions in imperial and late antiquity in the Mediterranean world. A connection emerges from recent research between asceticism (or at least a strand thereof), the rejection of slavery as an institution, and the embrace of social justice in ancient philosophy, Jewish Hellenism, and especially Christianity in antiquity and late antiquity. When Christian ascetics chose poverty and low status in service to Christ, they were often also concerned for those who were victims of social injustice and oppression. Since at least some Christian – and Jewish, and ‘pagan’ – philosophical ascetics spoke explicitly of ‘justice’ in this connection, we can surmise that at least a part of them embraced asceticism also for the sake of justice.

This chapter entertains four questions: first, what are hope’s conceptual relations to the other theological virtues, faith and love? Second, is there eternal hope for some people only, or for everyone – for the rich as well as the poor, for non-Christians as well as Christians? (I argue that Dante, in the Divine Comedy, offers some salvation hope for his pagan guide, Virgil.) Third, is hope inherently self-regarding or not? Fourth, does hope come to an end, as no longer necessary, when eternal life is fully inhabited – or does it continue eternally? In some accounts, hope will no longer be necessary once the kingdom comes, and God is all in all. Yet my chapter title refers to hope as a component of eternal life, hope that motivates eternally. The theological belief that souls eternally strive for perfection is developed in the Greek writings of the early Church Father St. Gregory of Nyssa.

The transformation of the ancient world from paganism to Christianity brought with it not only a new set of ethical injunctions, but a new 'moral cosmology'—that is, a new way of conceiving of humanity in relation to God and the cosmos. One important element of such a moral cosmology is the distinction between the sexes. Why did God create humanity in two sexes, and what is the ultimate meaning of one’s sexual identity? The thought of the Greek Fathers on this subject was heavily indebted to that of Greek philosophy, especially Plato. For Plato the soul is fundamentally sexless and acquires sexual identity only upon embodiment. Although Christians (with the exception of Origen) generally rejected the pre-existence of the soul, they accepted the premise that the soul itself is intrinsically sexless. Many carried this further to the conclusion that in the afterlife there will be a gradual movement away from our current sexual condition to a higher, asexual form of existence. This chapter traces the development of such views from Plato through Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. It further argues that on this point Christian authors accepted the pagan philosophical inheritance rather too uncritically, and that a careful consideration of their rejection of metempsychosis suggests a very different view.

Christian Platonism is a catch-all phrase. It recognizes that Plato and his successors, including the whole of ancient pagan thought, formed part of the complex background to the emergence of a new religion. Both pagans and Christians were mutually transformed by their prolonged encounter on many issues, but especially on the questions of creation, desire, and return. The chapter begins with Judaeo-Christian influence upon major features of the Platonic tradition and then articulates a hidden conversation that lies behind Christian thinking about the Trinity, the structure of reality, and the creation of the human being.

The relation of early Christianity to ancient Platonism has been a conflicted issue in historical scholarship, bringing to the fore latent questions about the nature of philosophy and shape of Christian theology. This chapter is intended to build upon recent advances in the scholarly interpretation of both Platonism and Early Christianity, in order to disentangle some long-standing interpretive issues. It emphasizes the role of Platonism and Christianity in the emergence of monotheism in late antiquity and the importance of Platonism in the development of the philosophical idea of transcendence.

This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst for the eponymous heroine to follow Thecla’s example and reject the marriage proposed for her. She does so, however, without creating the rift with her parents that Thecla’s departure necessitates. That careful reuse demonstrates the developing uncertainty over whether the rise of Christian asceticism necessitated the destruction of the traditional household. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, we see the Cappadocian bishop again using Thecla to think with, as he feels his way towards a new solution to this same problem. These case studies not only show us the changing landscape of Christian thinking on marriage, family, and asceticism, but also reveal the complex matrix of meanings latent in the original Acts of Paul and Thecla.

In Encomium in xl martyres ii, Gregory of Nyssa relates a violent biographical incident that was life changing. When Gregory was an adolescent, his mother, Emmelia, commissioned the building of a martyrium in Ibora, for the Forty Martyrs. Emmelia asked Gregory to accompany her to the inaugural festival. Gregory went grudgingly. Once there, his lax behaviour earned him a visit from the Forty Martyrs, during which they beat him. This chapter examines the violent episode from three perspectives. First is the discussion of what ‘acceptable’ violence is within the household of an elite Cappadocian family in the fourth century. Late Roman family law informs an examination of the tension and resolution between Emmelia and Gregory, as mother and son. Next, what valence Gregory gives this traumatic event is explored with regard to his familial history. Both were extremely important to Gregory and inextricably bound up with the Forty Martyrs. The chapter ends with an analysis of the startling ways Gregory employs the beating in the sermon, both to reify his family as kin to the martyrs, and to promote imitation of the martyrs among the faithful. The particular consequences of family violence upon Gregory as an elite Cappadocian Christian thus unfold.