The Modern Recovery

Honored in antiquity as “Father of the Fathers,” Gregory of Nyssa was nonetheless relatively neglected for much of the second millennium, eclipsed by his brother Basil and his friend Gregory the Theologian and shadowed by suspicion over his eschatology. The twentieth century reversed this: through Jean Daniélou’s recovery of his mysticism, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s study of his thought, Werner Jaeger’s critical edition, a dedicated international colloquium, and a major reference dictionary, Gregory has become one of the most studied and theologically central of all the Fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Father Honored but Neglected

For all the conciliar honor heaped upon him — the imperial edict of 381, citation at the Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Councils, the title “Father of the Fathers” at Nicaea II (787) — Gregory of Nyssa did not, for most of the centuries between antiquity and the modern era, occupy the place his gifts would seem to warrant (see Father of the Fathers). Several factors conspired in this comparative neglect. His brother Basil the Great and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, “the Theologian,” overshadowed him in the popular and liturgical memory of the Church, the three Cappadocians being remembered chiefly through the first two. The ambivalence over his teaching on universal restoration meant that one strand of his work was quietly set aside rather than studied. And in the West, the Scholastic and later the manualist traditions found less use for a Father whose deepest contributions lay in mystical ascent and apophatic theology rather than in systematic dogmatics.

The result was that, well into the twentieth century, Gregory was known but not deeply read — cited for a handful of Trinitarian formulae, honored in the calendar, but not at the center of theological attention. The recovery that followed was therefore genuinely a recovery: not the discovery of an unknown author, but the restoration to the heart of theology of a Father who had been honored at a distance.

Daniélou and the Recovery of the Mystical Gregory

The pivotal figure was the French Jesuit Jean Daniélou (1905–1974), later a cardinal and one of the architects of the ressourcement — the twentieth-century “return to the sources” that reshaped Catholic theology in the decades around the Second Vatican Council. In 1944 Daniélou published Platonisme et théologie mystique: Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Aubier, 1944), a study that did more than any other single work to make Gregory a living theological presence again.

Daniélou read Gregory as a Christian mystical theologian of the first order, organizing the ascent of the soul through the classic stages and, crucially, recovering two doctrines that would become the watchwords of modern Nyssen studies. The first was the divine infinity: God, being without limit, can never be comprehended, and the soul’s knowledge of him is therefore never complete but always opens onto more. The second, following directly from it, was epektasis (from Philippians 3:13, “straining forward to what lies ahead”) — the doctrine that the perfected soul does not come to rest in a static beatitude but progresses endlessly into the inexhaustible God, so that perfection itself is unending growth, and even in the life to come the blessed go “from glory to glory” without arriving at a final terminus (Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique, Paris: Aubier, 1944, esp. the chapters on the spiritual senses and on epektasis). Daniélou would return to Gregory throughout his career, notably in the later study L’être et le temps chez Grégoire de Nysse (Leiden: Brill, 1970), which examined the Nyssen’s understanding of created being, time, and the diastēma (interval) that separates creature from Creator.

Daniélou’s achievement was to show that Gregory was not a derivative Platonist with a Christian veneer but a profoundly original theologian who had transformed the philosophical inheritance into a distinctively Christian account of the soul’s endless journey into God. After Daniélou, epektasis and divine infinity became standard categories of patristic theology.

Von Balthasar and the Thought of Gregory

Two years earlier, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) had published Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942), later translated into English as Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995). Von Balthasar approached Gregory as a thinker whose vision of becoming, of the soul’s perpetual movement, and of the structure of finite spirit stretched toward the infinite anticipated themes central to modern philosophy and to von Balthasar’s own theological aesthetics. Where Daniélou stressed the spiritual and ascetical doctrine, von Balthasar pressed the metaphysical and philosophical architecture of Gregory’s thought — the dialectic of presence and absence, of having and not-yet-having God, that animates the whole. The two works together, appearing within two years of each other in the midst of the Second World War, mark the true beginning of the modern recovery, and they fixed at the outset the two poles — the mystical and the metaphysical — around which subsequent scholarship would turn.

Jaeger and the Critical Edition (GNO)

A recovery of this depth required a reliable text, and that too was a twentieth-century achievement. The great classical philologist Werner Jaeger (1888–1961) launched the critical edition of Gregory’s works, the Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO), beginning in 1921 and published by Brill. The edition brought to Gregory the full apparatus of modern textual scholarship — collation of the manuscripts, establishment of the text, critical apparatus — and replaced the inadequate older printings (chiefly that reproduced in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca) with a sound scholarly foundation. The GNO, continued by successive editors after Jaeger’s death and still in progress, made it possible to study Gregory’s actual words with confidence; without it the philosophical and theological recovery would have rested on shifting sand. Jaeger himself also wrote on Gregory’s relation to early monasticism, but his enduring gift to the field was the critical edition that bears the imprint of his philological rigor (Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. W. Jaeger et al., Leiden: Brill, 1921– ).

The International Colloquium and the Brill Dictionary

The maturation of the field is visible in two institutional achievements. The first is the International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, a scholarly conference series inaugurated at the Benedictine monastery of Chevetogne in Belgium in 1969 and held at intervals of a few years ever since. Each colloquium has typically been devoted to a single work or theme of Gregory’s, bringing together the leading specialists of the day, and the proceedings — published in successive volumes, latterly by Brill — constitute a continuous record of the discipline’s growth. That such a series should exist at all, sustained across more than half a century and drawing scholars from across confessional and national boundaries, is itself a sign of the vitality the field had attained.

The second is the Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, edited by Lucas Francisco Mateo-Seco and Giulio Maspero (Leiden: Brill, 2010; Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 99). With roughly two hundred entries by some forty contributors, treating each of Gregory’s writings individually together with the themes, persons, and intellectual background relevant to his thought, the Dictionary gave the field a reference work such as few Fathers possess — a “symphonic vision,” in its editors’ phrase, of a century of scholarship. The existence of a dedicated dictionary marks Gregory’s arrival as a major object of study in his own right, no longer a satellite of Basil or a footnote to Cappadocian Trinitarianism.

The Contemporary Scholars

The recovery begun by Daniélou and von Balthasar has been carried forward by a now substantial international community of scholars. Among the leading contemporary voices:

Morwenna Ludlow, whose Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) examine both his eschatology and the ways modern and postmodern thought has appropriated him.
Giulio Maspero, co-editor of the Brill Dictionary and author of Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), a leading interpreter of Gregory’s Trinitarian theology.
Sarah Coakley, who has drawn on Gregory for systematic theology, gender, and the apophatic, including the edited volume Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
John Behr, whose work on Nicene theology and patristic anthropology situates Gregory within the development of Trinitarian and ascetical doctrine.
Johannes Zachhuber, author of Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa (Leiden: Brill, 2000), on Gregory’s account of universal human nature.
Lewis Ayres, whose Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) gives Gregory a central place in the consolidation of pro-Nicene theology.
Anthony Meredith, S.J., whose accessible studies (Gregory of Nyssa, London: Routledge, 1999, in the Early Church Fathers series, and The Cappadocians) introduced Gregory to a wide readership.

Within Orthodox theology the recovery has been received and extended as well, with Gregory read as a primary witness to apophaticism, to theosis, and to the contested hope of universal restoration.

Why Gregory Became Central

The reasons for Gregory’s modern centrality follow the contours of modern theological concern. His mystical theology of the ascent, with its divine darkness and its doctrine of epektasis, answered a twentieth-century hunger for a theology of spiritual experience and unending growth. His apophaticism — the insistence that the infinite God is never comprehended — resonated with a theology chastened about the reach of human concepts and drawn back toward the via negativa (see Theosis). His anthropology — the human person as the image of God, the bond of sensible and intelligible worlds, made for endless progress, his teaching on the soul and on the body’s resurrection, and his striking treatment of the Life of Moses as the pattern of every soul’s journey — spoke to renewed interest in theological accounts of the human (see The Life of Moses). And his teaching on universal restoration placed him at the center of the most heated eschatological debate of recent decades, claimed by universalists and contested by their critics, so that no serious discussion of the apokatastasis can proceed without him (see Apokatastasis in Gregory).

The result is a remarkable reversal. The Father honored at a distance for a millennium and a half has, in the span of a single century, become one of the most intensively studied of all the Fathers — read not as a museum piece but as a living interlocutor for theology, philosophy, and the spiritual life. The “Father of the Fathers” has, in the modern recovery, been restored to something like the place the Seventh Council assigned him (see Church Fathers).

References

Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique: Essai sur la doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse. Théologie 2. Paris: Aubier, 1944.
Daniélou, Jean. L’être et le temps chez Grégoire de Nysse. Leiden: Brill, 1970.
Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Présence et pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Beauchesne, 1942. English translation: Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995.
Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO). Edited by Werner Jaeger et al. Leiden: Brill, 1921– .
Mateo-Seco, Lucas Francisco, and Giulio Maspero, eds. The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 99. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa. Successive volumes, from the first colloquium (Chevetogne, 1969); later volumes published Leiden: Brill.
Ludlow, Morwenna. Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Ludlow, Morwenna. Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Maspero, Giulio. Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 86. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Zachhuber, Johannes. Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance. Vigiliae Christianae Supplements 46. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Meredith, Anthony. Gregory of Nyssa. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1999.