What both Gregorys had frequent occasion
the praise above all in Basil’s exposition of Genesis, as well as frequent opportunity
to practice themselves, was the consistent identification of the God who,
according to the part of the Bible that Christians shared with Jews, “created
the heavens and the earth” (Gr. Nyss. Or. catech. 18.4-4 [Méridier 94-86]
Gn 1:1) with the God who, according to the part of the Bible that was exclusively
Christian, was the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Mt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:14) For
neither the name “God” there in Genesis nor the term “one” in the creed was to
be taken “as indicating the Father alone, but as comprehending in its
significance the Son with the Father,” together with the Holy Spirit. (Gr.
Nyss. Ref. 20-21 [Jaeger 2:320-21]) Whenever he referred to “the one
God,” Gregory of Nyssa explained, he meant “the one apprehended in the
unchangeable and eternal nature, the true Father and the only-begotten Son and
the Holy Spirit.” (Gr. Nyssa. Cant. 8 [Jaeger 6:257-58]) On the basis of
the narrative in Genesis and even on the basis of natural theology, the economy
of creation itself could be seen as having taken place in a series of
divine actions, each set of creatures superior to its predecessors, ascending
from inanimate objects to plants to animals to humanity. (Masc. ap. Gr. Nyss. Anim.
res. [PG 46:57-60]) (The angels were, in some sense, superior to all
these, but for some reason their creation had not been specifically mentioned in
the cosmogonic narrative.) But God the Creator was to be affirmed as the Holy
Trinity, “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally with one another
in the perfect Trinity, before all creation and before all the aeons and
before every sublime thought [epinoia].” (Gr. Nyss. Maced. [Jaeger 3-I:98])
A failure to make that distinction between Creator and creature with the utmost
precision led to “a total transformation of the doctrines of religion into a
kind of anarchy and democratic independence,” in which the sovereignty of the Creator
was compromised and eventually dissolved into a plurality of divine beings
scattered throughout the cosmos. (Gr. Nyss. Eun. 3.3-4 [Jaeger 2:108])
it was against such “pluralism,” which was only a euphemism for polytheism,
that the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity as Creator was directed. (Jaroslav
Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural
Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993], 249-50)
