The second doctrine in Gregory’s
catalog was the doctrine of God, which, however, as Gregory of Nazianzus also
charged, was corrupted by the habit of “looking at visible things and out of
some of them making a god” who was material. Related to this was the doctrine
of creation in Classical thought. Gregory of Nyssa apparently interpreted
creation with Plato’s Timaeus in view. For he gave the Classical
philosophers credit for affirming the doctrine of creation but faulted them for
failing to remove from this doctrine the mistaken notion of the coexistence of
matter with God, and therefore for ending up with what he called elsewhere a
theory of “two eternal and unbegotten existences, having their being
concurrently with each other.” (Gr. Nyss. Hom. opif. 2.3 [PG
44:212]). (Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The
Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 32)
