Thursday, April 18, 2024

Jaroslav Pelikan on Gregory of Nyssa's Doctrine of God

  

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)