ABSTRACT

Gregory made his initial entrance into the world of the Church and of theology through no desire of his own. The Arian Emperor Valens had split the province of Cappadocia into two regions whose capitals were to be Caesarea and Tyana. Prior to this division, Basil was well-established as bishop of Caesarea, working tirelessly to promote the cause of Nicene orthodoxy to the disdain of Valens and other Arian detractors. In an attempt to combat the Arian threat and to extend his control over the area, Basil created two new dioceses, installing his brother as bishop of Nyssa and his friend Gregory as bishop of Sasima. Gregory of Nyssa did not possess the administrative or political talents of his brother and did not come into his own as a theologian and writer until after Basil’s death. Many of the writings of the last approximately fifteen years of his life are occasional in nature (letters, homilies, doctrinal treatises, etc.) and therefore cannot be said to compose a totally coherent

theological system. In many respects, they extend in new and innovative ways the work of his brother. Gregory defends, for example, the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God against Eunomius and the deity of the Holy Spirit against the followers of Macedonius. He also appears to have played a significant role in the defense of Nicene orthodoxy at the second ecumenical council at Constantinople (381). In the history of spirituality, he is most well known for his On the Life of Moses, where he develops an apophatic theology based on an allegorical interpretation of the scriptural account of the Hebrew patriarch. Here he draws out the implications for spirituality of the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God, which he defended in Contra Eunomius. In the words of Andrew Louth, “the doctrine of God’s unknowability means that the soul’s ascent to God is an ascent into the divine darkness.”2 The Life of Moses is generally considered to be a later work of Gregory’s, along with his other influential work of allegory, the Commentary on the Song of Songs.