ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the grounds and consequences of Gregory’s counter-argument that dunamis and energeia coincide in the Godhead. Gregory of Nazianzus, the third Cappadocian, will bear witness by the vigour and informality of his polemics, to the wide currency of the Aristotelian protest against Nicaea. The chapter considers Gregory of Nyssa’s use of the term hypokeimenon, which seems worthy of a more technical analysis than it has hitherto received. In his Letter to Ablabius, Gregory argues that the doctrine of the Trinity does not entail three gods because the nouns theos and theotes are derived from the verb theasthai, ‘to contemplate’. Eunomius departs from Aristotle by denying that the realization of this potentiality follows inevitably from the simplicity and eternity of God. Aristotelian logic may be a propaedeutic to a Platonic ontology, as Porphyry himself appears to have argued in his lost Harmony of Plato and Aristotle.
