Cultivation as Immanent Critique: Horticultural Metaphors in Gregory of Nyssa’s Reception of Origen and Basil

The present article asks after Gregory of Nyssa’s debts to Basil the Great, and this by re-examining two texts the former wrote shortly after the latter’s death: De hominis opificio and Apologia in Hexaemeron. It does so on the premise, mostly promissory for now, that Gregory’s efforts to sort through Basil’s legacy in his late brother’s wake was part and parcel of the Nyssen’s career-long project to reprise Origen of Alexandria under a “pro-Nicene” banner. Defending his elder sibling’s apparently incomplete Homiliae in Hexameron while also disputing their basic premise, that is, gave Gregory an opportunity to negotiate the dialectic of dependence and distinction that ultimately determined his reception of earlier authorities, including the great Alexandrian they both revered. With that much longer story in sight, this article focuses on Gregory’s deployment of horticultural metaphors, especially in the Apologia in Hexaemeron, to describe his stance toward both Basil and Origen. Closer scrutiny of these images alongside his more technical means of differentiating between himself and Basil suggests that Gregory considered his own work to be both a natural development of his predecessors and, precisely thereby, the immanent perfection of their thought.

Christian Formation and the Body–Soul Relationship in Gregory of Nyssa

This chapter examines Gregory of Nyssa’s anthropology as it is evident in three of his ascetic works: De Professione Christiana, De Perfectione, and De Instituto Christiano. Previous research has tended to use these as evidence for Gregory’s spirituality or his instructions concerning the truly Christian life, while his anthropology has been studied from his De Anima et Resurrectione and De Hominis Opificio. However, his concept of the truly Christian life seems to rely on some basic anthropological ideas which one can see in the ascetic treatises—especially in Gregory’s use of the language of ‘formation’ or ‘shaping’ the Christian and in metaphors relating to those concepts. Such language emphasizes the unity of the human being, her working together with God (the concept of sunergeia), and the imitation of Christ. It perhaps also suggests traces of hylomorphism in Gregory’s anthropology.

L’infinité divine chez Grégoire de Nysse : de l’anthropologie à la polémique trinitaire

In this article, I propose to call into question the opinion according to which the Contra Eunomium was a founding moment for the idea of God’s infinity in Gregory of Nyssa. I take into account two writings whose evidence on this subject was often neglected by most scholars of Gregory: De hominis opificio and De anima et resurrectione. I point out to the fact that virtually all the ideas related to the theme of God’s infinity are already present in these treaties. Instead of considering the Contra Eunomium as a breaking point in the intellectual developement of Gregory, I then suggest one should read it in the light and the continuity of his anthropological treaties.

Simmias’ Objection to Socrates in the Phaedo: Harmony, Symphony and Some Later Platonic/ Patristic Responses to the Mind/Soul-Body Question

Simmias’ famous epiphenomenalist analogy of the soul-body relation to the harmony and strings of a lyre (together with Cebes’ subsequent objection) leads to Socrates’ initial refutation and subsequent prolonged defense of soul’s immortality in the Phaedo. It also yields in late antiquity significant treatments of the harmony relation by Plotinus (Ennead III 6 [26] 4, 30-52) and Porphyry (Sentences 18, 8-18) that present a larger context for viewing the nature of harmony in the soul and the psycho-somatic compound. But perhaps the most detailed treatment of the musical analogy, and certainly the most radical, is to be found in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Hominis Opificio. Gregory’s remarkable development of the musical instrument analogy provides a multi-layered analysis of interrelated causality on the mechanistic, physiological, psycho-somatic and intellectual/spiritual planes. Gregory not only sees mind/soul and body as radically equal and yet multilayered in their mutual development; he also refuses to restrict mind to the brain alone, for all physiological systems, in his view, are holistically and individually expressive of mind’s activity. Gregory’s theory is more innovative than Augustine’s view of the mind/soul-body relation and, in my view, the most important account between Plotinus and Aquinas.

The Reception of Greek Science in Gregory of Nyssa's De hominis opificio

One of the most significant philosophical questions that Gregory of Nyssa grappled with in his anthropological treatise, De hominis opificio, was how intelligible mind, the image of God that the human person contained, might possibly exist in the physically-circumscribed limits of the corporeal body. Gregory addressed this question by engaging in a medical controversy that was current in his day: where in the body was the reasoning faculty located? Against those who placed this faculty in the brain, Gregory argued that certain mental states and afflictions were due to physical conditions suffered by the body and, therefore, had nothing to do with the reasoning faculty being confined to the brain. I conclude that Gregory's selective use of the anatomical investigations of Galen and the Greek medical writers helped him construct a unified theory of the human person in which the intelligible activity of mind both interacted freely with the physical body and depended upon the body functioning naturally for the complete expression of its divine rationality.