Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa was born around 335 into the same Cappadocian family as Basil the Great, apparently a decade or so his junior, and was educated largely at home rather than at the great schools of rhetoric his elder brother and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus attended, a fact he later treated as a minor embarrassment among more polished contemporaries. He first pursued a secular career as a teacher of rhetoric and reportedly married, an unusual biography for a man later ranked among the great fathers of Eastern monastic theology, before Basil, after becoming Bishop of Caesarea, drew him into church affairs and had him consecrated bishop of the minor town of Nyssa around 372, part of the same effort to fill Cappadocia's sees with reliable Nicene allies that had sent Gregory of Nazianzus to Sasima.

Gregory of Nyssa proved a poor administrator, was accused by Arian opponents of financial irregularities and briefly deposed and exiled around 376, and only returned to his see after the political tide turned with Theodosius I's accession. Basil's death in 379 affected him deeply, and in the years that followed Gregory emerged, somewhat unexpectedly given his rocky start, as the most philosophically sophisticated of the three Cappadocians, attending the Council of Constantinople in 381 as one of its leading theological voices.

Gregory of Nyssa's theology drew more openly on Platonist philosophy than either his brother's or Gregory of Nazianzus's, and he used it to defend the same Nicene position, that Father, Son and Holy Spirit share one divine nature while remaining three distinct persons, through arguments about universal and particular natures borrowed from Greek philosophical logic. His treatise Against Eunomius is among the most technical philosophical defenses of Nicene Trinitarianism to survive from the period, answering a radical Arian theologian who had argued that the very meaning of the word unbegotten proved the Son could not be fully divine.

Gregory is remembered today at least as much for a different kind of writing, his Life of Moses, which reads the biblical account of Moses ascending Sinai into darkness to meet God as an allegory for the soul's endless approach toward an infinite God who can never be fully comprehended, a state Gregory called epektasis, perpetual reaching forward, arguing that even in the next life the soul does not arrive at a final rest but keeps moving deeper into God without end. This idea, and his related teaching that evil has no independent existence but is only the absence or privation of good, influenced later Christian mysticism, particularly in the Eastern tradition, far beyond the immediate theological disputes of his own century. He died around 395, some years after both his brother and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus.