Gregory of Nyssa Quotes on God
Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395) — the youngest of the three Cappadocian Fathers, alongside his elder brother Basil the Great and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus — gave fourth-century Greek Christian theology one of its most sophisticated philosophical statements of the divine nature. The Life of Moses, On the Soul and the Resurrection, and the polemical works against Eunomius develop the central doctrine of divine infinity (apeiria): God’s nature is infinite, and the human ascent toward God is therefore a perpetual movement (epektasis) of further reception into a divine reality that can never be exhausted by created comprehension. The framework, with its corresponding apophatic insistence on the inadequacy of all created concepts to the divine essence, shaped subsequent Greek patristic theology through Maximus the Confessor and the Eastern Christian mystical tradition, and reaches twentieth-century theology through the ressourcement scholarship of Daniélou and Balthasar.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gregory of Nyssa:
“He who climbs never stops going from beginning to beginning, through beginnings that have no end.”
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Attributed to Gregory of Nyssa:
“Concepts create idols of God; only wonder grasps anything.”
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Attributed to Gregory of Nyssa:
“What we cannot reach by knowledge, we may reach by love.”
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Attributed to Gregory of Nyssa:
“The soul that has tasted of the divine grows hungry for more.”
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Attributed to Gregory of Nyssa:
“Every concept formed by the understanding becomes an obstacle to those who seek God.”
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“Evil will come to nought and will be completely destroyed. The divine, pure goodness will contain in itself every nature endowed with reason; nothing made by God is excluded from his kingdom once everything mixed with some elements of base material has been consumed by refinement in fire.”
A Treatise on 1 Corinthians 15.28 -
“Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection , Patrologia Graeca 46.101-105”
As virtue is a thing that has no master, that is, is free, everything that is free will be united with virtue. -
“Indeed, it was for this that intelligent beings came into existence; namely, that the riches of the Divine blessings should not lie idle. The All-creating Wisdom fashioned these souls, these receptacles with free wills, as vessels as it were, for this very purpose, that there should be some capacities able to receive His blessings and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream.”
Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection -
“Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection”
Indeed, it was for this that intelligent beings came into existence; namely, that the riches of the Divine blessings should not lie idle. The All-creating Wisdom fashioned these souls, these receptacles with free wills, as vessels as it were, for this very purpose, that there should be some capacities able to receive His blessings and become continually larger with the inpouring of the stream. -
“Every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God.”
The Life of Moses ; translation, introd. and notes by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff Page 96 (1978 ed). -
“With the eye in a natural state sight follows necessarily ... In the same way the life of blessedness is as a familiar second nature to those who have kept clear the senses of the soul.”
On Infants' Early Deaths -
“The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the man who has it.”
Chapter 18 -
“Man was made in the image of God; that like, I take it, might be able to see like; and to see God is ... the life of the soul.”
On Infants' Early Deaths -
“God's name is not known; it is wondered at.”
Commentary on the Song of Songs, quoted in Ware 1995:14. As quoted in Inter-Christian Philosophical Dialogues , Volume 4, Taylor & Francis, 2017. ISBN 9781351617833 , OCLC 1004354917