Word as Work

Gregory of Nyssa’s theory of matter has been the object of a sustained debate since the beginning of modern patristic scholarship. Based on a passage in his Apologia in Hexaemeron , he has been assumed to defend the position, previously rejected by Origen and Plotinus, that matter is nothing but the coming-together of intelligible qualities. I argue that attention to Gregory’s Apologia beyond this isolated passage displays a nuanced appropriation of Plotinus’s natural philosophy: For both Plotinus and Gregory, qualities come to matter through the agency of the ordering λόγοι of nature, with the three elements together forming a sensible body. This conception is highly congenial to Gregory’s interpretation of the Genesis narrative, which takes God’s commanding utterances to signify that God placed wise and artistic λόγοι into each being for its coming-to-be. Such a structure of sensible creation can become an integral part of his theology of nature: Discerning the λόγοι that God implanted into each being is to behold the wisdom in creation—a wisdom which thereby comes to be constitutive of the very substantiality of the entire sensible cosmos.

creation ex nihilo · Gregory of Nyssa · Origen · Plotinus · theology of nature · theory of matter · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Philosophy and Thought