Introduction

          In this paper I will examine the developments that took place in St. Gregory of Nyssa's theology just prior to his controversy with Eunomius, both as it concerns created existence and the inner life of the Tri-hypostatic God.  In order to do this I will examine a few key ideas that can be found within St. Gregory's Homilies on Ecclesiastes, because it was in those particular homilies, written around the year AD 380 or AD 381, that St. Gregory assumed for the first time a position closer to that of St. Athanasios in his disputes with the original Arian heretics during the first half of the fourth century. [1] 

          Now, the shift of focus in St. Gregory's theology involved a fundamental change in his understanding of reality, because he had to move from a position that affirmed the existence of a gap between the sensible and intelligible realms of being, to an ontological gap between the uncreated and created.  In other words, his new position made it impossible for him to hold that man's soul, as an intelligible principle, was on God's side of the ontological gap; instead, man's soul, like his body, is essentially other than God. [2] 

          In addition to this new distinction between uncreated and created being, St. Gregory held that the created order itself involved a gap; that is, the created order exists as a diastema, because created things have a beginning (ἀρχή) and an end (τέλος), and consequently they exist as dimensional (διάστημα) and moving (κίνησις) beings, while God is essentially other than the created order, because He is non-dimensional (αδιάστημα) and stable.  The effect of St. Gregory's new understanding of the created order, and of God's adiastemic nature, forced him to abandon the idea of a strict opposition between man's spiritual soul and body, because these two principles of human existence were now connected on the same side of the ontological divide from God, and so they naturally belong together.  While at the same time his views on God's non-dimensionality affected how he understood the triad of divine hypostases, and the fact that there could be no gap, namely, no diastema between the Father (as ungenerated) and the Son (as generated) within the Godhead.

The Distinction Between Uncreated and Created Being

          I became interested in the developments in St. Gregory's thought after reading Dr. Alden Mosshammer's articles on St. Gregory, because it was in those essays that Dr. Mosshammer posited the idea that the Bishop of Nyssa had adopted a new position on the nature of reality, and that he initially did this in order to refute the views of Eunomius, because it had become clear to St. Gregory that he would be unable to defeat the Anomoeans without first overcoming his own Platonic (and Origenistic) conception of reality.  The new position adopted by St. Gregory really involved embracing a truly Christian conception of the world, and one that mirrored (while going beyond it) the position adopted by St. Athanasios earlier in the fourth century. [3]  The first signs of St. Gregory's new specifically Christian understanding of reality became evident in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes, for it was in those particular homilies that he emphasized for the first time, at least in a major way, the distinction between the uncreated and the created orders of being.  He came to see these orders of reality as the fundamental divide between God and man, and it was also in the Ecclesiastes commentaries that he first promoted his new understanding of time ". . . as the common measure of all things that come into being," [4] and of the divine as existing beyond time, and beyond any kind of movement, while simultaneously being the cause of temporal existence and movement for all that exists within the diastema. [5]

          Now, in St. Gregory's earlier works it is clear that he saw the world in a more or less Platonic way; and so, he envisioned man's salvation as the ascent of his spiritual element into the celestial realm of intelligible being, and this ascent necessarily involved the abandonment of material existence altogether. [6]  Moreover, as I mentioned before, he appears to have accepted the Platonic idea that man and God had some type of natural affinity at the spiritual level, because both man (at the level of his soul) and God are intelligible beings, and so he put man's spiritual element on God's side of the ontological gap (διάστημα).  Now accompanying this vertical ascent of man to God, St. Gregory held that a type of horizontal movement for created beings was also necessary, but only in the sense of a return to an earlier place; that is, to a place prior to the introduction of the corruption of sin and evil.  In other words, for St. Gregory the horizontal temporal movement within man's being was largely a negative quality, and not a stretching into eternity, because as Dr. Mosshammer puts it in one of his articles, "Historical time is a regressive degradation of an original state of perfection, and [as a consequence] man must move backwards in time so as to remedy the deficiency." [7]

          St. Gregory only overcame this negative view of time when he finally recognized that all of created reality is constitutionally structured in a temporal manner; that is, he overcame this negative viewpoint once he realized that movement through time is an essential element within the created order.  St. Gregory finally saw that created being must move, because if it stops moving it stops existing.  His new understanding of the restoration (ἀποκατάστασις) of created being no longer saw time and space as something that man had to escape from in order to be saved; instead, he saw salvation as involving ". . . a divine intervention into historical space which restores the freedom of its possibilities as a frontier," [8] a frontier between "the intelligible διάστημα and sensible time." [9]  Thus, salvation does not involve an essential change in created reality; rather, it involves an existential change, a change that involves a stretching (ἐπέκτασις) of created being into the divine infinity. [10]  Through this new way of understanding reality St. Gregory definitively overcame the Platonic dualism of body and soul, which had troubled him so much in his earlier writings, because he now saw that salvation involved the whole man (body and soul) as he moves eternally into God.

          What makes St. Gregory's new view of reality possible is his radical reinterpretation of time as a quasi-spatial dimension.  Man's body and soul —  according to this new understanding of reality —  together exist in a single realm of being; that is, they both exist within the created order, which itself is limited due to its diastemic and kinetic nature.  To state it more directly, both the spiritual and material elements of man's being are involved in existential limitations, which distinguish them both from God's adiastemic and infinite existence.  It is precisely this new division of reality that allows St. Gregory to overcome the Platonic view of the body as a prison for the soul, from which it needs to be released, and allows him to see that salvation actually entails the reintegration of body and soul as a single living being.

          In the eschaton man's "Resurrected flesh remains flesh, but becomes, like or similar to uncreated spirit by becoming existentially, not constitutionally, incorruptible. Although the flesh does not become spirit, there is, . . . an experiential slippage.  That is, eschatological believers remain diastemic (finitely dimensional and kinetic), but experience a type of infinity in having an eternal future." [11]  This is what St. Gregory means when he sees salvation as epektasis, as the stretching of man's diastemic existence into eternity.  But for this 'eternal stretching' to be possible, there must first be what Dr. Douglass calls, a metadiastemic intrusion, [12] in which the adiastemic God enters into the diastema and is surrounded by it, while He simultaneously transcends and continues to surround the diastema because He is, and remains, adiastemic.

Creation as Diastema

          Once St. Gregory realized that the created and uncreated realms of being were truly distinct, he finally came to see that creation is not simply a diastemic reality; instead, it is the diastema itself.  That is, created being is kinetic, moving from its beginning (ἀρχή) to its end (τέλος), and this kinetic constitution defines diastemic reality, while simultaneously closing it in upon itself.  In other words, created reality must move or it ceases to exist, and this is what constitutionally differentiates it from the uncreated being of God.  As St. Gregory explained, creation as diastema:

In this text St. Gregory highlighted the fact that it is impossible for man to transcend his own created essential being; and so, any interaction between God and man is ultimately dependent upon God's condescension to enter into man's diastemic realm of existence.  As Dr. Douglass puts it, "The eternal maintenance of a diastemic πέρας is ontological:  created beings, including angels, can never overcome their constitutional otherness from God." [14]  Nevertheless, God can bridge the gap by giving man a share in eternity, but in doing this He does not alter man's essential being; instead, He stretches man's finite existence into infinity.

          Now of course for God there is no gap, neither within the divine being itself, nor between the divine being and created reality, and that is why God can enter into the diastemic order of reality and reveal Himself to man.  God absolutely transcends the diastema as its creator, but He is present to His creation because He not only causes it to exist, but He sustains it in existence at all times.  Thus, God can come to man, but man cannot come to God.  Man can receive God, but he cannot under his own power bridge the ontological gap separating his finite existence from the infinite existence of the divine being. [15]  Created existence is essentially measurable, since it has a beginning and an end; while God's being is infinite, or more to the point God is infinitely beyond the infinite, because God is beyond being (υπερούσιος ουσία).  Ultimately, the finite nature of created being cannot be altered, but creation can be given a participation in eternity; that is, it can have its finite existence extended into eternity, and this is what St. Gregory sees as man's salvation in Christ. 

          This understanding of reality is found in St. Gregory's later works, and began to develop just prior to his controversy with Eunomius as a solution to the problem inherent in a Platonic division of reality.  In place of a division between sensible and intelligible reality, as I mentioned earlier, St. Gregory emphasized the ontological distinction between the uncreated and created realms; and moreover, the diastemic nature of the latter realm of being became the fundamental paradigmatic structure governing his entire theological outlook in his mature writings.  Nevertheless, he did not abandon the Platonic distinction between sensible and intelligible; rather, he continued to make that kind of distinction in connection with man's material and spiritual elements, but with his new view of reality, he put forward the idea that man's spiritual soul was supposed to elevate his body through the proper use of human freedom.  Thus, he saw the spiritual soul as the principle that would make possible the drawing up of the material body into everlasting existence through the life of virtue.

          St. Gregory's new view of time was intimately connected with how he understood man's acquisition of virtue as it is described by the author of the book of Ecclesiastes. [16]  Certain technical terms within the Septuagint version of Ecclesiastes became the focus of his interest, words like, time (χρόνος), moment (καιρός), measure (μέτρον), commensurate (σύμμετρον), and timely (εὔκαιρον), and he used these terms in order to explain how a man acquires virtue, while also highlighting the dimensional and kinetic nature of created existence. [17]  The idea that created existence is measured becomes a central focus of his elucidation of the Ecclesiastes texts, because he held that measurement, both as a temporal quality and as a type of "golden mean" between extremes in the life of virtue, was intrinsic to human existence in the diastema.  But his new view of reality meant that the Aristotelian "golden mean" of balance in action in a quantitative sense was not enough, [18] because the exercise of virtue requires more than that, it requires ". . . the right quantity at the right moment." [19]  To express it differently, man's temporal dimensionality requires that the proper action be taken at the proper moment (καιρός), and not simply in the proper degree.

          The point of St. Gregory's analysis is not simply to expound upon the nature of virtue; rather, he is explaining the very nature of man's diastemic existence.  Man lives within the measurement of time, and so there is a connection between time (χρόνος) and measurement (μέτρον); in fact they can be thought of as one thing.  As Dr. Mosshammer explains, "Time is an expression of measure . . . because time is the measure of everything that is individually measured.  Every particular thing has its own measure or quantity and these are different for every individual thing that is measured.  Time itself, however, is the common measure because time contains all things within itself." [20] 

          That being said, St. Gregory sees man's entire life as ordered to doing the right thing in a timely (εὔκαιρον) fashion at the right moment (καιρός), and so, man's existence is properly kairotic in nature; that is, his existence involves movement from one kairotic moment to the next through the exercise of his free will.  For St. Gregory man is constitutionally diastemic and kinetic, and that means that salvation cannot involve man's overcoming his essential otherness in relation to God. [21]  Instead, salvation involves the restoration (ἀποκατάστασις) of the diastemic order to its proper kairotic nature involving never-ending movement into the divine infinity, and thus becoming finitely infinite.

          In addition to what has already been said, St. Gregory's conception of the acquisition of virtue is concerned with changing the human will in order to conform it to the divine will, because it is only in this way that human activity can mirror divine activity, and through this metanoia man can build a temple within himself that is a worthy dwelling place for God.  A man does this in a way that is like the building of the Temple in the Old Testament, but not with stones and other physical materials; instead, the Christian is to build a temple fit for God's habitation out of his virtuous actions.  As St. Gregory explains in his Homilies on Ecclesiastes, "We must first tear down the buildings of evil in us and then find a moment and a clear space for the construction of the temple of God which is built in our souls, whose fabric is virtue." [22]  The practice of the virtues prepares a man for the indwelling of God, but if this preparation has not been done it follows that a man is lost; however, even when he has been properly prepared, the gift of God's presence remains an absolute act of grace on God's part.

The Diastemic Nature of Man's Language and Knowledge

          St. Gregory, in agreement with the other two Cappadocian Fathers, held that language was an invention of man, and that means that, "Language reflects its creator, man, not its creator's creator." [23]  Eunomius, on the other hand, held that language was a divine gift that had been given to man by God, and so for Eunomius language was an analytical form of communication that conveyed the exact meaning of the thing named. [24]  St. Gregory in his writings against Eunomius attacked this conception of language by highlighting its diastemic and kinetic nature, and by emphasizing the distanciations involved in man's formation of epinoetic concepts and his articulation of those concepts in speech.

          As Dr. Douglass explained in his book Theology of the Gap, there are four levels of distanciation in the Cappadocian epistemology and each stage involves its own diastemic limitations.  The first distanciation is of an ontological nature, because man cannot experience the divine essence; instead, he only experiences the divine energies (ἐνέργειαι), which flow out from the triad of divine hypostases into the world.  For the Cappadocian Fathers the essences of things are unknowable, and this is especially the case with the divine essence, because it is infinite and beyond comprehension, in fact it is beyond being.  Nevertheless, the Cappadocian Fathers held that it was truly possible to gain a real knowledge of God, albeit limited, through His activities (ἐνέργειαι).  As St. Basil said:

Likewise, for St. Gregory of Nyssa man only comes into contact with God's activities (ἐνέργειαι) and not with His essence, and because there is a gap between the uncreated essence and created beings, language itself, which is a created reality, is incapable of communicating the essential reality of anything, and this is particularly true in reference to God.  Moreover, both St. Gregory and his older brother St. Basil rejected Eunomius' analytical view of language, in favor of a view of language as kinetic and polysemic.  Now because language is polysemic it follows that words carry many nuances of meaning, and no one meaning can exhaust the use of a word.  Thus, the word know, like all other words, cannot be restricted to one definition, and that is why St. Basil could say that he knows God even though he does not experience or comprehend the divine essence, because he knows ". . . the ἐνέργειαι that flow from His essence and unidirectionally transgress the adiastemic boundary," [26] revealing God's presence in the world.

          The second distanciation involves man's perception of the energetic manifestation of God.  This step ". . . involves the noetic reception of the perceptions of this sensory experience [i.e., the energetic manifestation of God's presence] and the processing of this as thought." [27]  Man truly perceives God through his participation in the divine energy, and in personal experience gains an understanding of the divine being which is real, but without coming into contact with the divine essence.  It is at this epistemic stage that the Cappadocian Fathers, particularly St. Basil, make a distinction between understanding and thought; that is to say, between the understanding of the thing experienced and reflection upon the thing experienced, which leads to a conception of the thing, what Dr. Douglass calls the process of, "διάνοια and ἐπίνοια." [28]  This process of reflection is the third distanciation, and, as indicated above, it involves the reduction of what has been perceived to intellectual conception.

          Reflection upon the energetic manifestations of God, which are perceived by man, leads to the formulation of the epinoia; that is, to epinoetic conceptions of God's being.  Once these concepts have been formulated, it becomes possible for man to articulate his experience of the divine as it has been received through God's operations (ἐνέργειαι).  The articulation of the epinoetic concepts of human reflection is the fourth distanciation.  In speaking about God man is one step removed from his epinoetic conceptualization of the divine; and in formulating the concept of the divine, he is one step removed from the original experience of the energetic manifestation of God's presence; and finally, in experiencing of the divine energy, he is yet again one step away from God's unknowable and incommunicable essence.  All four of these distanciations found within the epistemological system of St. Gregory, reveal man's diastemic and kinetic nature, while they simultaneously manifest God's absolute essential transcendence from the created order. [29]

God's Adiastemic Nature and the Revelation of the Trinity

          God, as the creator of all that exists in the diastemic order of being, is Himself beyond diastemic existence, and so, there is an ". . . absolute absence of any διάστημα in God, an absence that makes God absolutely Other to diastemic beings," and this lack of diastema, ". . . is just as true within God," and so, "There is no interval between the distinct persons of the Godhead." [30]  This is the key to understanding St. Gregory of Nyssa's refutation of Eunomius' attempt to turn the Son of God into a created being.  St. Gregory, by putting Christ on the other side of the gap, that is to say, by placing Him in the adiastemic realm of being, has made it possible to defend the homoousios doctrine of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed as an affirmation of divine unity, while simultaneously emphasizing, in the way the creed is formulated, the reality of the hypostatic distinctions within the Godhead. 

          As an example of what I mean, the distinction between essence (ουσία) and person (ὑπόστασις), which St. Basil insists upon, and between the three divine hypostases themselves, are real, but since God is adiastemic, there is no separation or gap between essence and person, nor can there be a gap between the triad of divine hypostases in their distinct modes of origin (τρόπους τῆς ὑπάρξεως).  Created being, on the other hand, of its very nature involves gaps of many kinds, for example, its movement from non-being to being, it has a beginning and an end, it experiences gaps between its activities which only unfold in the dimension of time, etc.; but the divine being is adiastemic, and so there can be no interval between the ungenerated Father and the eternally generated Son (and the same holds with the Spirit as well), nor can the distinction, already mentioned, between essence and person lead to gap in God.

          Bearing in mind the diastemic nature of language mentioned earlier, it becomes possible to see what St. Gregory means when he speaks about the Tri-hypostatic God.  First, he recognizes the fact that theological discourse necessarily involves a certain amount of imprecision, because diastemic words are being used to describe an adiastemic reality; in other words, what man says about God is true, but it is also false.  St. Gregory, in commenting on David's statement in the book of Psalms, "All men are liars," [31] explained that this scriptural verse does not concern some kind of conception of human depravity, but instead refers to the diastemic nature of human existence. [32]  To put it differently, language is subject to all of the limitations of dimensional man, and so, "language simultaneously lies and tells the truth," [33] it conceals and reveals at the same time.

          Thus, when St. Gregory speaks of God's essence (ουσία) he is not trying to say what God is; instead, the word is meant to signify the unknowable aspect of the divine being, which is common to the three hypostases.  Moreover, St. Gregory refuses to say that there are not real distinctions within God; that is, between what is common and what is particular, but simply admits that there are no gaps between the divine essence and the divine hypostases, or between the particular hypostasis of the Father and the hypostasis of the Son.  All of this information is known only because God condescended to enter into the diastemic realm of man.

          It is only through the self-emptying (κένωσις) of the Son of God in the incarnation that the divine order is revealed; the Father as source, the Son as begotten, and the Holy Spirit as processed, and this revelation of the Tri-hypostatic Godhead, allows man to come into contact with God at a personal level; that is, it allows man to experience the divine through the unidirectional penetration of the diastema by God's personal energy (ἐνυπόστατος ἐνέργεια). [34]  Moreover, as John Behr points out, this ontological order within the Godhead is reversed as man goes up by the Spirit, through the Son, and into the Father. [35]  But this transcending event of personal encounter with God must not be thought of as drawing man out of the diastemic order; rather, it involves an existential change within man's being.  Essentially man remains created and finite, but existentially he is transformed, he is stretched infinitely, so that he becomes like God.

          It must be admitted that man's diastemic nature makes it difficult to speak about the Trinity, because in formulating words to express the mystery, a certain temporal sequence is unavoidable.  As Dr. Douglass explains, ". . . humanity in its desire for God can neither comprehend nor experience adiastemic and akinetic being nor function within the diasteme without diastemic and kinetic language," [36] yet in spite of the fact that language is itself diastemic, it is the means for overcoming distance by distance.  But for this to be so, a man must understand the limitations inherent in language; otherwise he will commit idolatry by worshipping the conceptions of his own mind, rather than God. 

          As. St. Gregory said:

God is known to us through His energies (ἐνέργειαι), which reveal the three divine persons, but which cannot provide man with knowledge of God's essence.  The Trinity as the supreme mystery reveals God to man, while simultaneously exceeding any type of rational formulation or articulation.  Language can convey something of the mystery, but in everything it says, it falls short of the essential reality.

Conclusion

          Clearly, man cannot escape the diastema because he is by definition a diastemic and kinetic being; that is, he is a dimensional and constantly moving being, while God is adiastemic and akinetic, existing beyond dimensionality in absolute stability.  This ontological gap between God and man is, for St. Gregory, a permanent reality at the level of essential being, and as a consequence, man can never know, nor come into contact with, the divine superessential (ὑπερούσιος) essence.  Instead, he can only experience God's personal energy (ἐνυπόστατος ἐνέργεια), which, as the enactments of the divine essence by the three divine hypostases, both reveal and conceal His presence.  These gracious energies (ἐνέργειαι), which flow out from the Trinity as a manifestation of the divine being within the created world, enable man to transcend his own finite existence, allowing him to become finitely infinite, as he stretches forth (ἐπέκτασις) into eternity through the process of theosis.  In other words, salvation involves both revelation and concealment, and this is exemplified by what happened to Moses, because as St. Gregory of Nyssa said concerning him, "Moses' vision of God began with light (Exod. 19:18); afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud (Exod. 20:21).  But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness (Exod. 24:15-18)." [38]  It is by entering into the divine darkness — a cloud of darkness caused by excess of light — that man can come to know God, and this knowledge is not reducible to intellectual conception, but involves a personal encounter with the Tri-hypostatic God; and it is this encounter, which stretches forth into eternity, that is salvation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works Cited:

Khaled Anatolios.  Athanasius:  The Coherence of His Thought.  (New York:  Routledge, 1998).

John Behr.  Formation of Christian Theology:  The Nicene Faith.  (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2004).

Jean Cardinal Danielou.  From Glory to Glory.  (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001).

Scot Douglass.  Theology of the Gap.  (New York:  Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2005).

Alden Mosshammer.  "Time for All and a Moment for Each:  The Sixth Homily of Gregory of Nyssa on Ecclesiastes," in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version With Supporting Studies: Proceedings of the Seventh International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa.  Stuart George Hall (Editor).  (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993).

Alden Mosshammer.  "Historical Time and Apokatastasis according to Gregory of Nyssa," in Studia Patristica. Vol. XXIV-XXVIII, Papers presented at the eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford, 1991.  Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Editor).  (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993).

Willemien Otten.  The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Erigena.  (New York:  E. J. Brill, 1991).

St. Gregory of Nyssa.  "Sixth Homily on Ecclesiastes," taken from The Commentaries on Ecclesiastes.  (New York:  Walter de Gruyter, 1993).  Translated by Stuart George Hall and Rachel Moriarty.

Philip Schaff (Editor).  The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.  (Peabody:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1994).  28 Volumes.

Works Consulted:

Michael Rene Barnes.  The Power of God:  Δύναμις in Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian Theology.  (Washington, DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 2001).

Tamsin Jones Farmer.  "Revealing the Invisible:  Gregory of Nyssa on the Gift of Revelation," Modern Theology 21:1 (January 2005), pages 67-85.

Viktor Zhukovskyy.  "The Antinomic Method of Gregory Palamas:  Between Transcendence and Immanence, God’s Essence and Energy, Single and Multiple Trinity," in Verbum Vitae 41:3 (3 October 2023), pages 693-711.

St. Gregory of Nyssa and the Ontological Gap Between Created and Uncreated Being

by Steven Todd Kaster

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Theology 722:  Fathers and Doctors — Cappadocians

Dr. Stephen Hildebrand

14 December 2005 (Minor revisions were made to this paper on 10 November 2024)

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End Notes:

[1] See Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius:  The Coherence of His Thought, (New York:  Routledge, 1998), pages 133-163.  For St. Athanasius the Son is proper to the Father, and that means that He is uncreated, just as the Father is uncreated; and moreover, the fundamental ontological divide is between the uncreated and the created, and the Son is clearly on the uncreated side of that divide.  As Dr. Anatolios explains, ". . . Athanasius' insistence that the Son is 'proper' (ἴδιος) to the Father, expresses his understanding that the being of the of the Son is intrinsically and wholly bound up with that of the Father:  'always Father, always Son.'" [page 141]  In other words, the Father and the Son are both on the uncreated side of the ontological divide, because the Son is not a product of the Father's will; rather, He is generated from the Father's own nature.

[2] See Tamsin Jones Farmer, "Revealing the Invisible:  Gregory of Nyssa on the Gift of Revelation," Modern Theology 21:1 (January 2005), pages 67-85.  As Farmer explains, "God's infinity marks the ontological difference between the Creator and creation which comes into being with God's free gift of creation.  The fundamental division of reality is no longer the Platonic one between the ideal and the material, but between God and God's creation; now the ideal and the material have to be considered together and are both located within the realm of created reality.  This difference opens up into a distance between two ways of being infinite; the divine is infinite by nature, whereas the creature is infinite on account of its infinite changeability." [page 73]

[3] See Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each:  The Sixth Homily of Gregory of Nyssa on Ecclesiastes," in Stuart George Hall (Editor), Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version With Supporting Studies: Proceedings of the Seventh International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), pages 249-276, section 1 (Introduction).  St. Gregory had already tried, at least in a limited way, to lessen the anti-materialist views involved in his Platonic conception of reality, for as Dr. Mosshammer points out in his article, "Even in his earlier works, Gregory is reaching for some strategy to accommodate his negative and essentially Platonic view about the physical world as men experience it to his more positive and Christian view that as a creation of God the visible universe and man’s place within it must somehow be understood as good."

[4] Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 1 (Introduction).

[5] God as the cause of movement within the diastema must not be seen as a denial of free will, because St. Gregory insists that man is truly free, and in fact sin and evil within his theological system can only be explained by the radical freedom of the creature, in determining its own destiny.  See Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 2 (The General Theme of the Homilies).

[6] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Historical Time and Apokatastasis according to Gregory of Nyssa," in Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Editor), Studia Patristica, Vol. XXIV-XXVIII, Papers presented at the eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford, 1991, (Leuven: Peeters Press, 1993).  In his article Dr. Mosshammer admits the Platonic and Origenistic nature of St. Gregory's earlier writings, but says that he ". . . abandoned the idea he seems once to have in fact held of a heavenly paradise from which an originally spiritual human nature was banished to live in bodily exile," and in place of this idea, "He begins to conceive of time, rather than space, as the dimension which separates human nature from its intended perfection."  Thus, it is not material existence that is what separates man from God; instead, it is time, and the diastemic reality within which man lives that causes a separation, and this can only be overcome by an intrusion of the divine into the diastemic realm of being.  See also Dr. Douglass' treatment of metadiastemic intrusions in his book, Theology of the Gap, pages 127-159.

[7] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 1 (Introduction).

[8] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Historical Time and Apokatastasis according to Gregory of Nyssa," page 71.

[9] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Historical Time and Apokatastasis according to Gregory of Nyssa," page 71; It is important to note that Origen had used the term apokatastasis to indicate ". . . that all corporeal existence will disappear as having served its punitive and pedagogical purposes and all rational creation, including Lucifer himself, will be restored to the good.  There is much in Gregory's usage which reflects this point of view, but he was not comfortable with the implication that the material creation has no share in a perfect universe.  Gregory moves step by step from an Origenist understanding of ἀποκατάστασις as the restoration of a universe consisting entirely of intelligibles towards a conception of the ἀποκατάστασις as the restoration of the proper relationship between intelligibles and sensibles, a relationship in which intelligence is communicated to the sensible order without compromising the separateness of the two natures." [Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Historical Time and Apokatastasis according to Gregory of Nyssa," page 71]

[10] See Dr. Scot Douglass, Theology of the Gap, (New York:  Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2005), page 39.

[11] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 143.

[12] See Dr. Scot Douglass, pages 127-159.

[13] See Dr. Scot Douglass, page 39.

[14] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 39.

[15] See Tamsin Jones Farmer, page 73.  God and creation are hetero-essential in relation to one another, but  ". . . the distance or 'gap' (diastema) between God and creation which this ontological difference creates is only infinite from the perspective of the creature; for the divine Logos has traversed already the distance, which crossing also brings with it the invitation for the creature to begin a return journey that is without any final terminus."  The unending journey mentioned here is the epektasis of the creature as it stretches forth into its Creator in a never-ending process, which is called theosis.

[16] Dr. Mosshammer points out that St. Gregory abruptly changes the focus of his Homilies on Ecclesiastes beginning with the sixth homily, in fact in the fifth homily, "Gregory says that the division between intelligible and sensible will be his 'method' for interpreting the text," but at the beginning of the sixth homily he ". . . abruptly drops the line of argument based on the division between intelligible and sensible and begins an extensive defense of his introduction of the notion of measure into the discussion of the text that speaks of time." [Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 3 (Time and Measure in the Sixth Homily)]

[17] See Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 3 (Time and Measure in the Sixth Homily).

[18] See Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 3 (Time and Measure in the Sixth Homily).  Clearly, St. Gregory sees time as a defined and limited space, as a kind of spatial extension, rather than a numerical abstraction.  As Dr. Mosshammer explains, "Gregory is far more interested in the idea that virtue is a mean.  In fact, Aristotle had not defined virtue as a μέτρον, but as το μέσον.  Gregory's real interest in this passage has more in common with the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of motion (μέτρον κίνησεως).  His understanding of time is, however, quite different from Aristotle's, even if his definition suggests an Aristotelian influence.  The origin and paradigm of all motion is for Gregory the motion from non-being to being.  Thus Gregory here defines time not simply as the measure of motion through space, but the measure that accompanies and defines all things that come into being.  For Aristotle, time and motion are reciprocal relationships that numerically represent one another through the common attribute of the distance traversed.  For Gregory, however, time is rather a kind of space in itself than a numerical representation of motion across space."

[19] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 3 (Time and Measure in the Sixth Homily).

[20] Dr. Alden Mosshammer, "Time for All and a Moment for Each," pages 249-276, section 3 (Time and Measure in the Sixth Homily).

[21] As Dr. Douglass explains, the Cappadocian Fathers refused to ". . . limit the gap to the materiality of creation or the reversible consequences of the Fall.  That is, since the gaps were constitutional and permanent, they were not subject to an eradicating redemption.  In denying the eschatological possibility of deliverance from the body, that is, by embedding even the redeemed immaterial soul eternally within the realm of the transfinite created diasteme, there was no possibility of a Platonic return / deliverance from the prison of the body to the pure and static realm of Ideas, let alone an annihilating Neo-Platonic union with the 'One.'" [Dr. Scot Douglass, page 196]  In other words, man will always be a diastemic being, but his existence within the diasteme will be given an infinite extension through grace, as ever approaches, but never reaches, his end (τέλος), that is, the Tri-hypostatic God.

[22] St. Gregory of Nyssa, "Sixth Homily on Ecclesiastes," taken from The Commentaries on Ecclesiastes, translated by Stuart George Hall and Rachel Moriarty, page 107.  A different translation puts it this way:  "We must first pull down within us the buildings of evil and then find a space to construct a temple for God in our souls whose material is virtue." 

[23] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 59.

[24] See Dr. Scot Douglass, page 59.

[25] St. Basil's Letter CCXXXIV (234), in Philip Schaff (Editor), The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, (Peabody:  Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), Series 2, volume 8, page 274.

[26] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 87.

[27] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 51.

[28] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 51.

[29] It should be noted that the first distanciation involves a distinction in God's own being, but it is a distinction without a separation, because there is no diastema in God.  The other three distanciations are caused by man's own distemic nature, because he must formulate his understanding of reality through a temporal and kinetic process of reflection.  Each of the last three distanciations involves an espacement, that is, each distanciation involves a limitation in man's ability to know God, for as St. Basil said, "I was not unaware, when I wrote to your learned self, that every theological expression is, on the one hand, inferior to the thought of the speaker, and, on the other hand, is inferior to the desire of the questioner, because speech is somehow naturally too weak to serve perfectly the conceptions of our minds . . . our thought is weak, but our tongue is weaker still." [St. Basil's Letter VII (7), in Theology of the Gap, Dr. Scot Douglass, page 51]  See also Willemien Otten, The Anthropology of Johannes Scottus Erigena, (New York:  E. J. Brill, 1991).  In his treatise entitled "Periphyseon" Erigena expresses a position almost identical to that of the Cappadocian Fathers on how man comes to know God, as he puts it, ". . . all these things are more deeply and truly thought than they are put forward in speech, and more deeply and truly understood than they are thought, and they are of a deeper and truer nature than they are understood to be; they definitely transcend all understanding.  For whatever things are said about the [divine] trinity of the simplest goodness, or can be thought or understood about it, are merely vestiges and theophanies of truth, not the truth itself, which transcends all insight not only of the rational creature but also of the intellectual nature." [Pages 63-64]

[30] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 34.

[31] Psalm 115:2.

[32] See Dr. Scot Douglass, pages 57-88.

[33] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 83.

[34] Viktor Zhukovskyy, "The Antinomic Method of Gregory Palamas:  Between Transcendence and Immanence, God’s Essence and Energy, Single and Multiple Trinity," in Verbum Vitae 41:3 (3 October 2023), page 697.  According to Dr. Zhukovskyy, "The energy of God is the personal (ἐνυπόστατος) energy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

[35] See John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology:  The Nicene Faith, (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2004), page 419.

[36] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 65.

[37] Dr. Scot Douglass, page 69.

[38] Jean Cardinal Danielou, From Glory to Glory, (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001), page 247.

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