the Wisdom of Gregory Nyssa: Divine Darkness, Soul's Ascent, and Endless Pursuit God

In fourth-century Cappadocia, a single thinker reshaped the Christian imagination of God, the soul, and the endless reach of love.The Wisdom of Gregory of Nyssa: Divine Darkness, the Soul's Ascent, and the Endless Pursuit of God traces the thought of the boldest speculative mind of the early Church. Younger brother of Basil the Great and pupil of his sister Macrina, Gregory of Nyssa stood at the heart of the fourth-century debates that gave Christianity its lasting vocabulary about the Trinity, the human person, and the divine life into which both are drawn.From start to finish, this study follows him from the household at Annisa to the mountain of apophatic darkness, from the polemics against Eunomius to the lyrical Homilies on the Song of Songs, from the philosophy of body and resurrection developed at his sister's deathbed to the doctrine of universal restoration that would make him the most quietly daring of the Fathers.Readers will discover: - How Gregory grounded all later apophatic theology in his insistence on the divine infinity- Why his doctrine of unending ascent reshaped the Christian imagination of heaven- How his account of the image of God set the standard for later Christian anthropology- Why his philosophy of soul and resurrection still anchors eastern Christian thought- How he argued, against expectations, that every rational creature would at last be restored- What his sustained renegotiation of Greek philosophy gave to the entire later traditionWritten in contemplative and historically grounded prose, The Wisdom of Gregory of Nyssa: Divine Darkness, the Soul's Ascent, and the Endless Pursuit of God opens his most demanding ideas to thoughtful general readers and recovers a thinker whose theology of eternal becoming has shaped Christian mysticism from the fourth century to our own time.