Gregory of Nyssa

Gregory of Nyssa was one of the three Cappadocian Fathers, with his elder brother Basil of Caesarea and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, who shaped the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century. Born around 335 into a devout family in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey, he was educated largely by Basil and his sister Macrina, whom he called his teacher and whose life and death he described.

He married and worked as a teacher of rhetoric before being made bishop of Nyssa, a small town, around 372. Deposed for a time by opponents, he returned and took a leading part in the Council of Constantinople in 381. He died around 395.

Alongside his doctrinal works, Gregory wrote some of the most profound mystical theology of the early Church: the Life of Moses, the Homilies on the Song of Songs, and On the Soul and the Resurrection. He was deeply read in Plato and Plotinus, but transformed their thought: where they described the soul’s rest in the One, he described an endless progress into a God who is infinite.

His mystical theology was long overshadowed by his brother’s and his namesake’s fame, but it shaped Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor and the later Byzantine tradition. In the twentieth century the studies of Jean Daniélou and others restored him to view as one of the most original Christian thinkers of late antiquity, and as a central figure for the dialogue between Platonism and Christianity.