Kaplan, Ilya (2022). ‘In the Arche’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Apologia in Hexaemeron and the Neoplatonic Cosmos (Unpublished). In: SBL Annual Meeting. Denver, Colorado, USA. 19.11.2022.
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)The question of arche was of critical significance in Late Antiquity. Plotinus, who stood at the dawn of this period, famously argued that the cosmos has no temporal beginning (Enn. II.1.4). Not all his contemporaries would have agreed with such a thesis. However, it became a “dogma” of Neoplatonism that the world was beginningless.
When Gregory of Nyssa had to analyse Gen 1:1 in his Apologia (alas, a usually neglected work of Gregory), he was reluctant to associate the arche, in which “God created the heaven and the earth,” with any beginning in time. In this sense, he was not ready to accept Basil’s reading of Gen 1:1, whom he aimed to “defend” in that treatise. Neither did Gregory follow Origen, for whom the arche was Jesus Christ himself (Hom. Gen. 1.1). Gregory found his peculiar way of interpretation (and in doing this, he must have relied on Philo of Alexandria): he introduced a clear-cut disjunction between the world, which we know and experience, and another reality or order of things (the so-called “first creation”), which was (or rather eternally is) indeed created “in the arche”.
What is most important here (and what this paper will demonstrate) is that Gregory probably reacted in Apologia to a Neoplatonist criticism of Christianity and thus tried to make the Christian doctrine of creation intellectually acceptable to the critics by depriving Moses’ arche of any connotations of temporality. This paper also shows that, at the same time, Gregory subverted from the inside the Neoplatonist cosmology by making the eternal arche partly dependent on what is temporal and contingent.
Gregory makes quite a philological work to prove the atemporal character of that beginning. In particular, he claims that both Greek translations of bereshith (“in the beginning”) are complementary to each other: Aquila’s en kephalaio (“in the head”) points to the creation as being “in sum”; and the Septuagint version to the creation as “instantaneous and non-dimensional” since in the term arche, no “idea of dimension” is involved.
Where this creation takes place is an eternal reality in which there is no time, namely in God’s creative impulse (horme) or foreknowledge (probably, Gregory reads Aquila’s translation as speaking of God’s “head”). And the realm in which we find ourselves, this empirical world, is a gradual and ordered appearance of all things embraced by that horme. Even if, for Gregory, this “second creation” did presumably have a temporal beginning, Gregory “saved” Gen 1:1 from a too prosaic reading of it as simply indicating a starting point of the timeline.
The most provocative part of this paper’s argument concerns Gregory’s radical reversal of Neoplatonism and Platonism as such. If in the “first creation,” God eternally sees all things precisely the way they unfold in time, does it not mean then that it is not the becoming that reflects the ideal, and it is not the contingent that depends on the eternal but the other way round?
Item Type: |
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
Division/Institute: |
01 Faculty of Theology > Institute of Old Catholic Theology 01 Faculty of Theology > Institute of Old Catholic Theology > Systematic Theology, Ecumenical Theology, Practical Theology |
UniBE Contributor: |
Kaplan, Ilya |
Subjects: |
200 Religion > 230 Christianity & Christian theology 200 Religion > 280 Christian denominations 100 Philosophy > 180 Ancient, medieval & eastern philosophy 200 Religion > 220 The Bible 200 Religion > 270 History of Christianity |
Language: |
English |
Submitter: |
Ilya Kaplan |
Date Deposited: |
27 Mar 2023 13:41 |
Last Modified: |
27 Mar 2023 23:27 |
URI: |
https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/180715 |
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