Grasping knowledge

In his book on Gregory of Nyssa ( Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (A Communio Book) ), von Balthasar contrasts Nyssa’s epistemology with that of Zeno and the Stoics.  Zeno described a progression of thought under the image of the hand: an open hand is sensation, a half-closed hand is assent, and when the hand grips something tightly, it has comprehended.  In sum, “Intelligence is . . . above all a possession, and, for the Stoics, the degrees of thought are identical to the degrees of force and energy used in grasping the object.”

Gregory will have none of this.  The whole point of his treatise against Eumonius is to show that “our concepts are only remote analogies, approaches to the infinitely rich reality of God, symbolic signs, which point out a direction without ever reaching their object.”  For Gregory, knowledge of the creation is of the same sort.  We never conceptually possess the creation: “The ‘logos of creation,’ the essence of things, always escapes us.  God alone knows it.”  Human beings strive for mastery, but this striving must be given up to attain knowledge: “Human knowledge is therefore true only to the degree it renounces by a perpetual effort its own nature, which is to ‘seize’ its prey.”

Yet Gregory develops all this without a hint of skepticism: “The great, eloquent passages in which Gregory demonstrates to Eunomius that we do not know the smallest essence of any thing, of any element, not even the smallest little shoot of a plant, have no agnostic flavor to them.”  Rather, “they are atremble with the great mystery of the world and end in silent adoration . . . before the incomprehensible beauty of God.”  In place of the grasping epistemology of Zeno, Gregory offers an epistemology of wonder, a doxological epistemology, in which faith is “the only knowledge that conforms to our condition.”