Backing Down from Gregory of Nyssa’s Ascent

The early Church’s appropriation of
Greek philosophy is easily caricatured as an exchange that left Christianity intellectually
enriched but spiritually impoverished. In reality, the Church Fathers converted
Plato before they baptized him. That is, they found Greek metaphysics useful,
but they used it for their own purposes. Still, the question remains:
Christians changed Plato, but how much did Plato change Christianity?

For me, the point of asking that
question is not to expunge Platonism or even to straighten out all the tangled
knots that make so much of theology unthinkable without its Greek trappings.
Christianity, I suspect, will never be done thinking about Plato, but that does
not preclude the need to push forward toward a more Christian Platonism, even
if we cannot get back to a pre-Platonic Christianity.

No ancient theologian has been
closer to the center of discussions about the viability of Christian Platonism
than Gregory of Nyssa, and no contemporary Protestant theologian has been more
enamored of the kind of theology he represents than Hans Boersma. Writing from
a Reformed perspective, Boersma set out to combat modern materialism by
retrieving pre-modern philosophy in an important book, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry . “The
purpose of all matter,” he writes, “is to lead us into God’s heavenly
presence.” The Platonist-Christian tradition can help us to see how the entire
cosmos is a window onto the divine.

Gregory radicalized the
incommensurability of creator and creation, which appeals to Boersma’s
Calvinism, but Gregory also propounded a boldly speculative ontology of the finite
world’s participation in the infinite. Boersma wagers that both sides of Gregory’s
thought—the infinite gap between God and us and a sacramental mysticism that folds
our souls quite naturally into the life of the divine—make sense only when held
tightly together.

It is significant, then, that
Boersma now admits that Gregory promises more than he delivers. In his new
book, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of
Nyssa, Boersma writes that “he wanted to test my hunch that the pre-modern
Platonist-Christian synthesis does not require us to abandon the goodness of
matter.” In an extensive investigation of Gregory’s views on gender, marriage,
exegesis, death, virtue and the church, he concludes that Gregory’s “anagogical
or upward transposition leaves behind the objects of earthly, embodied
existence.”

The fatal flaw in Gregory’s
metaphysics is not his otherworldliness but his inability to conceive of the
worldliness of the supernatural. Gregory correlates God’s infinity with the
soul’s infinite desire, but the incorporeality of the soul’s eternal
progression toward God leaves times and space behind. Even beauty must be
stripped of its surface in order to become an intelligible object of
contemplation. As he writes in De
virginitate, “The man who has purified the eye of his soul is able to look
at such things and forget the matter in which the beauty is encased.”

By identifying God with infinity,
Gregory puts himself into a hole that he can never quite fill with his
idealistic view of matter. It is hard enough to imagine the prime matter of the
Medievalists becoming transformed into spiritual matter in heaven, since prime
matter is really nothing substantial in itself. For Gregory, however, matter in
this world is already spirit, since physical objects are nothing more than a
unity of intelligible (and thus spiritual) qualities. If matter is all in the
mind, then it is already outside of space and time even here and now, and thus
our resurrected bodies in the next world will not need to be located anywhere,
nor will they need to undergo change, as we grow closer to God. Our bodies will
become our minds, and we will become like thoughts in the mind of God.

Boersma is not yet willing to give
up his quest re-Catholicize evangelicalism or the need for a contemporary
version of the sacramental worldview, but he has set himself a difficult metaphysical
task. It is, of course, the same task that ancient theology always faced: How
can theologians reconcile Plato’s vision of ascent with the weight of
resurrected bodies still grounded in a reality that resists being spiritually
consumed.

Stephen H. Webb is a columnist for First Things. He is the author most recently of Mormon Christianity . His book on Bob Dylan is Dylan Redeemed.

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