Pomo Cappadocians

Anatolios is careful not to claim that Nyssa is “fashionably postmodern,” but by characterizing Eunomius’s viewpoint as “logocentric” he acknowledges some “irresistible, if fragmentary parallels” between Nyssa and postmodern sensibilities about the signifying of signs.

For Eunomius, the signifier “Unbegotten” “really makes present the divine essence.” Gregory responds by denying that we can gain “such a simple, commanding grasp of an essence,” whether we are seeking to know God or other people or ourselves: “the act of knowing is not an act of comprehension in the sense of enclosing a reality with teh pwoers of the mind.”

In place of Zeno’s notion that comprehension is “a hand closed tightly over an object that it grasps,” Gregory proposes more mobile, temoporal, dynamic: “knowing for Gregory is more dynamically conceived as ‘approaching’ or ‘traveling’ in the path projected by the object of knowledge . . . . Gregory’s crucial metaphor for knowing is ‘journey.’” Abraham is the model knower, whose quest leads him “upward from sensible things to the divine infinity.”

I don’t like the “upward mobility” image, but the notion of knowledge as a journey is exactly right, especially insofar as it privileges the knowledge that comes at the destination, i.e., insofar as it is an eschatological epistemology. (Like – I can’t help saying – Derrida’s!)