Page 12
The ascent of the human soul to God is thus described by Gregory of Nyssa as a process of elimination which, however, never truly reaches a positive end: ...

MORE

Page 37
Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, had to defend himself against the accusation of tritheism; ...

 

Page 38
Already in Gregory of Nyssa, true human freedom does not consist in autonomous human life, but in the situation which is truly natural to man's communion ...

 

 

 

Page 59
... of a Gregory of Nyssa, and his doctrine of God in relation ...

Page 72
The total transcendence and inaccessibility of the essence of God becomes, in Maximus — as, before him in Gregory of Nyssa, and after him in later Byzantine ...

 

 

Page 135
This is the interpretation which Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus apply to the passage of Genesis 3:21 about the "garments of skin" given to Adam and Eve after ...

 

 

Page 138
... Nyssa, in his treatise On the Creation of Man, in discussing man before the Fall, attributes to him the "beatitude of immortality," "justice," "purity. ...

 

 

Page 169
Gregory of Nyssa reports the ancient variant for the text of the Lord's prayer, "Thy Kingdom come," in Luke 11:2, as "May Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and ...

 

 

Page 172
The theme of "light," which, through Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, permitted the association of the Biblical ...

 

 

Page 180
It is well known that, during the theological debates of the fourth century, the Cappadocian Fathers were accused of tritheism, so that Gregory of Nyssa was ...

 

 

Page 183
18 Developing his well-known doctrine of the divine image in man, Gregory of Nyssa defines one aspect of human personal existence which is clearly different ...

 

 

Page 185
It is in the fundamental oneness of these "acts" or "energies" of God that the Greek Fathers, particularly Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, ...

 

 

Page 201
Speaking of the Eucharist, Chrysostom insists that "Christ even now is present, even now operates";1 and Gregory of Nyssa, in spite of the Platonizing ...

 

http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/byzantine_theology_j_meyendorf.htm

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=5raFcfTZOY4C&pg=PA247&dq=john+behr+nicea#PPA438,M1

 

 

Don;t have this, neither have I read... but the two matters below sound important:

On the Soul and Resurrection   St Gregory of Nyssa

The resurrection of the body, perhaps more than any other Christian doctrine, requires us to face the implications of faith for our personal lives and for our understanding of the world. This issue faced St Paul in his dealing with the early church and also troubles St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century AD. St Gregory, educated in the prevailing Greek philosophical system, yearned to synthesize his faith and his philosophy. Struggling with the issue of resurrection, he followed Plato's example and dramatized the interior workings of his mind in dialogue form, in which his elder sister St Macrina plays the role of teacher. The position which Gregory and Macrina eventually reach corresponds essentially to that of St Paul, namely that our bodies will rise again as bodies, but in a finer and more glorious form than we have now. Expressing this belief in terms of Greek silence, the dialogue assumes that the same physical elements which compose our present bodies much be reassembled in our resurrection bodies; otherwise our bodies would be recreated rather than raised.

On Gregory of Nyssa (Schaff/Moore/Wilson):

If we take for illustration of this the most vital point in the vast system, if system it can be called, of Origen, we shall see that he had traced fundamental lines of thought, which could not in that age be easily left. He asserts the virtual freedom of the human will, in every stage and condition of human existence. The Greek philosophy of the third century, and the semi-pagan Gnosticism, in their emanational view of the world, denied this freedom. With them the mind of man, as one of the emanations of Deity itself, was, as much as the matter of which the world was made, regulated and governed directly from the Source whence they both flowed. Indeed every system of thought, not excepting Stoicism, was struck with the blight of this fatalism. There was no freedom for man at all but in the system which Origen was drawing from, or rather reading into, the Scriptures. No Christian philosopher who lived amongst the same counter-influences as Origen could overlook this starting-point of his system; he must have adopted it, even if the danger of Pelagianism had been foreseen in it; which could not have been the case.

Gregory adopted it, with the other great doctrine which in the mind of Origen accompanied it; i.e., that evil is caused, not by matter, but by the act of this free will of man; in other words, by sin. Again the fatalism of all the emanationists had to be combated as to the nature and necessity of evil. With them evil was some inevitable result of the Divine processes; it abode at all events in matter, and human responsibility was at an end. Greek philosophy from first to last had shewed, even at its best, a tendency to connect evil with the lower φύσις. But now, in the light of revelation, a new truth was set forth, and repeated again and again by the very men who were inclined to adopt Plato’s rather Dualistic division of the world into the intelligible and sensible. ‘Evil was due to an act of the will of man.’ Moreover it could no longer be regarded per se: it was relative, being a ‘default,’ or ‘failure,’ or ‘turning away from the true good’ of the will, which, however, was always free to rectify this failure. It was a στέρησις,—loss of the good; but it did not stand over against the good as an independent power. Origen contemplated the time when evil would cease to exist; ‘the non-existent cannot exist for ever:’ and Gregory did the same.

This brings us to yet another consequence of this enthusiasm for human freedom and responsibility, which possessed Origen, and carried Gregory away. The ἀποκατάστασις τῶν πάντων has been thought, in certain periods of the Church, to have been the only piece of Origenism with which Gregory can be charged. [This of course shows ignorance of the kind of influence which Gregory allowed Origen to have over him; and which did not require him to select even one isolated doctrine of his master.] It has also brought him into more suspicion than any other portion of his teaching. Yet it is a direct consequence of the view of evil, which he shares with Origen. If evil is the non-existent, as his master says, a στέρησις, as he says, then it must pass away. It was not made by God; neither is it self-subsisting.

--------------

II. But nevertheless much had happened in the interval of 130 years that divides them and this leads us to consider the limits which the state of the Church, as well as Gregory’s own originality and more extended physical knowledge, placed upon the complete filling in of the outlines sketched by the master. First and chiefly, Origen’s doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul could not be retained; and we know that Gregory not only abandoned it, but attacked it with all his powers of logic in his treatise, De Animâ et Resurrectione: for which he receives the applause of the Emperor Justinian. Souls, according to Origen, had pre-existed from eternity: they were created certainly, but there never was a time when they did not exist: so that the procession even of the Holy Spirit could in thought only be prior to their existence. Then a failure of their free wills to grasp the true good, and a consequent cooling of the fire of love within them, plunged them in this material bodily existence, which their own sin made a suffering one. This view had certainly great merits: it absolved the Deity from being the author of evil, and so was a ‘théodicée’; it entirely got rid of the two rival principles, good and evil, of the Gnostics; and it avoided the seeming incongruity of what was to last forever in the future being not eternal in the past.

Why then was it rejected? Not only because of the objection urged by Methodius, that the addition of a body would be no remedy but rather an increase of the sin; or that urged amongst many others by Gregory, that a vice cannot be regarded as the precursor of the birth of each human soul into this or into other worlds; but more than that and chiefly, because such a doctrine contravened the more distinct views now growing up as to what the Christian creation was, and the more careful definitions also of the Trinity now embodied in the creeds. In fact the pre-existence of the soul was wrapped up in a cosmogony that could no longer approve itself to the Christian consciousness. In asserting the freedom of the will, and placing in the will the cause of evil, Origen had so far banished emanationism; but in his view of the eternity of the world, and in that of the eternal pre-existence of souls which accompanied it, he had not altogether stamped it out.

He connects rational natures so closely with the Deity that each individual λόγος seems almost, in a Platonic way, to lie in the Divine which he styles οὐσία οὐσιῶν, ἰδέα ἰδεῶν. They are ‘partial brightnesses (ἀπαυγάσμαπα) of the glory of God.’ He allows them, of course, to have been created in the Scriptural sense of that word, which is certainly an advance upon Justin; but his creation is not that distinct event in time which Christianity requires and the exacter treatment of the nature of the Divine Persons had now developed. His creation, both the intelligible and visible world, receives from him an eternity which is unnatural and incongruous in relation to his other speculations and beliefs: it lingers, Tithonus-like, in the presence of the Divine Persons, without any meaning and purpose for its life; it is the last relic of Paganism, as it were, in a system which is otherwise Christian to the very core. His strenuous effort to banish all ideas of time, at all events from the intelligible world, ended in this eternal creation of that world; which seemed to join the eternally generated Son too closely to it, and gave occasion to the Arians to say that He too was a κτίσμα. This eternal pre-existence in fact almost destroyed the idea of creation, and made the Deity in a way dependent on His own world. Athanasius, therefore, and his followers were roused to separate the divinity of the Son from everything created. The relation of the world to God could no longer be explained in the same terms as those which they employed to illustrate the relations between the Divine Persons.

 

 

 

Singularity within a Supermassive black hole within a Galaxy<=> the "Divine Point/Spark"

 

Active galactic nucleus (Big accretion disk) <=> "Human Ego Periphery"

 

Diffuse material gathered in the Accretion Disk <=>Embodied space-time experience.

 

--------------------

 

Basically, the singularity ends up significantly "disposing" the entire galaxy's manner of existence while not truly being directly identifiable with the galaxy itself.  The galaxy "emerges" from the forces involved with the supermassive black hole, especially the singularity within.  But the galaxy is NOT the singularity.

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/12/2009 4:33:23 AM (GMT-5)

No two human "persons" are exactly identical ever (all are irreducibly unique)...but there is the same "point of nothingness/infinitity" within EACH person, inextricably linked to the Creator Holy Spirit of Christ-the-Logos.

I know this makes sense....

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/12/2009 2:32:55 PM (GMT-5)

"You shall always be..."

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/12/2009 7:16:53 AM (GMT-5)

http://www.acrod.org/listen.html

Pascha
(The Feast of Our Lord's Resurrection)

1. Introduction to Paschal Matins

2. Ode 1 of the Paschal Matins Canon

3. The Angel Exclaimed

4. Exapostolarion of Paschal Matins
(Having Slept in the Flesh)

5. Christ is Risen (Folk Melody)

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/12/2009 10:49:15 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 4/12/2009 2:28:46 PM (GMT-5)

http://books.google.com/books?id=MiRd9CqySfcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=behr+mystery+in+christ

 

The mystery of Christ: Life in Death

 By John Behr

 

And read chapter ONE online for FREE, in total. 

---

(o)