Andrew Radde-Gallwitz - The Spirit in the Faith of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa: Summaries of Faith in their Letters

Modern scholarship on Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of the Trinity, and in particular on his pneumatology, has understandably, and often successfully, sought to isolate the fundamental structures and arguments of his doctrine from his theological treatises. Some place greater weight on his argument for the Spirit’s divinity from inseparable activities (Holl, Ziegler, Ayres, Barnes); others such as Christopher Beeley see Gregory as advocating a mishmash of exegetical arguments. It has generally been assumed that the adequacy of his pneumatology must be judged in light of Gregory’s success at theological argument. Accordingly, his weightier theological treatises (such as Against the Macedonians), rather than texts such as letters or homilies, have received the most attention. But was Gregory always making arguments? What were the first principles of Gregory’s approach—the unquestioned starting points from which he proceeded? From where did he get these? By directing attention to a few sample passages in Gregory’s letters, and placing them alongside some of Basil’s letters, I argue for a set of claims: (1) that it is possible to distinguish Gregory’s faith (in the fourth-century sense of that term as being expressible in expositions of faith) from his theological argumentation and elaboration on behalf of that faith—that his faith and his theology are distinguishable, if not fully separable; (2) that light can be shed on Gregory’s pneumatology by looking not only at how he argues for the Spirit’s divinity—those structures and arguments outlined in modern scholarship—but also in how he sets forth the faith in brief expositions of Trinitarian belief which set up the first principles of his theological elaborations; (3) that important examples of such summaries of faith occur in Gregory’s letters: epp. 5 and 24 from the Pasquali collection published in the Gregorii Nysseni Opera series, as well as the letter To Eustathius On the Holy Trinity; (4) that once such summaries are taken into account, the more extended and more controversial arguments of works like To Eustathius and Against the Macedonians become more comprehensible; and, most importantly for the current workshop, (5) that such summaries of faith are often directly dependent on similar statements in letters and other works by Basil of Caesarea. Basil’s imprint on Gregory’s teaching on the Spirit is clearest when Gregory was summarizing the faith.