Tuesday 5 July 2011

Marcello La Matina - Seeing God through language. Deixis and quotations in Gregory of Nyssa's Against Eunomius III.


The Book III of Gregory’s Contra Eunomium is mostly devoted to explaining three crucial sentences from  the Holy Scripture: i.e. Prov 8, 22; Act 2, 36, 2Cor 3, 17. In various ways Eunomius did use such statements to advance his arguments against the divinity of the Only-Begotten. Now Gregory—recalling the teaching of his brother Basil—reexamines the  originary questions, by showing his arguments and his witnesses as he was calling them before a justice court. Thus, the Book III seems to assume the features of a passionate and articulated “theoretical homily” in defense of the Incarnation of God. My aim is to stress once more the originality of Gregory’s account, who, in many passages, anticipates the style of the most relevant modern analytic philosophers. In this short paper I will focus myself on the following traits: (1) the use of the powerful Cappadocian semantics of “ousìa” / “hypòstasis”; and (2) the recurrence, throughout the whole text, of some indexical expressions with a special performative force. 

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