This presentation is part of a larger ressourcement project on the beatific vision, for which I have been offered a research position as the Danforth Chair at Saint Louis University; the presentation builds on my scholarly publications (including a book with OUP) on Gregory of Nyssa. In this presentation, I draw on Nyssen's sixth homily of De beatititudinibus, on Vita Moysis and on Homilies 5, 6 and 8 of In Canticum canticorum. I ask the question of how human personhood and the beatific vision are linked in these writings of Gregory. I argue that for Gregory the soul (the human person) finds her telos when in union with Christ she becomes ever purer in an ever-increasing growth in the beatific vision. This Christological focus of the beatific vision has been insufficiently recognized in Nyssen scholarship. For Gregory, already in this life the human person (the soul) as she is meant to be (depicted under the biblical images of the pure in heart, Moses, and the bride) can be realized in the soul's mystical vision of God in Christ. At the same time, Gregory is convinced that human personhood can never be fully realized, since the soul will always remain in search of greater fulfillment of her desire; seeing God implies non-seeing at the same time, since the soul can never (not even in the hereafter) attain to the very nature of essence of the infinite God.
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