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Johannes Zachhuber, "Gregory of Nyssa: on the Hexaemeron: Text, Translation, and Essays" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Johannes Sakhuber
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body.
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Anna Marmodoro
In time for this class.
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Anna Marmodoro
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Anna Marmodoro
Oh sorry. Namaste.
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Mike Motilla
You coming where to?
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The North Pole, of course, like a very Jonas Christmas movie and Home Alone on Disney.
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Mike Motilla
Did I burn down the joy?
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Anna Marmodoro
I don't think so.
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Johannes Sakhuber
I think we're all in for a.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mike Motilla
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient you Review. I'm Mike Motilla and today we're talking with Johannes Sakhuber and Anna Marmodoro about Gregory of Nyssa's on the Hexameron or on the Six Days of Creation. It's the first volume in a new series from Oxford University Press called the Library of Early Christian Philosophy. Gregory Fnisse was born about a decade after the Council of Nicaea. He was part of the first Christian generation, as one scholar put it. He wrote about doctrine, he theorized the increasingly popular movement of asceticism, and he was a bishop with the ear of the emperor and his writings. They give us a window into how this Christian generation started to see not just the Trinity or theology, but also how their theologies helped them look at the world and how what they saw shaped what they thought. Gregory often wrote about analogical reasoning and its limits that is kind of how to move from the natural world up to the heavens. And, you know, how to go from like, here's a tree to somebody made that tree, to what kind of thing would have made a tree. And in doing that, he was part of a much larger tradition that goes back to at least Plato's Timaeus, and that includes people like Philo of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, things like that. But between Plato and Gregory, there was more than 500 years of history. So even though Gregory, like most educated Greeks, would have read Plato, the Plato that he read was mixed up with Aristotelian and Stoic and what we might call today Neoplatonist thoughts, people like Plotinus and Iambiclus and others. And one of the tricky things about studying philosophical thought in late antiquity is that, yes, everyone read Plato, but Plato was always being refracted. Like, in the same way that it's hard for us to read Plato today without having Kant's categories or Derrida's critiques in our heads already. Plus, Gregory had, like, a whole Christian tradition, too. And so kind of in his head is also bouncing around the Bible and Basil and Origen and Athanasius and more. So by the time he was writing, for example, the idea that creation was made from nothing ex nihilo was basically settled doctrine. And it was clear that kind of between, you know, Plato and Christians, there was going to be this kind of fight about was creation from nothing or not? And so Christians had to kind of work out this problem if they're going to come up with a cosmology that could compete with their pagan neighbors. This was a time when Christians and pagans, you know, they were still going to school together. Gregory's brother shared a teacher with the last pagan emperor, Julian. So there was real competition, or at least there were different live possibilities for philosophies and for philosophies about what the world was really like. And on top of the obvious philosophical material, Gregory, like any intellectual, was also reading what we'd call today, like natural sciences. His cosmology wasn't just like heavenly spheres and perfect circles. He was trying to actually understand the world that he saw with trees and cups and bodies and things. And the only way to reason from the seen to the unseen, as he understood it, was to really see the natural world. So his writings, they're filled with medical and biological and something like empirical study as well. Part of what makes reading on the Hexameron such an exciting work is that it displays then so many of the kind of late ancient themes that we might be used to. Things like the transformation of the classical world, like Christianization, like new understandings of Romanness. Even if, you know, the text is working in a pretty technical philosophical jargon that is the 4th century, it has kind of technical Christian theology being done in a way that, I don't know, like Cicero might be able to squint and still understand. And yet, you know, many of the pieces that will be familiar are also building towards something new, some kind of, like, momentum that will emerge with these familiar pieces. So, you know, on the podcast, we don't talk a whole lot about, you know, like, real theology and philosophy, but we have seen the kind of long endurance of classical culture, even if it's usually going on in something like Christian art or baptistries. But it wasn't just visual art that was continuing on these traditions. Christians, they cared a whole lot about doctrine, but the doctrines they cared about also carried and transformed a classical world with them. So when we talk about the classical influence of Jewish texts on Christian ones or on, you know, pagan ones on Christian ones or things like that, these aren't things that you can, like, easily tease apart. Like, as one author in this volume puts it, you can't just, like, take a highlighter and say, like, well, the yellow parts are the Stoic parts and the blue parts are the Plato parts and the green part is from the Bible and so on. Right. Like, inclusions and transformations are really never so simple. This is a complicated process. And here to help us understand how this complicated process of influences and transformations and consequences come about are two really leading scholars of Gregory of Nyssa, and they're really wonderful guides in this text. Johannes Zakuber and Anna Armodoro are the editors of this great volume. So Johannes Yakuber is a professor of historical and systematic theology at Oxford. His books include Human Nature and Gregory of Nyssa, the Rise of Christian Theology at the End of the Of Ancient Metaphysics, Time and the Soul From Aristotle to Augustine and more. And Ana Marmodoro is Leonard and Elizabeth Eslich professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. She has written or edited at least half a dozen books, including Metaphysics and Introduction, Forms and Structures in Plato's Metaphysics, Aristotle On Perceiving Objects, and most recently, she has co edited the Oxford Handbook to Omnipresence. So, hi, Johannes. Ana, welcome. Thank you for being here. It's really such a pleasure to have you. Could you introduce yourselves? Who are you and how did you come to put together this volume on Gregory of Nissa's? Hexameron and this new series.
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Johannes Sakhuber
Okay, I go first. Hello, Mike. Thanks so much for having us. It's a great pleasure and an honor. And as you've said, I teach at Oxford University. In a way, you've said it all. I've been there for 20 years now. My research started, actually, with work on Gregory of Nissa, which I did as part of my doctoral studies almost 30 years ago now. And he's not really let me go since, even though I've done all sorts of other things as well, including published this book on the idea of Christian philosophy, really, from the Cappadocian fathers to the 8th century. But even there, Gregory of Nyssa, in a way, was a kind of a guide through this longer story that I was trying to tell there. So, yeah, I mean, I've tried to get away. Not very hard, but I've never quite managed. And with this book, I'm squarely back in trying to figure out a few of the insights that Gregory still has to teach us today.
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Anna Marmodoro
Hello. Hi. My name is Ana Marmodaro. I'm an Italian philosopher working presently in the U.S. i'm a philosopher, passionate about all sorts of things, but particularly metaphysics and this history. So, for me, Gregory of Nyssa is a little bit of a new territory, a passion that I developed during my decade at Oxford, in fact, in collaboration with Johannes Kuber and other colleagues at Oxford, who made me see the excitement that there is in this late antiquity text, both pagan and Christians, which was something I was not familiar with from my previous studies and research. So I kind of joined the club in Oxford, and I find it the club that's very exciting to be in, and I'm very motivated to kind of connect to words that sometimes are a part of the world of theology and classical studies and the world of analytic philosophy, which is. Which is my home, and show others how interesting the philosophical questions that we find in these texts are for today, as well as for the times in which they were written and discussed. I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you, Mike, for having us.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. No, thank you so much for being here. We're glad you joined the club. Do you think you could tell us just a little bit more about the series, just to kind of get us started? I mean, this is the first book in the series, but kind of, what are the kind of bigger ideas that are going on here?
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Johannes Sakhuber
I mean, as Anna's already said, I mean, one of the things that brought us together was this particular interest in patristic Texts in texts written by early Christian authors, but seen as philosophical texts. And that to this day is really not something that a lot of people do, a lot of people take very seriously. I mean, there is a long standing tradition of asking questions such as what kind of influence can we see in an early Christian text, let's say from Plato or from Aristotle? But that's sort of different from what we really tried to try to establish, which is more like, how can we read these texts as philosophical texts? Now, my last monograph was really an attempt to take that approach seriously. But while I was trying to do that, it really struck me, coming from my background, which is really in theology, is really in patristics, it struck me that somehow we need to do more to facilitate that study. And one of the things, one of the ideas that came up, partly in conversation with others, partly from my own previous work, is that we need a basis of texts of, we might say, a canon of texts that people can say, well, if you want to understand about early Christian philosophy, these are the texts you ought to look at. And not just the texts are such, but the texts have to be made available and must have been, must be prepared to be, to be read and studied in this light. And so that's really how we came up with the idea for this series of a library of early Christian philosophy. So what's happening is we select texts, we present them in the original, we try to provide, produce a translation that's really sensitive to philosophical language, and then add a couple of interpretative essays that bring out what we think are main philosophical ideas in this text. And Gregory's on the Hexa Imran just seemed a very good case to start us off in this series. And I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to talk about that as we go along. But, yeah, I don't know, Anna, whether you'd like to add anything to this, but that's sort of where I've come from. Obviously you've come to it as a philosopher, so probably with some slightly different questions.
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Anna Marmodoro
I endorse everything that you've said, Yoannis. I think Ioannis has put it very beautifully in some of his previous work. The early Christians are often shadowed by the classical sources, to which, to some degree, they inspired themselves, themselves. But there is more than just being shadowed by the classics. So what I find very interesting about this text is that they provide also some missing link between classical antiquity and the later periods. And when we study philosophical questions, speaking for my community, my home community, as it were, to Study, philosophical question is very helpful to see the diachronic development of how the problem has been treated. So in a sense, this study of early Christian school philosophers had left a gap in our understanding of several problems, causation, creation, all sorts of other things. And I think by bringing to light what these texts say and how we can look into them philosophically, kind of fill that gap. And we hope to inspire other colleagues and also younger researchers, early career researchers and graduate students to just do more in the same line. One more thing that maybe didn't come to the front is that these essays that accompany the text texts that we have chosen for the series are authored by colleagues with different specialties. So we are all connected by these interests in early Christian philosophy, but there are some of us that have a stronger background in theology, some of us in classics, some of us in philosophy. So there's a multi perspective that comes through in the volumes. And I think it's also very important to engage a real wide audience in what is exciting about early Christians. Thank you.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, wonderful. And we should say the translation was done wonderfully by Andrew Eddie Galowitz, so people can get a feel just for the text as well. So the book is, it's really interested in kind of philosophy and theology with Gregory, but maybe I can do a little bit of historical setup just to make sure listeners are on the same page and we can then get into his intellectual world. So I said some of this in the beginning. Gregory's born in about 330. He's born into this kind of wealthy Christian family in Pontus in modern day Turkey. And he's part of what Roberts called that first Christian generation. So with the exception of the 20 month period when Julian was emperor, the Roman emperor is always going to be a Christian leader and churches are getting Roman money and prestige. Gregory's dad taught rhetoric. Gregory also taught rhetoric. His brother was this big shot bishop from Caesarea. Gregory kind of becomes bishop to solidified Basil's power. And his, you know, kind of church career starts off slow, but after his brother dies, he, he ends up kind of writing a lot. And his kind of, I don't know, his prestige itself kind of takes off. He writes a book on the nature of humanity. He writes against this theological opponent named Eunomius. And you know, he's writing kind of partly drafting off his brother's name, but partly with his own. The power of his own writing too. He becomes like a standard bearer for Nicene orthodoxy under the Emperor Theodosius. And he's just he's just like, writing a. He writes about doctrine, he writes about asceticism, he's writing letters to everyone. And he becomes, like, a major player in church politics in his own right for the next decade or so. Kind of up until the 390s, he kind of fades from the historical record. By 394, I think. He dies in 395. That's, I think, just kind of a guess. And while he wasn't nearly as influential kind of in the long span of history as his brother Basil or the other Cappadocian, Gregory of Kazianz, I mean, his writings were copied and read. He's got kind of a resurgence that happened in the 20th and 21st century. There was kind of a revival with his writings on mysticism and the luminous darkness. But part of what I see you doing in a volume like this is to try to bring a little bit more precision to some of Gregory's big themes. So you can kind of. If there's more biography that we need, we can add that. But this is really an intervention into the kind of philosophical world of Gregory. And so maybe you could start us off with, like, how has scholarship been understanding Gregory's intellectual world? And has a book like this end up bringing more nuance to that discussion?
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Johannes Sakhuber
Yeah, I mean, that's so. Really. I mean, I'm very happy with everything you said about his life and about his thought, and I think it's really exactly as it is. I mean, perhaps the one before I say something about the scholarly world. I mean. And the one thing that I would probably emphasize even a bit more strongly, because that's how it's appearing to me increasingly over the years, is this sort.
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Anna Marmodoro
Of utter.
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Johannes Sakhuber
Sort of drama that happens at one point in Gregory's life, I mean, I think up until 300 or 380 perhaps, you know, when he is no longer really a young man, he is practically a nobody. I don't think that anybody at that point, apart from a very small circle of friends and family, knew of him. Obviously, the big guy was his old brother Abadil, who was a major leader. He was a major intellectual. He was a major leader of the ascetic movement. And then Basil dies precisely at the moment when the ideas that he fought for, for political reasons, suddenly are victorious. And who's left? Well, Gregory. And he's really filling this gap. And I think this is pertinent partly also for the text where we're talking about here. He is really suddenly there's a sort of an opening. There's an opening there. People try to find someone who can fill a Basil's footsteps. And Gregory wants to say, yes, I am the person who's there. I can do that. And it create. And again, we can see more about it when we start talking more really about the Hexaemiron. It creates from the outset a bit of an ambiguity, because on the one hand, Gregory, I think it's very clear that a lot of his prestige is owed to the fact that it was his brother who is now dead and who's prepared the ground for a lot of the things that he's now asked to. But of course, at the same time, he doesn't only want to be his brother, he wants to be his own man. And so there's constantly in Gregory this tension that on the one hand, he seems to be saying, yes, Basil is the teacher. I basically just follow in his lead. But at the same time, he also keeps implying, well, I can actually do things better than Basil. I see things clearer than he did. And I think teasing that out is one of the most fascinating aspects of understanding Gregory also, perhaps one of the few ways we have into an understanding of his personality, because Gregory overall isn't someone who tells us a lot about himself. He always seems to hide behind his writing. But I think in this complicated relationship that's clearly there between him and the sort of overweening inheritance, intellectual inheritance from his late brother, that's a way into understanding him. Now, perhaps more to your question on the scholarly world, I mean, it seems to me very clear that the moment scholarship became interested in Gregory, which was in the sort of mid 20th century, it became interested in him as a representative of some kind of philosophical, intellectual culture within this nascent Constantinian Christianity.
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Mike Motilla
Right.
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Johannes Sakhuber
I mean, there's always this sense, Gregory and the Platonic tradition, Gregory and philosophy, Gregory and perhaps the natural sciences, which is again, very important for we're looking at here. Gregory is somebody who seems to embrace all the learning that's available at the time, more so than perhaps many others. Did he push that too far? Did he possibly embrace some of these traditions at the expense of what was expected of an orthodox bishop? It's hard to know whether people thought that, but it's not impossible. He's definitely someone who really is very keen to push the boundaries there. And I think scholarship obviously hasn't spoken with one voice. When do scholars ever speak with one voice? But I think, by and large, that's the picture. And I suspect, Amana, that's probably one reason why Gregory is perhaps more Interesting than some other Christian authors for someone who really comes from the background of a philosopher.
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Anna Marmodoro
Thank you. I'm very happy to endorse everything that Johannes has said, and I just want to add a couple of quick thoughts. So your question mark, Mike, was about how we're with this volume related to the existing scholarship. And I want just to add two quick considerations. I think that from my perspective, one thing we do is to look at Gregory, relatively speaking, from the outside. So again, I speak for myself, but some of the colleagues who authored chapters for the book, these are not necessarily colleagues who have worked on Gregory all their lives, but they come to this text with their background, their perspectives, understanding how. How things work from Gregory by having a little bit of intellectual distance. And sometimes this is helpful, as we know, in many paths of life. And I think this is what has happened in the volume, that some of us are very much into Gregory. Some of us come to Gregory from a different perspective. So that's one thing. The second thing I think that this volume does that perhaps is different from the scholarship generalizing now is simply that we look very closely at the text. So as you were putting it, yes, it is nuanced. It is like detailed analysis of a relatively short text done by multiple authors. So we all look at these lines and we find a depth and the wealth of ideas that is very impressive. So I think these are the two things I would highlight. Looking at Gregory from the outside and looking at the details of attacks from multiple perspectives, I think this one dimension that is new in what we are doing in the volume.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, no, it's wonderful. And I mean, part of the. The nice thing about coming from the outside is that I think it helps readers see. Sounds silly, but, like, remind readers that he's like a 4th century person. Like, there's something about the mystical, like, you know, the luminous darkness that just, like, I don't know, it makes sense why Derrida writes about him or something like. And that's great, you know, like, this is how a lot of people get interested in this world. And, you know, like, like, God bless all of that. But seeing him as a kind of contemporary with other kind of philosophical tens that he sees the Roman world in a very Neoplatonist, Stoic, these kind of philosophical interests are closer to him than Derrida. And so just getting back into a world where you're talking about, you know, the spheres of creation and like, those kinds of things I think do help, like, ground, like, okay, yeah, this is the philosophical world that we're talking about. And so it is, you know, this is like an ideas book. But there is something about situating him among these philosophers that reminds us, like this is the intellectual world that he's part of. And like, you know, it's fine to do modern theology. That's what you want to do. But like, this is his world. And so paying more attention to the kind of context I think, think. I don't know. It helped me see something new in Gregory. But I'm going on too long. Sorry.
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Mike Motilla
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Mike Motilla
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- [26:19]
Johannes Sakhuber
Here we have the Limu Imu in.
- [26:22]
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- [26:34]
Mike Motilla
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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Johannes Sakhuber
Cut the camera. They see us.
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Mike Motilla
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. You know, but maybe we're jumping ahead because before we can get to Gregory, like this is a commentary, it's very much related to Basil's hexameron. So, you know, sometimes people call this like an apology for Basil's text. But you know, like Johannes, you said like Gregory, he has his own ideas, right? And you know, one way people try to talk about this is just that it's like a different audience. But it's. I think it's more than that. You know, Gregory is like a formal text written to his brother Peter, Basil's series of homilies. But can you tell us a little bit about Basil's textile kind of what was it? And then why was Gregory writing about it? Johannes maybe started.
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Johannes Sakhuber
Yeah, so that's really a very important aspect of what we're doing here, right? I mean, Gregory's text is relatively slim. It doesn't have the ambition really to tackle every single aspect that you'd expect in Hexe Imran in a Commentary on the Six Days of Creation. And that is because from the outset he says that all he wants to do is clarify a few points that his brother Basil had raised in his own homilies and that people had criticized. Now, I've already said we can never say anything that Gregory says about his brother simply at face value, I'm afraid, because there's just so much clearly going on. But just for clarification, I mean, we have to see that these homilies that Basil preached relatively shortly before his death were a runaway success. And not just in his own time, but for the remainder of the Byzantine period. They were seen as the star example, the most perfect example of someone coming from a well educated classical background using the biblical text and doing something that was on a par with what, what the best classical authors could have done. Basil's language was praised, Basil's ability to bring in, in a sort of light way, a lot of learning. And I think that was fairly clear already at the time when he completed them. Now I say completed. The tragedy, of course, was that Basil wasn't all that old. He was older than Gregory, but he wasn't all that old. He very ill. So by the time he was getting his homilies ready for publication, he was basically already dying. And there's one homily that he didn't even prepare for Prynne, namely the one on the sixth day on the creation of humankind. So the homilies were sort of off the press and Basil was no more. So Gregory pretty much had called Blanche to do what he wants. Now he says he needs to write this as an apology, but actually what he does, the main point he's really dwelling on, are not points where you get the sense that he actually wants to clarify or defend Basil. A very large part of the treatise is taken up by a topic on which he explicitly wants to contradict something that Basil said, where he's talking about his interpretation of the cosmological process overall. We'll come back to this, right? The simultaneous creation. He's developing an idea that clearly isn't Basil's idea at all. There's also the broader matter that Basil is part of a trend at the time to move away from allegorical interpretation of the text and more towards a sort of non allegorical exegesis. And Gregory again seems to want to push against that and really pick up on the tradition that comes from someone like Origen to be permitted to use allegory. Allegory as an exegetical tool. So, yes, the framing of the text is more or less entirely based on the justification that Basil's homilies needed elaboration or defense. But as we can see, to what extent that's really Gregory's agenda. Well, is somewhat doubtful, I would say. He's also piggybacking on. He's more piggybacking, I think, on the success that Bazaar's text has. And actually, sorry, just one more thought. One way we can see where that's actually worked is that if we look at the manuscript tradition, in many cases the manuscripts we have of Gregory's apology or Gregory Hexa Imran is.
- [31:49]
Mike Motilla
Is.
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Johannes Sakhuber
In the same. Is together, joined together with Basil's homilies, which, as I've already said, became super successful. So the survival of this text, to an extent we could say, isn't due to the fact that it was included in collections of Gregory's writings, but it was appended to copies of Basel's homilies.
- [32:12]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. Anand, do you think you can tell us what kind of divergences do we see? We can feel there's this connection there that. That, I don't know, rhetorically Gregory wants. But he's also trying to say, like, I'm going to talk about some of those myself too.
- [32:29]
Anna Marmodoro
Yes, certainly, Mike, I can give a specific example that relates to the chapter that I authored for the volume. So in the chapter that I authored, I focus on the problem of creation. So how can God create? God being immaterial and God being good, can create a world that is both material and also riddled with evil. We may come back to that later. But in the course of this examination of how Gregory treats the problem, I look at one specific argument of Aristotle and how both Basil and Gregory comment on that. And I show that Gregory, I think, takes himself to go beyond Basil with a little bit more sophistication and maybe more sympathy for Aristotle, as if he had gotten a point more in depth than what his brother did. And he's not afraid of just. Just doing that. So, you know, showing confidence and distance from his brother. That's just a little example. I hope it can help the readers to just get the feel for what we're talking about.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, it's perfect, right? And it's even a time where he admits that he's doing it. Right. In other texts, he'll say, like, I'm just saying exactly what Basil said. And then, I don't know, you like to read it and you're like, no, you're not. But in this case, he'll say, like, okay, you know, this is maybe his. What he would have said, or here's like an elaboration on it. Like he's. He's kind of owning up to the fact that he's saying something just a little bit different at least, or coming up with his own stuff.
- [33:55]
Anna Marmodoro
Yeah, apparently just a little bit different, but I think in depth, quite a bit different. And yes, we all know about the relationship with the siblings. We can understand the psychology there, I guess, but thank you. Yes.
- [34:08]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. Okay, so maybe we can get into some details. Johannes, you alerted to this just a second ago, but what is this doctrine of double or simultaneous creation? What's he talking about? What's the problem that it's supposed to solve and how does it solve it?
- [34:23]
Johannes Sakhuber
So the problem is, how is it appropriate for the creation of God to be narrated in a sequence in a story? I mean, to an extent you have that actually also in the interpretation of Plato's Timaeus.
- [34:41]
Mike Motilla
Right?
- [34:42]
Johannes Sakhuber
Is it. But we're offered this as a sort of mythical story, but clearly that's not how God acts. Right. God doesn't do sort of one thing first and then another thing and then another thing. The way I do it, if I, well, God forbid, were to build a house or something. So God as the perfect creator, obviously creates differently. And Gregory's this idea is that if we look at the first verse of the book of Genesis, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. That in this verse we find mysteriously, somehow indicated that actually God in an instant, sort of creates everything all at once. Now, by this he doesn't mean, however, that the whole of creation is complete in that instant, and we may be able to sort of get back to that later. But what he means is that the seed of everything is complete in the beginning. There is a sort of potential of everything. So it's like. Like, I don't know, a big, big bang, to use an analogy from modern physics, a sort of fireball in which. In which absolutely everything that is. That is going to come into existence in the process of creation is potentially already there, but it then has to develop into its proper shapes and forms and into individuals, et cetera, et cetera. Would you agree with that, Anna?
- [36:26]
Anna Marmodoro
It sounds good. I just want to answer the second part of what Mike was asking. As a philosopher, I don't think there is a successful solution there, but given that we said all good things about Gregory and his intellectual power so far, I think it's fair to us. A note here that probably is not philosophically sound as a solution, but it's really incredibly interesting to look how Gregory and his big mind wrestles with that.
- [36:51]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's going to be an important part of these as well. He doesn't have to solve it. We don't have to be convinced, even if he kind of thinks like, yeah, here's the question. Answer. Here's my answer.
- [37:02]
Anna Marmodoro
Yeah, you know, probably to our scrutiny, would feel like not a sound solution, but it's a valiant effort. So that's what I would say. And the problem remains the same for other authors that wrestled with it. So.
- [37:12]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [37:14]
Anna Marmodoro
Fairness.
- [37:15]
Mike Motilla
So the book has all these different kind of influences. And, you know, like any author, Gregory, he's read widely and he's got like 25 ideas in his head at any time. And it's, you know, I think I said at the beginning, like, you can't do the. Like, you know, Plato's in blue, Stoics in green, that kind of thing. That's a great note in one of the essays of the book. But it's helpful for us to at least try. Like, if we slow down the squirrel, if we color code a little bit, it'll help us, like, actually see the mix. Can we start with the stoic influence? Like, what does it actually mean to have a stoic influence in A text like this, like what? I don't know, we talk about like, yeah, of course, here's the Stoic influence. But like what, what does that mean?
- [37:59]
Anna Marmodoro
I'm happy to just make a remark about influence and then I'm happy also for Johannes to say more about specifically Stoic influence. But my, in my study of Gregory and authors of the same period, I think understanding what influence means a very important part of our exegetical approach. And here is my 2 cent idea. I think that these authors partly because read directly the sources or they didn't read them in the details, they didn't have the books in the library they could check out and have in front of their eyes, in my understanding they were picking up some key core ideas and work with them in a creative manner. So when we talk about influences is creative influence is creative reappropriation of certain principle put used in context in research and questioning that may be very different from the original one. So I think I see things this been true for how Gregory relates for example to Plato and Aristotle. I've seen this in previous work of mine regarding Gregory and I think that's broadly speaking true for the Stoics as well. But I'm very happy for Ioannis to you know, flesh out this a bit more if you want. Johannes.
- [39:10]
Johannes Sakhuber
No, I'm, I, I, I think, I think it's, I think, I think it's really important to, to, to think through, you know, what do we mean by influence? And I think, I think as, as Anna says it's, it's important to understand that we shouldn't really think of any of these figures, certainly not of Gregory, that they were like a modern scholar sitting in a library having an assignment from a publisher to say now you publish your exposition of the six days of creation. And then you say ah, and what's the bibliography? And where do I start? And what are the books I absolutely have to read? So it's, and I mean if I see it like this, it sounds ridiculous, but I think it's actually really tempting because we often think that other people are a bit like us and the people who read texts like this today are themselves scholars. So they tend to think, I think intuitively we tend to think easily that that's exactly what someone like Gregory did and that's arguably really misleading. I mean, perhaps back to the question of Stoic influence. I mean I suspect that part of the reason you're asking that Mike, is that we have a chapter on this by our colleague Gretchen Bydom Skills and I actually think it's one of the most fascinating contributions we have. And perhaps if I may, as part of. Simply because of what it doesn't say, namely, it's not in the first instance, Platonic influence. And when people talk about early Christian authors, I mean, I'm tempted to say for centuries the first thing that always came up is they were basically Platonists. And to an extent that hasn't changed. And so when people talk about Gregory Ernest as a philosopher, usually what people have in mind is, is, well, how does he relate to someone like Plotinus, for example, how does he relate more generally to Neoplatonists? Whereas I think that the sort of Stoic influence is a little bit the stepchild of modern research in the philosophical background of the Church fathers. But I think Gretchen shows really well how important Stoic influence is. And I think partly because for someone like Gregory, some patterns, some explanatory patterns that one finds in Platonic authors are not very attractive. But the vision of the Stoics, and I really simplify here, but the vision of the Stoics, which is to see the world, the cosmos, as we might say, an immanent system that sort of works, sort of develops based on principles that are already imminent in the cosmos, that is helpful, even though of course, Gregory wants to add the idea of a creator as transcendent of the world, which isn't something I suspect that most Stoics would have been too happy with. But once he moves on and tries to understand how creation develops from this first. From this first moment when God creates sort of everything all in one as a seed, he actually finds Stoic ideas very helpful.
- [42:47]
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- [44:18]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, no, I. Both your points about kind of what we mean by influence there is so helpful because I think there's a temptation for scholars to say, like, well, if there's not a footnote, it doesn't exist, or it's a bad reading. It's too general or it's too vague. But I think what's going on with someone like Gregory is maybe he reads some of this stuff, you know, 15 years before, he's then talking about it in this text, and he's got like a basic idea in his head of like, you know, what do the Stoics mean? Like, I don't know, like, I. I read some cons when I was in grad school. Like, do I have the basic, you know, like, could I tell an undergrad, like, in on the Sterling? Like, I probably could, but that's. That's about the level of engagement that we can expect. And so what part of what I mean, I. I took that, that really, really wonderful essay to help me see is like, this is the big idea that there is this kind of imminent thing, this kind of imminent principles, and there's a kind of order to create that Gregory can see. And, like, that's kind of what he means by, you know, stoic thought and whether he, you know, he's not really owning up to, like, well, here's my stoic influence here. But that idea, you know, it could carry with him for, you know, 15, 20 years down the line to the point that it's, you know, half conscious that he's talking about it, but it's still, it's present if you have eyes to see. I find that really helpful. So thank you for, I don't know, bringing our attention to what we really mean by influence there. Ana, maybe we can get onto your paper. Your paper is on this kind of, like, effects, like principle. And the fact that there's a principle at the end of it makes it sound technical, but maybe we can explain at least the outlines of the problems. So I'm going to take a crack at it, and then you can kind of correct me here and then get into some of the details. I think the Basic idea with the like effect, like principle, is like, you know, heat makes something hot. Humans reproduce. Other humans like effects. Like, that's the big idea. And so the big questions for theologians at the time is something like, you know, if God is immaterial and like affects, like, then how do you get an immaterial God to make material things? Like, that's the big question there. And Christians want to avoid saying that, well, matter was always there. Like, matter was eternal. That's bad. Bad. And they also want to avoid saying that God is matter. Like, both of those things get you canceled. And so this question of the divide of the bridge between the material and immaterial, it's haunting. Lots of intellectuals at the time, like, I don't know, Plato and Porphyry and Iambuclus are all gonna fight about this in their own ways. But you take us kind of back to this thought experiment that Aristotle does where he has this strip away all of the properties of a substance. And so it's kind of like the Argonaut issue, except instead of replacing and rearranging all the pieces on the ship, you're just taking more and more things away. And he's asking, what remains when all the properties of a substance go away? And so he ends up then talking about this stuff called ultimate matter and instantiation. Maybe we can start there. What does that mean? What is ultimate matter?
- [47:24]
Anna Marmodoro
Yeah, you presented principle very well. We call it principle, but it's very much an intuition that I think everybody might have that, you know, something affects something else by transmitting the quality that it has. So heat makes something hot, and the human produces human. So it's an intuition that the ancients certainly, I think, invariably endorsed and then becomes a problem for the Christians because they have this problem that God is immaterial, but the world is material. So how is it possible that something immaterial nevertheless creates something that is material? Seems a violation of the principle. A principle intuitive. But the doctrine says something that Christians have to buy. 2. So here is the problem. So I think Gregory's approach to this problem is very deep and original. I think deeper than Basil. So he looks at Aristotle, and I think he gets Aristotle. Right. So just to briefly represent the experiment for our listeners, so imagine a material object, whatever you like. Take a dog, take a tree, take a desk or a computer, and imagine literally stripping away, namely taking away by abstraction all the properties that characterize that object. It. And so you go from color, shape, location, and so on and so forth. And the conclusion of that thought experiment, which is actually very, very difficult to perform in your mind. So the listeners are all invited to try. For Aristotle is that what we find at the end is something, something, and I emphasize something that has no positive characterization and no negative characterizations. And that, logically speaking, is something really surprising. How can there be something that is neither characterized positively or negatively? But the surprise doesn't end there. Aristotle says, and that's matter, and that is also the ultimate matter of things. So the puzzle for the reader, for Aristotle is how is it that. How is it the case that there is something that has no characterization at all, but is also called in some way, namely matter? It has a name, and name refers. So what is the reference to matter or the ultimate substance, right from there. So I take Aristotle there to make the point that a material object is material, not because there are properties that somehow combined with an entity, namely matter. So it's not properties attached to matter. It's rather than a material object is instantiated properties, properties that occur in the world. So the height of Socrates, the pillar of Socrates being a human being of Socrates, are not in a Platonic heaven, they are in this world. And that is the meaning of there being imattered. And more technically, it is the meaning of there being instantiated. And I see Gregory as responding to Basil. So we go back to the previous topic and go a little bit deeper than Basil and say, look, there is no problem for God in creating material objects or the material world, because creating something material does not mean creating matter to which properties are attached. It simply means creating some properties that occur in space, time, in the natural world, in the world as it is. And I think that is how Gregory, now I want to emphasize, is influenced by Aristotle and finds in Aristotle a really creative way of addressing a problem that we could say haunted many Christian thinkers of the time. So I hope this illustrates it to the listeners. But I definitely invite everybody to try the experiment and find out what they have in their mind when they've taken away all properties of Socrates from Socrates. And I think my bet is that others would find the Aristotle as plausible as Gregory himself. Of deed.
- [51:04]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, I mean, it's like a real mind trip to like, actually try to do this of like, I don't know, like, what it. What if Aristotle wasn't. Or what if Socrates, like, wasn't bald? And what if he, like, looked different? And what if he. And then you just like, keep taking it away and keep taking away, and then there's. There's nothing left. And yet it's still. I Mean it challenges, I think common sense ideas about what we mean by that.
- [51:24]
Anna Marmodoro
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
- [51:26]
Mike Motilla
And I mean I think that that's. But that's gotta be what Gregory also wants from it. So what's Gregory's like problem with this ultimate matter?
- [51:38]
Anna Marmodoro
In essence, I think. Yeah, so in essence, I think Gregory is trying to resolve the problem of how can God create a material world by saying, look, there is no matter, there's a matter to be created. There is simply properties that occur in the actual world. So Socrates is not, you know, a sum of prop of Platonic form. Socrates is something in this actual world where we live and talk and walk and so on. And the difference between these two world is what is called technically instantiation of properties. But instantiation make it sound very difficult and very complex. And I think I personally would paraphrase as like occurrence, occurrence in the actual world. What is Mike, what is Johannes, myself, these properties in this world as opposed to any other possible global world. I want to add here that this I attribute to Gregory a reading of Aristotle that is definitely controversial. So I don't want to mislead the listeners in thinking that that's straightforward Aristinian scholarship. But I also want to say that if I may, I'm also co ed. I'm sorry, I'm editing a book also for Oxford University Press on the history of matter, trying to show that there is a long history of thinking of matter just the way I think Aristotle did did and substantiating this interpretation that I see as grounding Gregory's understanding of the problem of how God creates the material world. So more for another episode?
- [53:08]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Like, you know, come back on when that's out. Yeah. So Johannes, your paper. It looks at how Gregory uses the word Logos. Logos is a famously tricky word and great, you know, word story, speech, principle, like it means a lot of things.
- [53:23]
Johannes Sakhuber
Right.
- [53:24]
Mike Motilla
But it's a key word, Stoic philosophy. It's of course the big word in the beginning of the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And it becomes a key for earlier Christians and people like Philo of Alexandria, people like Origen of Alexandria, even in the first century. It's a big deal word. So can you tell us about how early Christians, people like Origen, were talking about this word, the Logos? And then we can get into what's unique with Gregory.
- [53:51]
Johannes Sakhuber
I mean, in a way, I'm tempted to say it's. It starts off from almost the same problem that Anna's been discussing. The question is, we want to understand that there is God, that there's a sort of transcendent principle that's not the world, but nevertheless has causally somehow produced a world. And that's, of course, somehow this causes, like, problems. So how is that possible? Now, if I may start with a text that you haven't mentioned, and it's not a Christian text, it's the pseudo Aristotelian text on the World de mundo. And that text comes up with a really, perhaps helpful, but almost a bit funny explanation for that. And the author of that text says, well, you know, if you think a really powerful person, like the King of the Persians, that person is in control of everything that happens in his empire, but he isn't doing it personally. He has the people who, you know, he has underlings, and he basically just tells them, and then they go on and tell somebody else. And so in a way, he's still getting it all done. And somehow the idea of Logos in a cosmology is more or less at least initially modeled on that idea that somehow God doesn't get his hands dirty in producing the material world, and yet he is the Creator. And how can you bring those two together? Well, you think there is a sort of intermediary being, and this intermediary being is Pabst we call Logos. But what does Bottas Logos mean? We could see if we just start from the text of Genesis. Logos means world heard. So perhaps we could say the text of Genesis says God says, let there be light. So let there be light is clearly the word of God. And so then we think, well, the word of God isn't just an English or a Hebrew or a Greek word, but it's a sort of powerful metaphysical ontological principle on its own. So that's the Logos. God produces the world, sorry, by means of His Word. If you then move on from someone who merely reads Genesis and accept fundamentals of Christian worldview, then as you've already said, then you have the beginning of the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the Logos. So the idea that Christ is actually this principle, Christ is the Logos. Christ is some sort of, at least initially in the second and third centuries, Christ is some ontological principle, metaphysical principle, that's perhaps not quite as transcendent as the Father, but still transcendent to the world. And so we have a sort of chain of command where the Father uses Christ, uses the Logos to make the world. So that that's broadly the history that Leads us from a Jewish reader of Genesis such as Philo of Alexandria in the first century to Christian readers like the so called apologists in the second century and even someone like Origen in the third century, where you have this idea of Logos as some sort of intermediary that can explain how God, God the Father is actually making the world without, as I said, sort of getting his hands dirty, personally.
- [57:47]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of the, you know, a first, second, third century version of this. But Gregory is like even different from other, I don't know, like 4th century Christians. Like it's not just like Origen and subordinationists or whatever we're calling them now. Like he's also different than Basil or Athanasius. Like I think the post Nicene consensus is that Christ is the word, but Gregory doesn't quite go there. And so the Logos in creation, this is how you put, you say the Logos is aligned with the Akluthia and taxes the sequence in the order such that by observing how things play out in space and time, Christians can speculate but never fully know what is beyond. So can you explain that? How does he differ from other Christians?
- [58:29]
Johannes Sakhuber
Yeah, no, sorry, absolutely, Mike. I mean, one has to know this background in order to see how intriguing it is that Gregory actually does something very, very different. He's still using the term Logos a lot, but he's using it, as you've just said, not at all to denote a transcendent principle, not at all really even remotely to indicate Christ or any aspect of God. The Logos is more like a principle internal in creation. Now I'm repeating what you've just said, which actually allows people to move from the observation of the world to a recognition or knowledge of God. And I think that's an idea that's actually very dear to Gregory, that Christians ought to study the natural world world Christians ought to be naturalists or we might today perhaps say physicists or scientists. But there is a theological reason for that. Gregory believes that by observing the natural world, by understanding its regularities and the causal connections and its orderliness, the observation of nature leads us to insights about, about God, about the Creator. So in some ways, I mean, we have to be careful with these historical analogies. But in some ways Gregory is really a bit like These sort of 18th century physical theologians, you know, these people who said, oh, you know, how do we know God? We observe the beauty and the harmony of the cosmos and that gives us a sense of the greatness of, of the Creator. At one level, Gregory isn't very far from this kind of approach. And the term logos to him has a key role in that particular connection.
- [60:41]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you get the sense that sequence, in order, they're like this kind of halo effect. There's kind of glow that comes from. If you get how things go, if you get, get kind of the sequence of things, the order of things, you can't know exactly what is behind them, but you can get like a sense of their presence. I don't know. I mean, Anna, you're the real experts on omnipresence, but that's at least what it sounds like to me. Okay, all right, Good, good, good. I just realized I was saying that in front of you, so maybe we can kind of move on to the influence of this text. I mean, know, one of the great things about this text is that even if it wasn't read, I don't know, all that widely after, after his life, like, it shows us how a high powered, serious Christian intellectual thought, like, for a historian, like it's, I think, a window into a larger world. But, and I know this is kind of getting you to speculate, but like, why, why do you think this work was more neglected than, than other texts that, that he wrote or that, I don't know, like, like it circulated with Basil's text. But like, you know, Basil's was like the serious one, Gregory's was kind of the add on. Right. You know, do you think you would tell us, like, why do you think kind of Gregory's commentary, what wasn't as big of a deal as some of the other stories that we have?
- [62:02]
Johannes Sakhuber
I mean, let me perhaps just begin by really reiterating the point you've made and because I think we really have to, have to be clear. I mean, of course, course, generally when we speak about influence in late antiquity, I mean, it's not. We don't have a sort of citation index where we can say, oh yeah, 100 people all quote this or that, this or that particular author. So we're generally on sort of shaky grounds when it comes to influence. But that's London. We're on shaky grounds. But I mean, here we have, it's fairly clear, we have a text that is completely neglected, I mean, to the best of my knowledge, for almost the entire Byzantine period, we have perhaps one or two individual authors where we get a sense that they or can say that they've actually read this text. And even that, you know, even that's not terribly clear. And that contrasts with Basil's text, which keeps being read and cited and being held up as the model. Of the sort of perfect application of cosmological ideas to the Christian text. So what exactly is going on there? I honestly know the answer. I mean, one possibility would be that ancient people weren't stupid and could really see through the sort of slightly dodgy way. Gregory wanted to, as I said earlier, piggyback on Basil's success in order to create a readership and audience for his own ideas, which were really at variance with Basel's ideas in many ways.
- [64:04]
Mike Motilla
Is.
- [64:05]
Johannes Sakhuber
But, you know, then you could at least think that people might say, well, Gregory, that wasn't well done. But, you know, this complete non reception really is a bit of a mystery. And it is a mystery sort of to circle back up to our book in view of the fact that whatever we may say about Gregory and Basil, this text is actually very, very interesting. Interesting. And there's really a lot one can learn from it. There's really a lot that makes us think about creative ways. For a Christian reader of Genesis who thinks that the first chapter of Genesis provides us with a cosmology, and then to ask how can we relate that to the existing cosmologies that we have in the ancient. In the ancient world? I mean, I would say it has been unduly neglected, but it definitely has been neglected.
- [65:08]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. And. Or there are kind of things that surprise, like, I don't know, like, why should people keep reading this text? I guess that's the other way to put it. It's like, you know, like, maybe you could speculate on why it is that this text didn't take off, but kind of, as a philosopher, both of you are reflecting that it's interesting and it doesn't quite work. Can you tell us just like, about that tension there?
- [65:34]
Anna Marmodoro
Yes, it's a big topic, but specifically, I mean, this text is interesting and difficult. And maybe the difficult dimension is what didn't engage readers in the history of the text. I'm not sure it's very difficult to speculate. It's difficult because once you microscope the text, there are, as we said before, influences that range from the Stoics to, say, Plato and Aristotle. So obviously a reader with certain type of background can appreciate them more, but not everybody might have that kind of background. It's also difficult because the topics dealt with in this text by Gregory range in a significant, significant way, given the brevity of the text and so on and so forth. So it's hard to speculate why did not become more of a, you know, Bestseller or good reel. But I think in terms of why it should be because just reflecting and analyzing, you know, just a few pages overall, one can go deep in the classical sources, in theological problems, in metaphysical problems, and so on and so forth. So maybe the metaphor that you use your. Yourself, Mike, at some point of window applies here. So this text is really interesting. Window into a large world of interest to metaphysicians, historians of philosophy, theologians, classicists, and so on and so forth. So highly recommended by us.
- [67:05]
Mike Motilla
Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, get out there, Get. Get the book. You know, download it from your libraries. You know, buy the book. It's.
- [67:12]
Anna Marmodoro
It's not necessarily our book, but, you know, the original text by Gregory, you know, we don't necessarily want you to look at our work on it, but just go. Go for Gregory.
- [67:21]
Mike Motilla
Well, that's my job. You know, I think they should get your book. But, but. Okay, let's wrap up though. Can you tell us like, what. What's next for the series and then what. Maybe what are you. You also working on on next?
- [67:33]
Anna Marmodoro
I can briefly say that I'm working on two things for the series. Just give a concrete sense of what's happening to the listener. So I just completed the chapter on Augustine's the Ordina. And so we have a for volume on that. And I am putting together a conference and the volume on Eugena's Vox Spiritualis in collaboration with the wonderful liquor researcher Rodrigo Balloon Villanueva. And these are the things I'm doing for the series. Independently of the series, I'm working on a new monograph for Oxford University Press with the title Parmenidian Essentialism. So I can't get away from metaphysics. But this new book is more focused on the classical tradition. So three author, Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, looking at the contemporary analytic metaphysics debate. And that's it for me.
- [68:26]
Johannes Sakhuber
Yeah, I'm too still busy with the series in that together with Andy Radgalwitz, I'm actually in the process of finalizing the second volume, which is going to deal with the first book of Origen's Commentary on the Gospel of John is really a bit of a challenge to take an exegetical text, but it is to take, sorry, take an exegetical text as a case study of early Christian philosophy. But it is actually that it's very philosophical and I'm very much looking forward to getting this out next year. And there's another edition translation that I'm getting ready at this point. And it's not exactly the reason why I chose this particular author, but he is actually one of the very few people who uses incites Gregory's Anhexer imran. It's a 6th century patriarch of Constantinople called Eutekias whose work is is scattered as extant in translations. Only a little bit really left in Greek. But it's very interesting and Gregory of Nyssa is clearly one of his favorite authors. So the works and fragments by Eutekias will come out with Oxford University Press next year, I hope.
- [70:13]
Mike Motilla
That sounds great and I hope, you know, I hope you'll come back and we can talk more about other things soon. Well, it was such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. Okay, bye bye.
- [70:25]
Johannes Sakhuber
Thank you for having us.
- [70:26]
Anna Marmodoro
Thank you.
- [70:39]
Pastor Joe
Pastor Joe here. And I am so excited to tell you about my fourth book called Stand Firm and Act Like Men. In it, we will walk through what the Bible means when it says, be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong, and let all you do be done in love. It is a call for men to rediscover what biblical manhood looks like and what it means to love, serve and support those the Lord has entrusted to them. My prayer for you is that this book might challenge you to stand firm and act like men.