Book contents
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Ancient Religion and Cognition
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Funder Acknowledgement
- Introduction
- Part IRitual
- Part IIRepresentation
- Part IIIGender
- Part IVMateriality
- Part VTexts
- Chapter 10Bridging the Gap
- Chapter 11A Relevant Mystery
- Index
- References
Chapter 11 - A Relevant Mystery
Intuitive and Reflective Thought in Gregory of Nyssa’s Representations of Divine Begetting in the Against Eunomius
from Part V - Texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2022
Book contents
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Ancient Religion and Cognition
- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Funder Acknowledgement
- Introduction
- Part IRitual
- Part IIRepresentation
- Part IIIGender
- Part IVMateriality
- Part VTexts
- Chapter 10Bridging the Gap
- Chapter 11A Relevant Mystery
- Index
- References
Summary
In this chapter I argue that we should take seriously the numerous vivid images of material begetting in Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius because they provide him with a more experientially based, and so intuitive, way to conceive of the hard-to-grasp idea that the first and second Person of the Trinity were both distinct entities and also unified in essence or nature. However, I shall also argue that Gregory was at the same time continuously correcting problems that an intuitive model of begetting might bring to the divine by returning to more theologically correct, reflective ways of conceiving of the divine. I shall argue that via this oscillation between intuitive ways of thinking about the divine and reflective and theological ways of thinking about it, which Ilkka Pyysiӓinen has argued is normal for theological discourse, Gregory was able to present the Trinity as what Dan Sperber has defined as a ‘relevant mystery’.
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- Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience , pp. 266 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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