Those familiar with Hans Boersma's wider work may well recognise here a sort of case-study counter-piece to his Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Eerdmans, 2011). The earlier book lays out his wider vision of a sacramental participative ontology, and this focused monograph turns to Gregory of Nyssa with the expectation of finding historic support for such a view, as Balthasar, Daniélou and others believed they had before. What is interesting for those of us working in the interstices between liturgy, doctrine and patristics is that through the course of his research Boersma became increasingly convinced that he could not find the support that he hoped for. Instead, the picture that emerged was one that contests many contemporary claims for the implications of Nyssen's understanding of embodiment, leading Boersma to insist that the ‘radically anagogical character of Gregory's overall theology needs to frame interpretation of embodiment, gender, marriage, sexuality and virginity’ (p. 86).
The detailed observations about the significance of Gregory's anagogical theology of participatory virtue are enjoyably articulated and engage a broad cross-section of his writings. One might have liked wider engagement with Origenist tradition, but Boersma is surely right to affirm that ‘anagogical transposition is the main characteristic of Gregory's understanding of embodiment’ (p. 215). Thus his caution that ‘we should not so highlight Gregory's positive appreciation of embodiment as to lose sight of the profoundly otherworldly cast of his overall theology’ (p. 9) provides a welcome and thoughtful challenge to some of the work of John Behr, Elizabeth Clark, Virginia Burrus, Mark Hart and Rowan Williams, all of whom he addresses in detail. For Boersma, the key is that Gregory envisions prelapsarian and post-resurrection human life as embodied but not diastemic: ‘Virtue, as participation in the life of God, means leaving behind the diastemic structures of embodiment’ (p. 215).
Chapter 1, ‘The Measured Body’, thus takes on a programmatic significance, siding, like Ramelli, with the older views of Norris and Patterson, against the contemporary consensus that finite embodied existence necessarily involves diastēma (interval or extension in time or space). While not wishing to revert to reading Gregory against a purely Platonic metaphysic and still stressing the significance of his investment in the Creator–creature distinction as ultimate (particularly in the anti-Eunomian works), Boersma argues that Gregory continues to utilise classic spirit–matter dichotomies in ways that bring him to a somewhat muddled vision of resurrection life as both embodied and finite (and so distinct from the infinite triune life) and yet adiastemic (in ways more classically seen in Evagrian understandings of an ultimate incorporeality). However, Boersma's detailed case for a truly adiastemic Paradise (pp. 27–50), and that ultimately ‘material bodies are simply the convergence of intelligible properties’ (p. 50), contained some argumentative leaps. While the intersection of the eschatological ‘eighth day’ and its ‘ages’ with our current mortal existence was explored with some nuance, the conclusion that this is truly adiastemic rather than simply differently diastemic seemed to me overdrawn.
Even if one is not willing to go as far as Boersma wishes in this, the repeated emphasis that the anagogical journey is ‘into a significantly other mode of existence’ is a valuable one and probably enough on its own to sustain much of the later debate about gender and virginity, social and ecclesial relationships. The stress on the ‘verticality’ of Gregory's thought in chapter 5, ‘The Oppressed Body’, tellingly cuts through many perceived problems around his stance towards slavery; while the discussion of grief in chapter 4, ‘The Dead Body’, is particularly good and seems to strike just the right balance between recognising its this-worldly value and nonetheless calling for it to be anagogically transposed.
