Can one find a compelling theory of desire in a corpus of works as large, as amorphous, and, well, as old as Gregory of Nyssa's? Raphael Cadenhead, in his provocative entrée into the guild of Cappadocian scholarship, argues the affirmative. Cadenhead discovers a dynamic “ascetical theology” in Gregory's works, one uniquely attentive to the transformations undergone in both bodily and spiritual maturation. He notes the fluid gender language in Gregory's works but reads it differently than such recent scholars as Verna Harrison, Virginia Burrus, and Sarah Coakley (the supervisor of the doctoral thesis from which the book came). Gregory is not integrating more or less stable feminine qualities into male qualities (pace Harrison) nor destabilizing gender distinctions altogether (pace Burrus and, differently, Coakley). Rather, Cadenhead sees Gregory as rather conventional in his view of “ordinary,” non-ascetic gender relations but radical in his account of the spiritually advanced male ascetic. In Cadenhead's view, Gregory “schematizes the soul's transition in identity from male to female within a framework of diachronic spiritual growth” (141)—female because of the soul's desire for Christ, the male Bridegroom. He shows that this model contrasts with Gregory's earlier works.

The author's impressively thorough account is offered not merely as an exegetical inquiry but as a resource for challenging core assumptions in contemporary theological ethics (1). In his conclusion, Cadenhead notes that his book appears as various “moral controversies related to the issues of gender and sexuality” consume today's “ecclesial communities” (157). Gregory's views do not translate directly into our categories, and Cadenhead does not counsel uncritical acceptance of them. For him, Gregory gives a principle or rule for reflection; in Cadenhead's words, Gregory stipulates that “there can be no gender theory or theory of sexuality without an accompanying theory of maturation” (158). Roles of gender or sexuality that appear fixed in contemporary discourse should instead be understood as material that can be transformed radically over the course of a devout life, even if they are not “amorphously fluid” (145). Cadenhead follows Gregory further in refusing to separate sexual continence from the other-regarding virtues; he calls this an “ethic of integration”: only when one is freed from “slavery to the passions” can one freely “discern and desire the face of Christ in the poor” (160). Accordingly, the reader is urged “to regard the lifelong quest for ascetical self-mastery . . . as the precondition for transforming the social body” (160). The twin themes are the maturation of erotic desire and the implications thereof for the whole of Christian living.

How, then, does the author arrive at this theological intervention from a reading of Gregory's texts? Two methodological decisions stand out: to treat Gregory's ideas as theology as opposed to theory and to read his corpus developmentally. The first is rooted in a concern to avoid anachronism. Recent readings, Cadenhead claims, have been overdetermined by contemporary preconceptions, like fixed sexual identities and the distinction between sex and gender. Instead, Cadenhead views Gregory's work as “ascetical theology.” While admitting this, too, is an “etic” rather than an “emic” category—he locates its origin in modern Roman Catholic theology—Cadenhead maintains that “ascetical theology” avoids the worry of anachronism (8–9). He uses “theological” to describe Gregory's “motivations” as an author (53) and speaks of Gregory's “primary intentions” as theological (159). Cadenhead juxtaposes this characterization of Gregory as theologian not only to broadly feminist readings but also to this reviewer's philosophical reading of Gregory's virtue theory, which, in his view, misconstrues Gregory's “primary motivation”—“spiritual fidelity to Christ” rather than “abstract philosophical analysis” (55). In both cases, it is a serious objection. Readers’ reactions will likely be determined by whether they think theology is to be construed in these either/or terms.

Cadenhead's other methodological decision, to treat Gregory's corpus chronologically, determines the order of the book's eight chapters. Fascinatingly, Cadenhead's developmental account allows him to address his theme of maturation on two levels: Gregory's account of spiritual maturity, he argues, itself matures as Gregory ages. At various points, he—unconvincingly, in my view—explains Gregory's changing ideas by reference to Gregory's psychology or life experiences: his siblings’ deaths (88) or his own experience of old age (134). The argument raises a number of questions. How important is this doubling of levels for Cadenhead? Would the point about spiritual maturity stand without the developmental reading of the corpus? At the least, it would help to note that the claims are heterogeneous: one is a factual claim about Gregory's development, the other a conceptual claim about the nature of spiritual progress.

How sustainable is the developmental account? Cadenhead justifies his chronology in a table and annotated bibliography in an appendix (163–178), where he divides the texts into an Early Phase (up to Basil's death), Middle Phase (AD 378–387), and Late Phase (AD 387–394) and gives references to secondary scholarship. The arguments given do not establish as tidy a chronology as Cadenhead suggests: for example, thematic similarity between works does not entail their chronological proximity, and reference to Arians does not entail a date just prior to the Council of Constantinople. Many works that he fixes in one of his periods should be viewed as simply undatable. But suppose we grant the chronology, at least in certain secure cases, such as On Virginity (Early Phase), Life of Macrina (likely Middle Phase), and Homilies on the Song of Songs (Late Phase). To get the idea of intellectual development, we need changing ideas across these works. Even so, the mere presence of such differences does not require us to conclude that there is development—certainly not in the strong sense entailed by Cadenhead's organic metaphor of maturation. Numerous differences between Gregory's texts are explicable simply by referring to their respective rhetorical and topical aims; alternatively, one might say that he, in fact, changed his mind on some issue without conceding that he should have. Is Gregory's late theory of gender, as present in the Homilies on the Song of Songs, a result of development? The simpler explanation would say that the gendered figure of the Bride in that biblical text, rather than intellectual development, leads Gregory to see a feminizing transformation there and not elsewhere.

Theological retrievals of patristic texts always run the risk of sanitizing messy bodies of literature. Cadenhead's learned study largely avoids that pitfall. While it might not convince as a historical reconstruction, it gives theologically minded readers of Gregory a sense of his complex and dynamic writings on gender and desire, and it earnestly attempts to evaluate them without over-determination from ancient philosophy or the theoretical frameworks of Jung, Foucault, or Butler.