Recent scholarship on Gregory of Nyssa has tended to emphasise his positive attitude towards the embodied character of created existence. In line with this, Hans Boersma set out to test a hunch that ‘the premodern Platonist-Christian synthesis does not require us to abandon the goodness of matter and of history, but that instead such an affirmation of this-worldly realities is dependent on the participatory or sacramental ontology of premodernity’ (pp. vi–vii). He confesses that his hunch was only partially validated. Instead, he discovered that Gregory ‘is a thoroughly otherworldly theologian’ (p. 246), for whom anagogy – the ascent into participation in the heavenly or eschatological reality of divine life – is of central importance. Moving from the surface-level of history to the higher level of contemplation characterises not only Gregory's biblical exegesis, but all his thought. The other theme running through this book, alongside anagogy, is virtue. Virtue, for Gregory, is not simply a matter of moral behaviour, but ‘a process of anagogical participation that leads to never-ending growth in Christ’ (p. 216). It may start with practices in the material world, such as asceticism or care for the homeless, but ‘the more virtuous our life in the body is, the more we leave behind the diastemic life of this-worldly existence’ (p. 216). Virginal life in particular, as exemplified by Macrina, resembles the life of the angels.

Boersma offers a traditional historical theological investigation, taking Gregory seriously on his own terms. He is not interested in post-modernist strategies of deconstruction, wishing to do justice to Gregory's fourth-century context, rather than to force him through a contemporary grid. He takes particular issue with the recent treatments of gender and sexuality in Gregory's theology by Mark Hart, John Behr, Elizabeth Clark and Virginia Burrus, arguing that Gregory's concern for transcending gender, in order to reach an angel-like existence, has been misrepresented. ‘The concerns of Clark and Burrus are horizontal and this-worldly, whereas Gregory's are vertical and other-worldly’ (p. 111). Therefore, although Gregory ‘depicts gender as something ultimately unstable’, this ‘is not the result of a non-essentialist (postmodern) questioning of traditional heteronormative sexuality’. Instead, bodily instability ‘stems from a growth in virtue and from the recognition that our ultimate goal is a spiritual or angelic body’ (p. 15).

Boersma's analysis is based on a close reading of a wide range of Gregory's works. He is never simplistic, paying attention to the nuances, paradoxes and unresolved tensions in Gregory's thinking. He recognises, along with most contemporary scholarship, that Gregory superimposes a division between creator and creation upon the Platonic categories of spirit and matter, which enables a positive valuation of embodied existence. Gregory never rejects the body as inherently evil; he admires its biological functioning; he opposes slavery and shows compassion for the poor and the sick; he demonstrates pastoral sensitivity to the grief-stricken. However, he sees embodiment as serving an anagogical purpose: it is the indispensable springboard for higher things. Even his social concerns ‘have as their ultimate aim not the well-being of bodies but the eternal future of oppressor and oppressed alike’ (pp. 175–6). In the controversy with Eunomius, Gregory argues that whereas creation exists in time and space, and is therefore characterised by extension (diastēma), God is beyond any measurement. Most contemporary scholars assume that Gregory saw the diastemic nature of created life continuing even into the eschaton. Boersma, on the other hand, argues that in the homilies De tridui spatio and In sextum Psalmum, and also in De beatitudinibus, Gregory makes it clear that the measurements of diastēma ‘do not apply to the intelligible reality of the heavenly eighth day or of Paradise’ (p. 52). He acknowledges that this creates ‘a tension in Gregory's thought’, but not, he insists, a ‘blatant inconsistency’ (p. 44). One problem comes with accounting for a bodily resurrection. Boersma suggests that because Gregory retains the Platonic distinction between the intelligible and sensible, he can posit intelligible adiastemic bodies for paradisal existence, both before the Fall and at the end of time. This involves arguing that Gregory sees materiality ‘as simply the convergence of intelligible properties’ (p. 50), properties which can be reconfigured to form light, virtuous bodies. Boersma maintains that he is not negating Gregory's doctrine of eternal progress into the infinite divine life; but leaves unclear what it is that constitutes the ontological divide between creator and creation in Gregory's thinking, if not the presence or lack of diastēma. He acknowledges in a footnote that a further problem is caused by Gregory's references, in De hominis opificio, to human embodiment and gender before the Fall: ‘how is it possible to have gendered bodies in an adiastemic angelic-like existence in Paradise?’, which, says Boersma, is not a question that Gregory deals with (p. 49 n. 134). In the face of these tensions, Boersma resorts to Gregory's well-known sense of paradox:

Boersma offers many interesting insights, based on an intimate acquaintance with Gregory's works. He does not altogether do justice to those who read Gregory of Nyssa from a different perspective to his own; but he is surely right to highlight the importance for Gregory of anagogical participation in divine virtue. And in doing so he gives us a salutary reminder of the distance between a fourth-century ontological framework and our own.