Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. By Christopher A. Beeley. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xviii + 396 pp. $49.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As Christopher Beeley observes the preface to Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God : In Your Light We Shall See Light , one of the great lacunae of recent patristic scholarship has been the relative neglect of Gregory's work comparison with the other two Cappadocians (viii). Over the past decade, however, scholarly interest Gregory has finally expanded to include translations of his works by Martha Vinson, Lionel Wickham, Peter Gilbert, and Brian Daley; the volume on Nazianzen edited by Jostein Bortnes and Tomas Hagg Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006); and John McGuckin's massive intellectual biography of Gregory St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Crestwood N.Y.: St. Vladimirs' Seminary Press, 2001). Beeley's Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity is a worthy addition to this new scholarship, examining Gregory's trinitarian theology as a foundation to explore other areas of the Cappadocian bishop's thought.As the title of this volume suggests, Beeley approaches his material more systematically than purely historically, concentrating on the theology Gregory's treatises, orations, and letters, and devoting less attention to some other aspects. Overall, though, Beeley has used a methodology which is far from pure systematic theology and which fact does examine Gregory's trinitarian theology contextually, weaving it into a broader personal as well as theological tapestry whose threads include Gregory's familial and educational background and the historical and polemical context of his writings.The primary context for Gregory's trinitarian writings was, of course, his polemical engagement with the Eunomians (with an occasional sideswipe at modalists and other heterodox movements). He cleverly demonstrates Gregory's intelligence and creativity developing a strong trinitarian theology that successfully avoided and, fact, wickedly critiqued, both modalist tendencies and subordinationism the multiple theological currents circulating the second half of the fourth century. Beeley analyzes the Five Theological Orations not isolation but conjunction with the trinitarian themes which Gregory had already presented his earlier orations, as well as with careful attention to their own unique polemical and ecclesiastical context. For example, Beeley recognizes the Second Theological Oration--a paean to an apophaticism grounded the complete unknowability and transcendence of God's essence--and its thematic predecessor, Or . 20, the importance of Moses as a type to whom Gregory repeatedly returned to describe the human encounter with the divine and its paradoxical twinning of transcendent experience with divine inaccessibility.Chapter 1 is also a valuable scholarly contribution for the corrective balance that Beeley provides to many earlier scholars' overemphasis on God's unknowability. By placing the Second Theological Oration within its Eunomian polemical context, and by adroitly interpreting it intertextually both within itself and relation to other works, Beeley shows that Gregory's insistence on God's unknowability refers to reason alone and is counterweighed by his equally held conviction that we may know God experientially at least in part, that is, that we may experience God to the extent humanly possible. This has dramatic implications both for Gregory's trinitarian theology, terms of immanence and transcendence, and for his existentially--and christologically--grounded soteriology. …