Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light. By CHRISTOPHER A. BEELEY.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this rich and provocative study, Beeley challenges the widely held view that Gregory is an highly apophatic theologian, who makes a distinction between ‘theology’ and ‘economy’. This reflects what Beeley regards as the conventional twentieth-century misreading of the Fathers—that generally modern scholars make a distinction between ‘immanent’ and ‘economic’ modes of thinking about God. This in turn reflects a ruinous failure on the part of patristic scholars and theologians to understand the true nature of theology. The basis of Christian doctrine is ‘the revelatory character’ of theology (p. 201). This was understood by the theologians of the Origenian tradition, a tradition that reaches its culmination with Gregory. The misinterpretation of Gregory’s thought also reflects over-reliance on the Theological Orations and christological epistles. It is one of the signal strengths of this study that it covers the broad range of Gregory’s writings—the orations, poems, and letters. The book begins with a finely observed, 60-page account of Gregory’s life. It is followed by a chapter on God and the theologian, in which Beeley makes it clear that purification and illumination lie at the heart of Gregory’s thinking about the Christian life and the dynamic of doctrine, as they had for Origen. For Gregory, the meaning of doctrines is tied up with the believer’s involvement with the mysteries that the doctrines describe. While Gregory held that God transcends both being and the category of greatness, contra such scholars as Plagnieux and Hanson, Beeley argues that Gregory did not believe God is unknowable. Gregory predominantly describes God’s transcendence in quantitative terms. What he meant by God’s incomprehensibility is the inability of the creature to know the divine nature in its full magnitude or entirety (p. 96). Critical to Gregory’s theological vision is the belief that ‘the presence and work of God in creation is the presence and work—the economic revelation—of the eternal God. Not only is there no sense here that the transcendent God is potentially different from God as he is revealed in the divine economy, but this notion runs directly contrary to the very idea of the divine economy: that God has revealed himself as he really is—that we know the uncreated light of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, even if in an attenuated form’ (p. 200).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".